“EBI!”
This didn’t actually summon Ebi like a spirit from the ether; as far as I was aware, she was still up on the eighteenth floor, and we were in the basement, and it still took time to traverse the space between. However, she was hooked into all the CCTV cameras, the PA system, and, let’s face it, probably also my phone. In a split second, she heard me, reviewed the footage, and relayed my panic to Ai. Moments later, the Emerald Radiance charged through the door to join us.
She entered with superhuman physicality, nearly shoving the door off its hinges and launching from the threshold to right in front of us in what felt like a single step. The tattoo on her back was aglow, softly shining through the fabric of her ratty tank top in most places but retina-piercingly bright where it peeked out at her shoulders and the base of her neck. The emerald ink burned near lime as the Radiance stared at the corner Takagiri had indicated.
“Ebi says there’s nothing on the cameras. ?”
Takagiri replied in Japanese, sounding unsure enough that it was clear she was saying something along the lines of “I think I’m hallucinating.”
Ai nodded and materialized something into her hand—a pair of what looked like snowboarding goggles, its lens reflecting the room in blue. She pulled it onto her head and stared into the corner.
“”
“J—just a hallucination, then?” I asked, uncertain. My non-existent hackles were raised—removed though they were by blood magic—and my skin crawled with the insistence that , despite all evidence to the contrary. I forced myself to relax, trying to focus on the exceedingly awesome tech Ai had whipped out. “What do the goggles do?”
I knew the answer, of course, but this was a self-distraction tactic to force some normality onto the spookiness, not genuine interest.
“Ripple visualizer.” She pulled the headset off and checked the top edge of the padded rim for something. “A little red and pink in the walls, but that’s just Ebi.” She put the goggles back into her pocketspace, apparently satisfied, but cast a suspicious glower at the creepy corner just to verify, as though her unmodified meat-eyes might reveal something the ten thousand-dollar detection equipment hadn’t.
Takagiri, for her part, was alternating between doing the same and rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “,” she muttered. “Gone.”
Ai nodded, at last willing to turn her back on the empty corner and face us. “I’m going to call it a hallucination. ”
Takagiri nodded several times, a small, jerky, repetitious motion that seemed to be more to reassure herself than to reply to Ai’s question. She muttered something in response, then said it again in English.
“I don’t want to be here.”
“Okay. Ezzen, save what you’re working on, and let’s go somewhere else—my office.”
“Huh?” I blinked. “Oh, yeah, sure.” I scooted my chair back in to reach the keyboard.
As my hand wrapped around the mouse, I felt something wrong. The joints of my fingers ached. That wasn’t the most uncommon thing in the world, but it was usually a product of the weather, and it simply wasn’t cold enough in here for it. And as far as I knew, the only other thing that caused my hand to ache like that was—
“Red ripple.” I turned to Ai and raised my makeshift ripple detector.
She understood my meaning immediately and pulled out the goggles again, tugging them over her head in a hurry, ignoring how the strap caught her ponytail against her head. She frowned. “Nothing.”
As she turned back to me and Takagiri, though, she froze and sucked in a breath. Takagiri looked woozy, blinking repeatedly, and was wobbling on her feet. The ache in my fingers spread to the stump of my foot as Ai and I realized simultaneously that Takagiri was the source of the ripple. Ai reached out and grabbed her wrist, and Takagiri jerked to wakefulness with a scream. She looked around, crazy-eyed and terrified, as though not remembering where she was.
The pain in my hand spiked to a boiling throb as Takagiri locked eyes with Ai—then began to ebb away as she shuddered and sagged against the wall. She sank into herself, heaving sobs of terror that pulled at my heart. Ai immediately dropped to one knee to console her while I stood there, awkward and unsettled. I wanted to help—but first, I wanted to get the hell out of this room. I turned and cast one more wary glance at the corner that had started all this; still empty. Ai noticed and asked Takagiri something, presumably whether she still saw anything. She shook her head slowly, nonverbal.
We cleared out anyway. I spent the next minute still awkwardly standing there while Ai coaxed Takagiri to her feet, encouraging and soothing, with all the protective care of a big sister despite being easily twenty-five years younger than the Hikanome leader-assassin. As she finally convinced her to get up, the Emerald Radiance shot me a glance full of worry and suppressed panic.
We were running out of time.
—
Ai took Takagiri to the prosthetic fitting room to make sure she was alright—even aside from the psychological effects of whatever she’d dreamt in that micro-sleep, spilling out that much red ripple just by existing was never good. I would have come along, but this wasn’t my specialty; my way of helping Takagiri lay in helping the Radiances bring Sugawara to justice and end his nocturnal assaults on her mind, and that meant I had to keep working on the mantle patch.
I awkwardly wished them luck and returned to my room to keep working, hurrying to get as far away from the creepy encounter as I could. That meant another trip back down the basement hall, some time going up the elevator, and a half-hobbling walk across the landscape of beanbag chairs that made up the upper-level common area. The whole time, I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting yet hoping not to see…something. Sugawara’s ghost, I suppose. By the time I returned to my room, my nerves had settled somewhat, and once I threw off my shoes, disengaged my prosthetic, curled up in the big, padded chair Ebi had gotten me, and booted up my PC, I felt better. At least now I had something else to focus on.
It was wonderful to have my own proper workstation again, and this one was far in excess of anything I’d had access to previously. With three monitors, I had more screen space than ever before; no more splitting my single screen to have a too-cramped GWalk session on the left half and various documentation on the right, or being forced to tab between them for the luxury of full-width windows. Instead, I now had a full, high-resolution screen of GWalk on the center display, all the documentation I needed on the left, and the right monitor gave me space to always be able to see the chatroom. It occurred to me that I could maybe rotate that monitor to a vertical position to have the chatroom on top and something for music on the bottom, but that was a project for later.
Takagiri had given me enough theory to go off of; the swords were straightforward, and I had a solid picture in my head of how they damaged the mantles, so from there, patching the vulnerability in each mantle’s diagram was only two steps: modify the relevant mechanisms and make sure I hadn’t broken anything downstream in the process. The core of the first step was to address the leak on the gyroscope; Takagiri had briefly described the necessary changes for that, so I knew where I was headed.
The gyro assembly as implemented in the Radiances’ mantles was a gyroscope in name only, with no actual mechanical, electronic, or optical assemblies like you’d see in an aircraft. Instead, the same function was achieved with an {ALIGN}:4-{DIFFERENTIATE} block, which was a cheap, high-resolution way to determine which direction was up as well as account for rotational changes by just multiplexing the four spatial cardinal directions and checking for changes in orientation. It was a standard implementation for when precision was important; in this case, to ensure a clean interface with the senses of the piloting Radiance, because a misalignment between their internal sense of orientation and the mantle’s actual position would render the magical construct basically uncontrollable.
In most contexts, the small amount of free pink ripple exuded by this approach was negligible; within the information-altering domain of pink ripple, the particular effect of this leak would usually just pigeonhole into some minor color distortions on nearby photographs, or maybe key changes in music if there happened to be any. But Takagiri’s swords, and any other anti-mantle weapons wielded by other Sugawara loyalists using the same principle, were specifically designed to use this free ripple to damage the gyroscope upstream in the chain and, from there, mangle a bunch of other systems downstream, so this ripple had to be addressed. It was essentially a cyberattack—leak, vulnerability, exploit. So I needed to make a patch.
I could have replaced the gyroscope assembly wholesale with another approach—an LM imitation of a physical gyroscope would be fun to model and wouldn’t have this problem—but that would require testing, which GWalk couldn’t do for this sort of sensory and psychomotive interfacing, not without some extra magical hardware or directly asking one of the Radiances to implement it. And we were still on a time budget here; a full teardown and replacement of a core component of the mantle—which might not even work correctly—was unacceptable when we had maybe twelve hours. Besides, there was a simpler solution: I could just turn the pink ripple into another color with a glyph that could take the color and do something safer and more predictable with it.
Red ripple was right out, obviously, given Amane’s particular vulnerabilities—and nobody save Hina would want their mantle to produce as a side effect where not absolutely necessary, nor other sensory effects that would be just as bad for controllability as the aforementioned gyroscope misalignment. Green was similar—coming from an LM construct rather than an organic body, it couldn’t be trusted to reliably pigeonhole into something non-biohazardous for bystanders. Besides, almost none of the glyphs for that color took pink inputs predictably; that was one of the big issues with biomancy.
Orange, the color of ripple concerned with space and distance, was also a no-go. Orange glyphs tended toward spatial distortion, like pocketspaces or the fourspace storage mechanism for the mantles, as well as a bunch of weaving utility glyphs like multiplexers and tension modulators; control flow, in programming terms. Since the actual implementation of all these diagrams was literally weaving Flame through physical space, arbitrarily routing free ripple into orange was almost always a bad idea because it could mess up the whole lattice. Silver and white had no glyphs; they were theoretical models for phenomena more than anything else—barring Yuuka and Miyoko, both of whom interfaced with them glyphlessly. I still didn’t have a clue how.
So, that left blue, the set of glyphs concerned with kinetics and entropy. I could vent energy as heat or alpha radiation or various kinds of kinetic ‘kicks’, all of which were helpful in some situations. In this case though, for the constraints of the mantles’ function and concerns about collateral damage, the obvious and most widely used candidate was {SEVER}. In the diagram, I stuck it in right after the {DIFFERENTIATE}, and a little tinkering with tension and orientation gave me what I was looking for.
What were we severing? The water vapor in the air. Being able to break hydrogen from oxygen was an enormously important process for modern power generation, one of the key ways that magitech had changed everything at an industrial scale—but for this application, I only cared about getting rid of the pink ripple, and {SEVER} was elegant because it was no awkward kinetics, no heat, and no radiation—just hydrogen and oxygen into the surrounding air, and in fairly negligible quantities.
Implementing these changes was a lot of dragging, dropping, changing numbers in boxes, hitting “Build,” and tweaking the numbers again until everything worked how I wanted it to. The {SEVER} had to lead into the rest of the mantle, like the {DIFFERENTIATE} had originally, so it was important that it didn’t mess with the pink signals that were actually being used, only the leakage we were trying to get rid of. This was something GWalk could optimize for me, with the right constraints in place, but I still felt obligated to give everything an eyeball check.
The downstream effects were slightly different across each of the three mantles I was working on; the gyroscope module was the same, but in Hina’s mantle, it also fed the fourth dimensional position and rotation data directly to her neural link, since her mutated brain could take it, and that needed some extra work to integrate. By contrast, Alice and Yuuka’s mantles had intuitive controls for movement in the third dimension, but they had to traverse the w-axis via instrumentation. I wondered what it would take for me to also be able to freely and naturally move through the fourth dimension the way my girlfriend and the Vaetna could. I’d been helpless when trapped outside reality—locking onto my spear to return to Earth had been a clever bit of magic, but conditional, and it hadn’t been as automatic as just stepping kata-ward back home. I wanted that freedom.
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I also wanted to take a break now that the broad strokes of the solution were in place. For the first time in two hours, I relaxed my focus on the GWalk window and datasheets and diagrams and sat back in my chair, letting my other senses and awareness of my surroundings seep back in. My neck hurt, for one; I’d been sitting too far forward. I twisted it this way and that, looking for a satisfying , but got none. Instead, I was alarmed to find that my usual range of motion had expanded; I could turn my head well past my shoulder without discomfort; more of the changes to my flexibility that I’d seen previously.
“Hm.”
I experimentally unfolded my legs from under me and hefted my right shin in my still-weak arms. I lifted my foot to my chest easily, knee and hip swiveling easily to accommodate the motion. I went even higher, until my heel touched my chin.
“Wow.”
Giddiness swept through me. It wasn’t super strength, or speed, or four-dimensional freedom, but it was still unmistakable proof that I’d been altered, mutated beyond the old boundaries of my humanity, becoming something more. We really had to document these more properly with Ai once she was less busy trying to keep Takagiri alive.
I took the giddiness with me to the chatroom, pulling it over to my main monitor. It had been buzzing along to my right throughout the process, but mostly fallen outside of my attention as I had become engrossed in the engineering task. Now, though, it was time for a proper check-in. Early afternoon in Japan was late evening for the Americans, and many of us kept poor sleep schedules, so it was pretty active around now. Unfortunately, this meant I happened to walk directly into a topic that was rather close to home.
starstar97:
ks3glimmer:
Glimmer was at it again, I saw, rapping my fingers on the keyboard as my good mood soured; a mild benefit to my sharp reduction in chatroom presence since coming to Todai had been that I hadn’t had to put up with much of their direct, combative nature. Apparently, my luck had run out, and at an especially poor time: Hina’s official televised apology had just concluded. Twenty minutes ago, according to the clock. I hadn’t wanted to watch it anyway, not when I basically already knew what she was going to say. She’d apologized to me already, after all, and promised to do the same with her teammates. Though based on how my conversation with Alice had gone, I wasn’t sure if she’d actually gotten around to it yet.
At any rate, since the televised apology had taken about twenty minutes, and had ended twenty minutes ago, that meant Star had been acting as Hina’s lawyer here in the chatroom for ; a noble but unenviable task given that Glimmer seemed intent on painting my girlfriend in as poor a light as possible. Sometimes, I wondered why Sky even let such a combative person stick around.
I decided to intervene, mindful to not make Star’s life any harder by accidentally incriminating Hina further.
ezzen:
moth30:
moth30:
My brow furrowed ever so slightly. I liked the gender-ambiguous turn of phrase, but the message itself felt slightly ominous.
starstar97:
ezzen:
This did not work.
ks3glimmer:
ks3glimmer:
ks3glimmer:
“Fuck,” I groaned. I’d forgotten that, as far as the chatroom was concerned, I had a fairly negative relationship with Hina, one characterized by the discomfort I’d felt in the first few days with her, when she’d been feeling me out and courting me via repeated intrusions on my personal space. Summarizing my swing from that state of affairs to the current mess of our relationship simply wasn’t going to be possible without breaking opsec; my fingers hesitated on the keys as I tried to figure out how to express how things had changed.
Fortunately, the rest of the chat also felt that Glimmer’s pivot was uncalled for.
moth30:
moth30:
thanasen:
thanasen:
thanasen:
thanasen:
thanasen:
ks3glimmer:
ks3glimmer:
The others were quick to insist on the change of topic.
starstar97:
moth30:
ezzen:
Five seconds of googling later, I figured out what he meant: there had been a Vaetna stream two days ago, while I was out cold, finishing up the work that had been happening the day I’d been flametouched a few weeks ago. I became a little upset at myself for missing it; three weeks ago, I’d not have dreamed of missing a single Vaetna stream, to such an extent that they had defined my sleep schedule. It was upsetting that I was falling out of touch with the circles that had made up my whole life, even though my actual, material conditions had come much closer to realizing my dream of becoming a Vaetna.
Then again, this time wasn’t really my fault.
ezzen:
moth30:
moth30:
moth30:
Oh. Right. Even though my new hair had been a steady weight on my head and shoulders, I’d barely given it any thought and had mostly forgotten it was there—I hadn’t even looked in a mirror since the morning of the barbecue. The orange strands, which had begun their lives as a perfectly laminar curtain of dark LM, were now starting to get tangled and messy, as was inevitable when it was long enough to go down my back. I didn’t actually know how to manage that—just brush it in the shower? I wondered if I could avoid asking the Radiances about it and learn entirely through YouTube. Though the idea of Hina helping brush my hair in my spacious shower was…I shook it off.
More importantly, Moth’s message was a reminder that had seen my new hair. My stomach lurched as I thought of all the Hikanome members holding up their phones, recording me and Yuuka opening the tunnel, and then all the drama at the end of our fight with Takagiri. It was global news—which meant my ill-gotten hairstyle had been immortalized on camera and seen by millions. This would have been bad enough in itself, but everyone also knew that the hairstyle was , since I’d been caught on camera briefly during my escape from the PCTF. I had mostly been a dark lump in the short, handheld video, but that was enough to indicate the change from brown to neon orange, from neck length to back length.
But it was a change I didn’t hate. Being for it felt bad, and it made me feel somewhat exposed, but the actual change of hair was growing on me. And these were my friends. I swallowed and decided to be brave.
ezzen:
starstar97:
moth30:
starstar97:
The compliments made me feel shockingly good, a mixture of relief and just…elation. Was this the rumored gender euphoria? Whatever it was, it was nice. I was a little surprised that seemed to be the sum total of reactions, though. Something compelled me to probe.
ezzen:
moth30:
moth30:
[Direct Message] starstar97:
I tabbed over, relieved she was going with the most direct approach—and was promptly met with the last message I had sent her, the one where I had admitted to her both the act and the fact that it may not have been due to solely Vaetna-related dysphoria. That was probably why I’d felt the need to ask that follow-up question; I’d half-put this out of my mind because it had been right between Alice cracking my gender egg and my dealing with Hina’s moping, and I’d been too physically and emotionally exhausted to check if Star had even seen the message, but some part of me must have remembered that I’d never gotten a reply.
Evidently, Star had not seen the message, and took an uncomfortably long time to follow up. My trepidation slowed the passage of time, far more mundane than when I’d tapped into Yuuka’s silversight but equally glacial, each second feeling like minutes as my best friend composed a response to my gender reveal. I couldn’t take it.
ezzen:
starstar97:
A too-short message for the time she’d spent typing.
ezzen:
starstar97:
starstar97:
starstar97:
ezzen:
This was a lot at once. “How did it happen” was an insanely loaded question, and one I had to tread cautiously about—as much as I trusted Star, if she knew one of her biggest idols was a trans woman like her, and moreover that Kimura was Takagiri and was therefore also trans, she’d explode. So I employed a little white lying.
ezzen:
I told the story from front to back, beginning with the dreadful, agonizing haircut and ending with where we were now, including the Radiances’ support of me after the haircut but leaving out the revelations at the very end of the inferno and the specifics of my egg-cracking conversation with Alice. Instead, I semi-invented a version of events where I enhanced my body with magic during the fighting—which was true—and that led me to the realization afterward that simply transcending my physical limits wasn’t enough, not in concert with my very strong feelings about my body and facial hair.
ezzen:
Star had been very polite and refrained from interrupting as I worked through the story, but the moment I sent that message, she pounced.
starstar97:
ezzen:
starstar97:
starstar97:
ezzen:
I hadn’t actually given that any thought—I didn’t even know what my ideal form was, let alone how I’d get there. Star was light-years ahead of me.
starstar97:
starstar97:
starstar97:
starstar97:
ezzen:
starstar97:
starstar97:
ezzen:
ezzen:
ezzen:
Whatever changes those were.
starstar97:
starstar97:
starstar97:
starstar97:
starstar97:
starstar97:
I had, but I couldn’t tell Star that. Hell, Hina could have meant either Alice or potentially Sky, and I could divulge neither.
ezzen:
Despite how close we’d become, I still found myself shuddering at that first encounter with the hyena. She’d clocked me immediately, I realized, in my totality—both transgender and transhuman. Also, the idea of Hina sniffing me in a more literal sense—
I received a ping from the main chat.
thanasen:
ezzen:
A moment later, the attached image loaded—a zoomed in image of my face from when Yuuka and I had made the tunnel.
thanasen:
My heart stopped. Yeah, everyone had seen my hair, because it was impossible to miss the crazy orange even at a distance. But the cameras had also captured my —shaven smooth, sure, but still immortalized on the internet. They’d seen my face, in detail. My anonymity had been destroyed in full.
They’d seen my face.
Visceral wrongness crashed through me, the same as when the barber’s shears had chopped off my hair. I hated my face; it had become slightly, barely more tolerable to me after I’d forcibly removed all the beard and moustache hair, but it was still . It still didn’t feel like mine, and there was a heart-borne terror at the idea that anybody—everybody—would associate it with me.
The Radiances were one thing, trustworthy, safe, fellow flamebearers; even beyond Alice’s refleshing, they were all well-versed in the art of mask-making, what it meant to separate the private self from the public persona. They had made it literal with their mantles. I had implicitly extended the same grace to the various Todai employees I inevitably encountered in the halls; they were in on the masquerade too, in a lesser sense. But something in me screamed at the idea of being exposed so completely to the world at large, to the masses who would see the meat I called a face and label it when it was not.
I needed to cover it up, to replace it with something else, something that was correctly me, the version of me that was right.
My eyes slid back from my second monitor to my first, to the diagram of an entire LM projection of a human body splayed out before me, a fully customizable facsimile. No need for awful, spur-of-the-moment, horrifically bloody and painful sanguimancy this time; I could design the perfect shell, re-establish the distance, the right way, the way I was good at, through lattice-manifest and ingenuity, until the cameras would capture how I ought to look.
I needed to make a mantle.
Mjeow) is of Ai! As a reminder, these artworks are from an in-universe photoshoot for Todai PR, not necessarily depictions of the girls as we and Ezzen are familiar with them. So these are canon but not necessarily their default looks; that cutting insert necklace Ai is wearing is just a prop, for example, and not too much of her work involves her personally using a big ol' open-ended wrench like this one.
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