After euphoria came shame.

My first time in the doll had been eye-opening, a singular experience that had been far more viscerally impactful than I'd anticipated. Nobody, including me, had expected the mantle calibration doll to be so enjoyable, so freeing, such a reset. I'd been braced for it to be novel but not actually make me feel like a different person—what I'd gotten instead was a disassembled, deep-cleaned, and reassembled version of myself, with all the soul-muck temporarily scoured away. I hadn't understood how debilitating the grip of dysphoria and shame was, how it gummed up every level of my cognition, paralyzing emotion and poisoning my thoughts. Now I had tasted the alternative, and it felt incredible.

It wasn't quite right to say that the Ebi-like body of the doll was perfect for my sensibilities, that it was exactly the thing I had always dreamt of; it lacked the Vaetna's killing shapes, the flow of their armor and the…knightly presence, the energy they carried that I never quite could put into words. And I did eventually need to answer whether having different hips felt nice. The benefit to being in the doll was half in the smoothness and the facelessness and half as a result of the mental and spiritual disrobing my anima had undergone in the split second of transfer. I hadn't been working properly before, like my soul had been suffocated and overheating; in the doll and after, I was running at my proper operating temperatures, able to access a more complete emotional spectrum. Excitement, happiness, a general desire to keep living and live more than the shadow of a person I'd been until this point—

And horniness, to put it bluntly. Feeling so emotionally activated had come with a near-complete collapse of my inhibitions; I'd repeatedly escalated Hina's lewd provocations while making dinner and only resisted the urge to abscond from dinner and rut with her until the sun came up because I was also having so much fun cooking—and sex and food prep for a crowd shouldn't mix. While lost in the equally vivacious and endlessly enticing energy of my girlfriend, who had been so happy we were finally on the same wavelength, I'd had no regard for the other girls. But in the harsh and sin-exposing light of day, I remembered their discomfort with far too much clarity, the faint hunch of Ai's shoulders when my hand went directly from a cooking utensil to Hina's waist and back to the food I was making for everybody. I'd barely respected basic hygiene.

We should have just ditched and indulged our urges immediately instead of being nasty in front of the others; they wouldn't have had to put up with us, and maybe we'd have actually been able to follow through on all those whispered promises and roaming squeezes. Instead, when we did eventually flee for my room, she'd channeled my energy toward mantle design, urging me to continue self-actualizing through the endless panels and tables of GWalk. She still hadn't been able to resist getting a little handsy; I suspect that if we'd stayed up, I'd have eventually gotten pulled away from the keyboard into a tangle of limbs and teeth. Which would have been problematic because her definition of sex was not survivable for my fragile meat body.

Problematic. Bad. Yep. I did, in fact, need a certain amount of blood to live. For now.

So it was probably for the best that the glyphcrafting went on for barely fifteen minutes before my surge of energy ebbed and the soul-stripping took its toll. The sudden but predictable wave of exhaustion hit right as Hina had been starting to growl in my ear, and I barely had time to yawn before she bodily hauled me over to bed—and then left right before sleep took me. Did that count as a success of boundaries? I hadn't exactly enforced anything.

The next morning, I was dismayed to find that I'd slept off the euphoria and returned to my familiar, muted self. Extra muted, in fact, accented by contrast—and because I was plagued by guilt. My sense of propriety, freshly returned from its brief vacation, was holding me accountable. Its verdict: my conduct in front of the Radiances last evening was unacceptable, the exact kind of disgusting offense I'd been so afraid of committing the whole time I'd lived here. That, combined with the return of my dysphoria, made me somewhat uncomfortable with the idea of actually going through with anything lewd with Hina now, and I'd felt obligated to go around and apologize for my actions.

Ai laughed awkwardly in response to my stammering and waved her hands hurriedly. "I wasn't really paying attention to you, so I didn't notice. You made dinner and then went to your room. I'm glad the test platform worked so well for you. Did it give you any new ideas for the layout of your model?"

The sex-repulsed Emerald Radiance seemed like she'd struck it from the record of our interactions entirely, for which I was grateful, but I couldn't wipe away the guilt so easily. Even when I accepted her invitation—conversational diversion, really—to nerd-babble about magic theory, it wasn't enough to distract me from my overall sense of filthiness, which was how I knew it was especially bad.

Yuuka, on the other hand, was much more acerbic. "Fuck me, I'm glad I left before all that. Looked over the railing while you were cooking, saw you with your hand on her ass, went right back to my room. Why are you even apologizing? Didya even realize that I wasn't there, or were you too busy thinking about how you'd crack her ribs?"

That last part was so surprising that it broke me out of my contrite cringing. "Crack…her ribs?"

"Yeah. I bet she made you use the fuckin' poultry shears."

"We—what?" I was thrown; I could tell what she was implying, but it was totally unprompted. I wasn't about to admit that things not too far from that had crossed my mind just last night and went on the offensive instead. "You are describing sex, yeah? Is that seriously the kind of stuff Hina wants? Has she asked you—"

Heliotrope pushed a twintail over her shoulder. It was incredible how she could somehow look down at me from a full head height below. "Don't involve me in your butchery fantasies."

"You're the one fantasizing! I was apologizing for…being stupid in a normal way, not whatever the hell you're talking about, fuckin' hell." My contrition was dwindling, replaced by a little bit of strange schadenfreude. Yuuka was telling on herself, and that somehow righted the emotional boat for me. "Seriously, shears? Did you two take 'scissoring' that literally?"

Yuuka stared at me for a long moment with her human eye, then reached up to remove her eyepatch to reveal its twin, that baleful gem of prophecy. It didn't glow or hum, but I could tell she was looking at my future, or some small fragment of it. She crossed her arms. "We stopped because I didn't feel safe around that monster. Don't let her make you one too."

She left me impaled on that thorn as she left for school.

I spent the rest of that day dissociating. I no longer had the bravery to finish my round of apologies with Alice and Amane; my whole real-life social situation was put on pause as I retreated to the social bunker of my room and, within it, the chatroom. I hadn't given my friends nearly enough of my time over the last few weeks, too preoccupied with vacillating between life-and-death flamebearer nonsense, the interpersonal struggles that came part and parcel with that, and gender discovery via mantle work. Until the sun went down, I paid it all back by simply curling up in bed, watching videos, and talking to the little people in my phone. There, at least, I didn't disgust anybody.

The "99+" notification icon in the chatroom and the "500+" on the forums indicated that there was a lot to talk about, from large to small, and for once, I had the drive to go through every single one, an ideal distraction. My friends helped me curate; we started with the biggest bits of global flamebearer news, which were almost always new flamefalls; since my own, there had been two more, one in India and one in China, and both by all accounts had been far more typical than mine. The Vaetna had made no efforts to show up for the others like they had with me. The one in India had yielded two flamebearers who had immediately become part of the coalition of northern splinter kingdoms that still skirmished with Tibetan forces. The one in China had only found a single host, who had gone inferno.

The other notifications were just friends and colleagues pinging me whenever they wanted me to see something related to my interests. New YouTube videos about glyphcraft abounded, more than I could ever catch up on in one day, and that wasn't even accounting for the endless torrent of reporting, spin, and misinformation about the world's various VNT groups and other media-savvy flamebearers, some sent my way to be informative and some simply to be laughed at for their absurdity. Between the discussions, my friends' lives went on, no less interesting than mine for all their relative lack of violence: Moth had finally gotten laid off and was relieved about it, Twili had a haul of nature photos from a hiking trip he'd been on, and Mnmnm's grant application had been accepted.

I deflected and in some cases outright refused to answer questions about what was going on at Todai. The chatroom made it easy for me; nobody was dumb enough to ask directly what had happened at Sugawara's hospital or about the whereabouts of Kimura, so I didn't have to say much other than repeat assurances I was doing well. In the continuing wake of the Barbecue Inferno, I had no idea if or how I was ever going to bring up that I was dating Radiance Sapphire. I didn't particularly want to think about her right now anyway.

On the forums, meanwhile, there was something Todai-related I did have liberty to talk about. Yesterday, one of the prosthetic teams—Team 3, who had put a phone inside my foot—had made the entire design open source, from the physical construction of the foot to the glyph diagrams, and since anybody with a brain and awareness of what I'd been up to could figure out it was for me, this had led to an enormous surge of discussion that made up two-thirds of my notifications on the forums. Moth and Dendrite spent an hour helping me comb through the thread for stuff that was worth responding to, and we crafted a general update post on my experiences with it as well. I regretted that I'd fallen out of the habit of checking the forums multiple times per day; there was a lot of speculation that I could have headed off immediately with a little more proactivity. Such was the nature of minor celebrityhood.

And, of course, there was news about the Vaetna. I'd missed a total of sixteen streams since arriving at Todai, a little under one per day, but none had been especially interesting or notable, just a mix of Spire maintenance work and what was essentially close drone footage of missions, plus two of the weekly State of The Spire streams that were a broad overview of the nation's operations and projects. I'd used to do regular analysis posts for each maintenance stream—I stopped about a year ago but no longer remembered if there had been a specific reason. Depression, probably. And I tended to avoid watching the direct mission footage, preferring recaps, since it stressed me out to watch one of the Vaetna issue ultimatums to petty flamebearer tyrants threatening to turn a million people to glass, even knowing that those situations only ever ended one way. Skimming the recap videos, I didn't think I'd missed anything particularly Spire-shaking.

I was disabused of that notion when I started picking through the rumor mill. Their latest bone to gnaw on was responsible for much of the remaining third of my forum notifications: the announcement that Katya, sixth of the Vaetna, was taking a break from public appearances. I'd been tangentially aware of the news but not thought anything of it, busy and extremely stressed as I had been with the coffin and Sugawara and all the fallout and recovery from that, so it had fallen out of my mind in the time since, filed in the "unprecedented but not alarming" section of my brain. In that regard, I, Ezzen, famous Vaetna expert, had been derelict in my duties, since I hadn't taken into account a critical detail: the last time she'd been seen had been containing an inferno from my flamefall in Poland, over two weeks ago.

Theories had been proposed and shared as more evidence came in, and the collective diagnosis was dire.

starstar97: so to conclude

starstar97: somethings fucky with kat, and maybe the vaetna as a whole

starstar97: judging by bri ditching the rig

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starstar97: and maybe involving yoru flame?

starstar97: *your

starstar97: the price of rawdogging without autocorrupt oTL

ezzen: She just hasn't been around? I'm not up to speed, fuck.

My mouth was dry. They had put together the pieces days ago but elected not to message me directly about it, knowing I was already under a lot of pressure from many directions and assuming I'd get to it when I got to it. Thoughtful of them, but I wished they'd told me immediately.

moth30: yeah and its like… this is all they have to say?

moth30: cancelled her public events for a week before giving any explanation

moth30: like she never existed

That sent me into a bit of a panic spiral. One of the principal impossible-to-our-current-understanding-of-magic-but-maybe-viable things that could harm the Vaetna was an infomancy weapon retroactively deleting them from the timeline somehow.

ezzen: INFOVORED??

Of course, that was a silly conclusion to jump to, even as a nervous half-joke. Clarification arrived before I could tangent into terrified conspiracy babble.

skychicken: no.

skychicken: irresponsible wording, moth

moth30: soz

skychicken: she's still on twitter and stuff like that

skychicken: i suppose that might just be a sockpuppet and not actually her, but theres no reason to jump to that conclusion

I was running the numbers.

ezzen: I can't check right now but the longest time we've ever had any of the Vaetna be absent without explanation was maybe

ezzen: Four days? But that was during all the referendum stuff and it was Mayari, which feels a lot less weird

ezzen: Maybe there's one I'm forgetting.

DendriteSpinner: Ez, do you think your flame core is the same way?

starstar97: "the same way" as what

starstar97: fundamentally dangerous to the vaetna? cause theres no proof thats actually the sitch and jumping to that conclusion is kinda like problematic ish

starstar97: flamefall infernos are fucky wucky and even the vaetna could be blindsided by stuff

starstar97: and even if it has to do with something unusual about e's flame creche

starstar97: for all we know kat just has, like, a bad cold, and bri was wary of catching the same thing until they understood what it was

starstar97: doesnt mean shes dead or dying

DendriteSpinner: I concede that.

DendriteSpinner: Not to rehash all the backscroll from the other day, but a version of events where it IS related to the products of that flamefall is plausible, and the PCTF almost certainly is going forward with that assumption.

DendriteSpinner: Ez, did you see those videos with the C-17?

I hadn't and was quickly linked the discussion thread where the video had been posted. It was only a few seconds of cell phone footage, but it showed a military air transport with fighter escorts climbing overhead. The original post had claimed it was taken outside Chicago, and several other bits of footage had shown up elsewhere on the internet a few days later, including a conspiracy video from a Zero-Day influencer that had racked up significant attention. The consensus in the thread was that the air convoy had been flying west and that it was an express shipment from the civilian magic research labs at Argonne toward the more secret and infamous military facilities in Nevada. And by "shipment," the signs pointed to…

moth30: we already had leaks that ana baker was at argonne, and this could be them moving her to area 52

moth30: in which case they think the anti-vaetna theory holds water

moth30: this is all speculative!! sorry if we're freaking you out!!!

skychicken: yeah yall thats enough infodump at once i think

skychicken: dont re-traumatize ezzen please

ezzen: I'm good.

I was not good. Rather, I'd had a terrible lurch in my stomach for the past few minutes.

Anti-Vaetna; the term was upsetting enough in abstract, doubly upsetting if it applied to me specifically like I was the butt of some cosmic joke, and outright terrifying for what it implied about the PCTF's arrival in Tokyo any day now. Each link in the chain of speculation, from the cause of Kat's absence to Brianna abandoning Thunder Horse to the contents and destination of that C-17, pointed in the same direction: when the Peacies came for me, they wouldn't take no for an answer. They would use me to kill the Vaetna.

ezzen: Gonna go talk to the Radiances.

"Okay, Ezzen, the first thing I want you to do is calm down. We're prepared for this, don't worry," Alice sighed, sounding thoroughly confident despite the fact that she was craning her neck up at me, splayed facedown over a purple yoga ball, her tail extending straight behind her like a crocodile's.

I'd walked in on her mid-workout; she was stretching the poor, tormented muscles around the base of the tail. Sporting similar athleisure to what she'd been wearing when I first met her, sports bra and compression leggings, she was leaving a lot of skin exposed. There was a part of me that salivated at this scantily clad, gorgeous dragon woman, the part I hated myself for that had reared its head last night and made Yuuka feel unsafe around me. At this particular moment, though, that part was easy to drown out with the keyed-up state of the rest of my mind, the cocktail of geopolitical they-will-start-a-war-over-me panic and the deeper dread that I was innately toxic to my heroes.

I fidgeted as Alice continued. "Yes, we did put two and two together and figured that your Flame might have properties that make the Peacies aggressively covet you. But that doesn't really change much, does it? We've been planning for them to show up and try to snatch you since the day you arrived. They already wanted your brain, now they want your brawn as well." She slid backward off the ball to stand, then stepped around it to sit more conversationally and do some twists. "So as for whatever is going to go down between us and them, I don't see how this changes things."

"But—it's anti-Vaetna," I almost whimpered. "That's their, their—their holy grail, the only way to have a bigger stick than the Spire. The US will fucking…annex Japan or something if it means getting me."

Alice didn't believe me. "Slow down. So, knowing that the Peacies are coming for us anyway, the second thing I want you to do is focus on that. Banish any thought that you are somehow now doomed to be culpable for the fall of the Spire and…I don't know, the sun exploding or whatever else you're catastrophizing."

"I don't…not the sun exploding."

"Pretty telling omission."

"I mean, what the hell are the odds that I, of all people, am poison to them? That's a bad fuckin' joke," I fumed. "It's—even if we somehow get the Peacies to leave us alone, I'm never gonna be able to even visit the Spire." I could see it clearly in my mind's eye, being turned away from the Gate at bladepoint, Heung's tone faintly apologetic but heavy with uncompromising finality. I was on track to be the first person ever banished from the Spire.

Alice wasn't a telepath, but I was pretty easy to read. She pinched the bridge of her nose. "Come off it, Ez, being all Yuuka doesn't suit you. Take five deep breaths, three seconds in, three seconds out."

I felt the faintest sense of heat and winced, unsure if I was pissing her off or if that was just my blood running hot from embarrassing panic. For a moment, I considered petulantly ignoring her advice, upset at being treated like a child throwing a tantrum—then realized that was exactly the treatment I deserved. I stared at the floor of her and Amane's doorway, turning red with shame, and took the requested breaths. When I finished, Alice sighed again. "Your emotional spectrum is still all fucked from last evening, yeah? Rubber-banded the other way?"

I caught her use of profanity, a sign she'd shifted out of Radiance Opal mode and was now talking to me as my friend. "…Yeah. Is that a side effect of pumping my soul through a lattice?"

"Not a magical effect. Not to go armchair therapist on you, but you're crashing down from a euphoria high, and it's making you treat things as a bigger deal than they are." She pre-empted my objection that this was indeed a big fucking deal, world-shaking in fact, with a raised finger. "I've been there! Happened to me all the time when we were first developing the mantles. I'd give myself, uh, these," she said, hefting one of her breasts slightly with one hand, "And then when they were gone, I'd be super emotionally fragile for a few days."

"I…how did this turn into talking about your…chest?" The hesitation in that protest was undercut somewhat by the way my eyes automatically followed the gesture before I wrested them away to look at literally anything else; I settled my gaze on the corner of Amane's streaming setup visible in the next room, which was bathed in a soft purple glow that helped flush my visual cortex.

Alice stood slowly, her tail squishing the ball quite a lot as it slithered off. No wonder she had to stretch so thoroughly and frequently; the thick, scaled slab of muscle and fat was an insane amount of additional weight for a pair of human legs to be lugging around, even accounting for her muscular thighs and wide hips. Its bulk drew my eyes right back over almost as easily as any pair of—I bonked myself before that thought could continue and stared harder at the corner of Amane's desk over there. I instead made myself consider that it was also generally good self-care to stretch regularly—and that made me remember that I hadn't done any spear training in days, and I became more crestfallen still. Alice frowned sympathetically.

"Look, you're experiencing a big mood swing from being back in a body you don't like. Brain's dumping even more cortisol than usual, and it's making it hard for you to rationally categorize danger and what you can do about it. You're latching on to anything that will make you feel worse."

I ground out a noise somewhere between a sigh and a growl, frustrated at being read so easily; having my feelings guessed was a sign I was known and understood and seen, and while that should have been a source of comfort and camaraderie coming from Alice, it also made me feel exposed. I shrugged my hoodie, one of the big ones in a nice earthy green I'd gotten with Hina, a little higher around my neck. "It…yes, rationally, that makes sense, but they're some big fuckin' problems and you're sweeping them aside to talk about gender."

"Aha! Because they share a solution, or at least a first step. Sit down and think about it while I use the loo." She gestured at the yoga ball and made for the bathroom.

I hesitantly did as instructed and found that the ball was warm enough for me to feel it through my pants. It was a miracle Alice didn't bake Amane alive in their bed. I turned my mind to the so-called shared solution.

It wasn't much of a riddle; I found the answer immediately, and then spent the rest of the time hemming and hawing over what it meant.

Alice stuck her head out of the bathroom. "Well?"

"I…" I closed my mouth after the false start and took another deep breath, then delivered my solution in a rush. "I've got to use the doll more, haven't I."

Alice nodded and came out, wiping her hands with a towel that she then balled up and launched across the room into the laundry bin. "Good start."

I felt pressured to defend my reasoning. "I need a mantle to, well, fight, if it's gonna come to that, and I need to…what, microdose gender euphoria? I don't know if it works like that."

"Worked for me." She raised her arms behind her head and posed, Instagram thirst-trap style, hips forward. "And look at me now! Fifty-four kilograms of sexy babe. The system works!"

That weight definitely didn't include the tail, I noted, but I had other objections besides, darting my eyes away from her again. "I don't want to become a sexy babe. And would you stop doing…that?"

She dropped her arms. "Designing this body took hopping into my mantle after adjusting how it looked, dozens of times over months, and then I had to have a very upsetting talk with my Flame to convince it to rebuild my actual body to spec, so I'd say I've earned the right to flaunt it. Not to mention keeping it looking like this despite my appetite." She prodded her stomach with a finger. "Anyway, to figure out the body you want, you'll have to do the same, and that means getting used to a mantle, and that means getting into the doll, Shinji."

"What? Oh." In hindsight it was obvious Alice and Hina would share anime references. Not very mahou shoujo to reference a mecha show—though Amethyst demonstrated that there could be some significant crossover, and mantles in general were bipedal, cutting-edge weapons of war that protected their pilots…maybe there was something there. I hadn't yet watched enough anime to know. "That's—yes, that's all correct. But…using the doll made me worse. I don't like who I was last night."

"You mean how you were almost willing to bite one of Hina's fingers off? That's between you and her; I don't care, done it before. Unless you want tips."

I started. "You too? Has everyone but me mutilated my girlfriend? Am I being pranked?"

"You did punch her chest in, I'm told."

"Yeah, but that wasn't intended…" I trailed off, realizing I couldn't quite defend that line of reasoning, and backpedaled a little. "You and Hina?"

She rolled her eyes. "Come off it. She's my best friend and the girl who helped me hatch, and I am a lesbian. I've bitten parts of her you don't even know exist yet."

"…Huh."

"Yes. So your lecherousness last night with her, while a little too public, was…within parameters, I guess you could say. I certainly wasn't surprised, just worried you'd get some of her fluids into the food. You didn't, I hope?"

I raised my hand solemnly. "Nothing made it into the food, I promise. I think. Um. But I don't think that's a good enough standard for, er, defining acceptable PDA." I rubbed at my spear tattoo. "I think we really freaked out Yuuka"

"Ah."

Some of Alice's good mood, so rare for her to begin with, visibly wilted. I immediately felt bad. She walked over to the bed and sat on it—a maneuver that required raising her tail, sitting sideways, then scooting until the tail laid flat on the sheets. There was something appealing about its bulk, how it flowed out of her spine, to say nothing of the glitter of her scales—I caught myself from staring at her body. God, was I gross. I put my gaze back where it belonged as she templed her fingers. "Yeah, yep. What did she say, exactly?"

"Uh…basically that Hina makes her feel unsafe, and that I might too. Probably already did. She was kind of harsh about it. I know I should have some thicker skin about all the 'monster' stuff now, but…"

"That's Yuuka, she's harsh, but based on last night…Hina's not the only…" She trailed off. The tip of her tail thumped softly and steadily on the linens, a paff-paff-paff metronome for her thoughts, whatever she was deciding. Then she sighed heavily. "Hell, alright, let's head this off before it gets worse."

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