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3.03 Patreon Release
🕑 Added 2025-05-17 15:15:05 +0000 UTCMaking a mantle was a lot more involved than the instinctive immediacy of blood magic. I needed a full infomantic scan of my body, custom substrates, a lot of integration testing, and likely days’ worth of weaving for the final implementation once every other step was completed. I certainly wasn’t getting it done today, and I doubted I would get anywhere beyond the basic skeleton of the diagram before I needed the Radiances’ help.
They’d be involved anyway, of course; Alice had stipulated that a mantle would be necessary if I were to eventually go hunting with Hina, presumably for combat capability. But that was secondary to the true appeal: an alternate version of my body, one that I could fully customize to look however I wished, a face I could show the world that wasn’t this.
While I was pondering this, the chatroom exploded
starstar97: thana what the FUCK
DendriteSpinner: Hey maybe don’t be posting that?
starstar97: not cool
moth30: yo
The image vanished from the chat a moment later.
skychicken: @thanasen don’t post irl photos of chat members
starstar97: ^
thanasen: oh sorry
Sky to the rescue.
ezzen: Thanks, Sky.
ezzen: Yeah, please don’t do that.
My curt reply hid the fact that I was so rattled that my hands were shaking. My response to seeing my own face—or more pertinently, to the fact that my face was now public knowledge—was psychosomatic, sending my blood pressure through the roof and making me feel physically nauseous and a little dizzy. I could see sympathetic DMs from Star piling up in the corner of my screen, but I had to turn my chair away from the keyboard for a moment and just squeeze my eyes shut as the revulsion worked its way through my system.
“Cutie? You okay?”
I opened my eyes to see Hina sitting on the edge of my bed. She was in what had been a full black-and-white skirt suit, appropriate formal wear for a TV apology, but she’d shed the jacket, undone the buttons on her shirt, and ditched the skirt. Her cerulean eyes were full of concern and immediately soothed me.
“Uh. I think so. Now that you’re here,” I added lamely. It was sappy and romantic but true. “How long have you been there?”
“Just got here.” She hopped to her feet and hopped over to me while pulling her socks off, never seeming in danger of falling over. She tossed them aside and bent over to nuzzle my face.
I felt my heart slow and reached up to touch her neck; it just felt right. “Okay, yeah, definitely better now. I was just—” I separated from her and pointed at the screen, where the chatroom was angrily buzzing along. “Dealing with stuff.”
“Mm.” The blue eyes traced over to my main monitor. “Mantle patch?”
I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Mostly done now, just routed the pink leak into a water splitter offgas, based on what Takagiri did in her own mantle. Should mean the swords have minimal impact now, if we—uh, you, I apparently can’t come, sorry—run into more on the hunt. Which is tonight, apparently,” I rambled, mouth running on autopilot while my eyes wandered around my girlfriend’s front. God, she was hot, half-undressed like this. A welcome distraction, arrived at just the right moment.
Hina acknowledged my gaze with a teasing little wiggle and a grin, her arms reaching past me to rest on the chair’s backrest, trapping me. “Tonight, hm?”
“Uh, yeah,” I stammered, blushing, “so I really need to get it done. It’s most of the way there, I think.”
Her expression shifted a little. “You weren’t working on it when I came in.”
“I was…dealing with stuff, like I said. Um. I don’t know, just people being idiots and not respecting privacy.” I tried to swallow down the residue of the panic attack. “There’s been some yelling about your apology, too, but I think that hasn’t got much bearing on how it actually went?”
She shrugged. “Went okay. Hate the fucking suit, hate the cameras. Missed you the whole time. Scooch over.”
I complied, making some room in the chair, and Hina happily tossed herself into the gap next to me, cuddling against me. The chair definitely wasn’t meant for two people, but she made it work. A different kind of shudder passed through me. “Um, yeah, I missed you too.”
A purr passed through her body. “Tell me I did a good job. With the apology.”
“I didn’t watch it,” I admitted.
“Doesn’t matter!”
“Okay. Good job? Well done, Hina?”
The purr intensified, which made it easy to dismiss the habitual discomfort at letting somebody else see what was on my computer as I swung our chair back toward the keyboard. I’d been discussing gender stuff with Star, and it was fine by me if Hina saw that.
ezzen: Yeah, I’m okay.
Hina snorted. I rolled my eyes.
ezzen: But that reminded me that my face is out there in public, and I wanna do something about that.
ezzen: Test out bodies and faces with a mantle until I find one that fits me.
starstar97: ooooooo
Hina echoed Star’s intrigue, shifting against me and making a curious noise. “Mm?”
“…I don’t like my face,” I admitted aloud to her. “Which is something we can deal with magically, right?”
“Masks,” Hina confirmed. “Always masks.” She sounded a little sad, and I brought a hand off the keyboard to awkwardly pat her knee. She shifted against me. “You shouldn’t have to care about what they think.”
“Hina,” I warned. We were trying to work on her habit of othering normal humans.
“I—sorry,” she whined, “not trying to be all us-versus-them about it, but it’s just fuckin’ dumb! I don’t want to wear their fuckin’ costumes, their uniforms, and that’s bad enough when it’s just clothes. Stupid suits and big conferences with cameras.”
I nodded sympathetically while I waited for Star to reply. When she did, it floored both of us.
starstar97: ok, gender exploration hypothetical, stop me if this feels unproductive or like its putting you in a box: if you had to look like one of the radiances, which would you pick?
I gaped at the screen, then glanced at my shoulder, where Hina was firmly pressed up against me. The blue eyes darted up from the screen to meet mine, and we shared a long moment of awkward silence.
“Do I tell her I literally have one of them pressed up against me? She’d die of jealousy.”
“I’m actually curious, cutie.”
Oh no. Hina was taking this seriously—I was being tag teamed by my girlfriend and best friend. “Um. None?”
“Bullshit. I see the way you look at all of us. How about Yuuka? Big ol’ titties strike your fancy?”
I leaned away from my girlfriend in what little space I had to do so. “Whether it ‘strikes my fancy’ is beside the point, isn’t it?”
“Lotta overlap between what you’re attracted to and what you want to be.”
“Fine, but—I don’t want big ol’ tit—” I cut myself off before I could finish the vulgar word; it felt horribly offensive to use for somebody I knew. “Fine, no, not Yuuka. Too short, anyway.”
“Hmm. Tell her that,” Hina commanded.
“What, tell Yuuka?”
“No, cutie, tell your internet friend.”
“Oh.”
ezzen: Not Heliotrope. Don’t want to be short.
starstar97: so no big fuckin titties for ez… hm
starstar97: go on (☆ω☆)
I sighed, exasperated. Hina snorted.
“Alice?”
“Are we counting the tail?”
Hina shrugged, which I felt more than I saw. “Ask.”
ezzen: Does Opal include the tail?
starstar97: is there a reason it shouldnt
ezzen: Academic rigor?
starstar97: opal includes tail
“Then no. Huge inconvenience.”
“But she’s massively pretty.”
“She…is,” I conceded. Even saying that out loud, and even when specifically prompted to do so, felt like an overstep. “But that’s not—I don’t look at her face and go ‘God, I wish that were me.’ Which is what Star is after, I think.”
Hina nodded against my chest, which I took as my cue to report these findings.
ezzen: No Opal then, either. Nor Sapphire.
“Hey! Grr.”
“I mean, I want your physicality, but I don’t want to look like you.”
And I definitely didn’t want Star to start talking about my girlfriend’s body in too much depth when she was right here. Even though Hina would probably like that, because it was sure to get me flustered.
starstar97: damn so no boobs AND no hips?
starstar97: really leaning away from the feminine figure then huh
That brought me up short, surprisingly. Yes, I wasn’t particularly enamored with femininity, but I hadn’t considered my dismissal of Alice and Hina to be dismissing the two most…be-hipped…of the Radiances, at least in terms of the proportion to their waists, and now that I was thinking of it in those terms…
Hina watched the gears turn in my head, tantalizing cerulean in the corner of my eye.
“Hips are good,” she prompted.
“Hips…are good,” I realized. Would I feel less inclined to hide my body under layer upon layer of heavy, form-obscuring clothing if I had more of a figure to show off? I wasn’t sure—but that wasn’t an immediate and obvious “no” in the way I had responded to having a chest like Yuuka’s. “Huh.”
ezzen: Raincheck on the hips specifically.
Hitting enter on the message, admitting it to somebody who wasn’t literally pressed up against me, made it suddenly feel real, so strongly that it was an actual sensation, an odd but not entirely unwelcome pressure in my core.
starstar97: OOH
starstar97: that sounds like progress!
ezzen: I guess it is? It’s definitely something. But I still don’t want to BE a girl.
Hina shifted to nuzzle my neck as I typed that out. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but it felt nice.
starstar97: ofc ofc
starstar97: does that make sapphire your pick?
“Uh.” I didn’t particularly want it to be.
“Hmmm,” Hina hummed against me. “No love for Ai? Muscles good,” she pointed out.
“Muscles good,” I conceded, “and there’s…nothing wrong with how she looks. She’s quite…quite pretty, actually. Strong and toned, but not too bulky.” I reflexively rubbed my bicep in a futile attempt to dispel the awkwardness of rating somebody I lived with. “But if I’m headed in the direction you are, mutations-wise, then that’s not really a factor, is it? I’ll hardly have any muscle mass at all and still be ludicrously strong, right?”
Hina giggled. “Yep! Sounds like that’s what you want, so that’s what the Flame will give you.”
That gave me something more abstract to latch on to, bigger yet safer to discuss.
“Why’s it such wish fulfillment for you and not the others?” I realized a moment later that that was a slightly stupid question. It had fulfilled Alice’s wish and put a twist on it, and in a way, it had done the same with Hina—her emotional extremes were hardly an unalloyed blessing. I revised the thought before Hina could explain what I’d already figured out. “Is Todai an outlier, or does the Flame select for people who want to change? I mean, you, me, Alice, Sky, Takagiri…”
Could that have something to do with why I was twice-touched? Was my desire to be something else part of why the Flame had chosen me? The first time, I’d been a kid. Now I was…not quite an adult, but in that intermediary phase, right at the cusp, at the boundary of change. That felt significant, based on what I now understood of the Flame’s relationship with emotion and desire.
“Maybe! What about Amane?”
“Oh—yeah, of course she’d want to change too, Christ. Sorry for leaving her out.”
“No, I meant would you want to look like her.”
“Oh. Uh—” I was aware Hina had dodged the question, but I figured we might as well address the last Radiance. “Her hair’s really nice.”
“Mm,” Hina agreed, reaching up to run her hair through my fingers. “You jealous?”
“Uh. A little, now that you say it. Hers is so…well-maintained.”
“You can do that too, y’know. Everything she uses is off the shelf.”
“Yeah, but—” I floundered for a moment, trying to find a less plaintive way to express my objection, then gave up. “It’s work.”
“But you’ll look so good.”
I didn’t have a rebuttal to that. I reached for the keyboard again.
ezzen: Okay, uh, maybe Amethyst too? Human form, not mantle. So something between her and Hina? Specifically hips and hair, if I had to name specific features?
starstar97: hmmmmm
starstar97: fem bone structure, long hair (in your bizarre anime orange), not much in the way of boobs
starstar97: and of course carapace right
ezzen: I thought this was about the Radiances?
starstar97: only as a baseline
starstar97: one sec
“Heh,” Hina chuckled. “She’s got your number.”
“She’s known me a lot longer than you have,” I pointed out.
“Sure, yeah, true. But I love you more!” She wriggled upward to plant a kiss on my jaw. “Glad you got rid of the stubble, BTW, you look better without it. More kissable, too. A little sad I wasn’t the one to burn it away, though.”
“Sorry?”
“Make it up to me in bed.”
I’d had a good streak of staying calm-faced despite our proximity so far, but that’s what finally broke me. I reddened. “Uh?”
“Later, later. You’re busy, right?”
I blinked, realizing I had been supposed to resume work on mantle stuff at least twenty minutes ago. “Oh, shit, I gotta get back to work.”
Before I could make good on that, Star sent an image. It was of an anime girl, with orange hair in twintails like Yuuka’s, but with no such voluptuous chest—a milder figure, closer to Amane’s, clearly delineated by the skintight red suit she wore. Spandex, maybe, and clearly high tech. I found the word after a moment—a plugsuit, hugging her hips and waist and leaving nothing yet everything to the imagination. On those hips her hands rested, and she bore a smug expression.
I didn’t recognize the character, being relatively unplugged from anime culture despite the company I kept, but my anime-inspired girlfriend did. She cackled.
“Oh my god, she’s right, you wanna be Asuka Evangelion. Ha!”
I squinted at the anime girl, then frowned. “No I don’t. I never specified I wanted to keep the neon hair!”
“Neon Hair Ezvangelion,” she whispered.
“And a plugsuit is not armor!”
—
I kicked Hina out because she couldn’t stop laughing and I had to get back to work. She accepted the ejection easily, telling me through her giggle fit that she’d come back later to retrieve me for dinner and to “get in the fucking mantle,” which was a reference I had to look up once she left the room. Apparently, she planned to gather the whole team for a pre-mission dinner, which would also save me the trouble of hunting down all of the participating Radiances to individually work with them on patch implementations.
As I proceeded through the integration work on the mantle patch, accounting for the subtle differences in tuning between the control circuitry of each girl’s lattice-manifest body, I got a better picture of how my own mantle might come together. Star’s thought experiment was useful for defining the aesthetics I wanted, which were admittedly the main point of wanting a mantle at all. We kept chatting as I worked.
starstar97: idk i think i was on the money
ezzen: With her figure? Sure. But twintails are girly.
I was slightly less cross with Star for bringing the anime character up in the first place than I was with Hina. In the privacy of the one-on-one direct message, I could admit that “Asuka” was a useful metric for honing in on the look I wanted.
starstar97: amethysts hairstyle then?
ezzen: Or something like that. That was pretty much how my new hair looked when I got it, anyway
starstar97: what changed
ezzen: Uh
ezzen: Haven’t really been brushing it so it’s kind of tangly now
starstar97: !!!!
starstar97: SHAME
starstar97: will be a little moot either way though if the mantle becomes your default i guess
ezzen: That’s probably a while away even if I had the exact design ready right now .-.
starstar97: yeah but its a GOAL
starstar97: and like
starstar97: one you can actually make progress toward
This was a touchy subject for Star.
ezzen: Sorry
ezzen: Your situation fucking sucks.
starstar97: IT DOESSSS
starstar97: airlift me to tokyo /j
starstar97: /hj actually. pls
starstar97: then at least id be able to grow my fucking hair out
starstar97: fuck this fucking country
Star was living as a man, because the alternative was at minimum being fired from her job and likely actual danger to her life. She loathed it, but lacked the means to escape, and it was frustrating beyond belief.
But that was only half of the unfairness. Even if we could rescue her, bring her to a place where she had the safety and resources to transition to the greatest extent possible, she was still bound by the limits of science and medicine. No mantle for her, no magical full-body replacement like what Alice had undergone. It shouldn’t have to be this way.
It didn’t have to be this way, I realized.
ezzen: I’ll see what I can do.
ezzen: That’s a promise.
starstar97: wut
starstar97: send sapphire to kidnap me too pls??
ezzen: Uhh well I can’t quite promise that, but I also want to like…ACTUALLY follow through on magical transition stuff for regular people. Not fair that it’s an option for me and not for you.
starstar97: oh
starstar97: holy shit yeah thatd be rad if you can find the time and.. permission or whatever you need
starstar97: can todai, like, actually back that
ezzen: I hope so.
Privately, I thought they likely would, at least if we could collectively find the time for research once everything cooled down. It wasn’t a problem of resources, at least—the challenge was mostly one of magical theory.
starstar97: your transition comes first though
starstar97: let me know if you want to brainstorm more stuff for the mantle, asuka
ezzen: argh
I sent that message with a smile, though, and a weird sense of power, a feeling I could do some good beyond what lay in my immediate surroundings.
Star was right, though: mantle work did come first. I minimized the chatroom and set about the fresh challenge of integrating the changes I had designed. I had to get this done by tonight.
—
Dinner went awry.
The Radiances trickled into the penthouse’s common area one by one. Hina was already there, of course, surrounded by a growing pile of used dishes and intermediate ingredients as she concocted a meal that would nourish all of us for the long night ahead, even though only three would actually be heading out. I made to join in with the preparation, but she waved me off and insisted I just go sit down and wait; for this dish, apparently, two cooks was too many for the kitchen.
Honestly, that was frustrating; the sense of looming deadline regarding tonight’s mission made me antsy to do something and help out. I’d gotten the mantle patches done, at least as far as I could within the purely abstract realm of a GWalk file. The next step was for the Radiances to make the changes themselves, and that had been designated as an after-dinner activity, and that couldn’t happen until dinner was done, so I wanted to help with dinner. But Hina had a process, and I wasn’t to interfere.
I instead took a seat at the low table, in the position facing the windows that was apparently becoming my designated spot, and filled the time by continuing to work on my own tentative mantle designs on my phone, purely at the brainstorming and planning level. It was beginning to dawn on me just how complex of a project this was; all I’d managed to do so far was just lay out the most basic skeleton, the framework that said “this is a body made of LM;” the control circuitry was a placeholder, and all the physical details of appearance were locked behind making a scan of my body to use as a starting point.
I put my phone down when the elevator made its characteristic ding, too embarrassed to share or even risk exposing what I was working on. Alice trudged out the elevator, headed straight for one of the sofas, and made it about halfway through opening her laptop to continue working before Hina appeared next to her and snatched the device from her lap.
“No overtime!”
Alice silently accepted the intervention, rubbing her forehead where her not-horns definitely weren’t growing, and splayed herself out face-down on the sofa instead, her tail rising up from her butt like a pale mound and draping off the furniture’s edge in a way that didn’t seem great for her back.
I glanced at Hina with some concern, who shrugged, unworried.
“She’ll be recharged by the time we eat, just let her rest.”
“If you say so.”
Yuuka was next, heralded first by a dull, thrumming roar coming from outside the window, then by a soft thump overhead as her jetbike touched down on the rooftop landing pad, then by the footsteps of her trotting down the stairs to the upper level to take off her shoes, jacket, and accessories. By the time she came into view, she’d stripped down to just a long, high-waisted skirt and an undershirt, much less adorned than other outfits I’d seen her in. It retained the eyepatch, at least, but she was already pulling it off as she sniffed the air.
“Gyuniku?”
“Bulgogi, yeah, but not beef for you,” Hina clarified. “You’re getting those shredded soy-meat things. How were classes?”
Yuuka ignored the question except for a mild grumble as she descended the last flight of stairs to our level and crossed the room to the loveseat next to Alice’s couch, apparently unwilling to make small talk with her teammate. She had words for me when she sat down, though.
“Something about mantle upgrades?”
“Uh, yeah, just making sure Takagiri’s swords don’t mess with your—”
“I don’t want ya fucking around with my body,” she interrupted. She said it with a growl, but a halfhearted one, like it was coming from a place of obligation more than real hostility. “But it’s not like you can slip anything in there without me knowing, I guess.”
“I mean…yeah, you’re the one who has to implement it,” I managed, a little unsure at what kind of tone this conversation was supposed to have. Was I supposed to be offended? “Hina said we’d get to that after dinner.”
“No, you stupid cunt, I’d know because of the…” she began to point at her eye, then just gave up and groaned. “Whatever.”
Alice grunted from the sofa. “Yuuka, you don’t actually hate him. Save your energy.”
The Heliotrope Radiance physically recoiled from the mild rebuke, but didn’t argue against it. Alice hadn’t even deigned to raise her head.
Silence stretched onward for a time, growing more oppressive and cloying the longer it sat, like once-fresh mayonnaise left for too long in the fridge. Yuuka and I both retreated to our respective phones until the elevator announced its arrival with a ding. Amane stepped out, Ebi right by her side.
She looked good, all things considered. She’d clearly not just rolled out of her medical bed to meet us; her long hair was damp and she seemed in good spirits as she came over to the rest of us, plopping herself down in the loveseat next to Yuuka in much the same way Hina had sat with me in my room, though the plush chair had a little more space to share between them. Yuuka visibly brightened with her friend so close by, and the two girls tittered at each other quietly in Japanese, saving me from the awkward distance. Ebi took up her post over her charge’s shoulder.
[Direct Message] ebi-furai: hows your hand?
I gave her a questioning look, though I wasn’t really one to complain if she’d rather talk via text.
ezzen: Fine? Takagiri’s thing was just localized. Is she doing alright?
ebi-furai: no.
I winced.
I spent the next few minutes idly working on my prospective mantle’s diagram on my phone while we waited for the last Radiance to arrive and for dinner to be ready. As the minutes dragged by, it became harder to ignore how hungry I was; I’d mostly forgotten to eat today, and bulgogi was one of those foods that announced its presence loud and clear, filling the air with garlic, ginger, sesame, and all the other things that were good in the world. My stomach rumbled as I shifted in my seat—and Hina must have heard it despite being surrounded by sizzling pans, because she half-turned her head to fix me with a sapphire side-eye of concern. I hurriedly mouthed “I’m good” at her, not wanting her to rush on my account.
At last, Hina finally started plating up piles of grilled meat and veggies over rice and distributing them across the table, drawing the others to take their usual spots. But one of us was still missing.
“Somebody needs to go get her,” Yuuka opined.
“Might have lost track of the time,” I agreed. “Especially if Takagiri isn’t doing great.”
Alice, slightly zombie-like after her power nap, glanced at Ebi. “Well?”
The android shrugged, the interlocking blue plates of her shell shifting hypnotically with the motion. “Am I my mother’s keeper?”
“Yes,” chorused Alice, Hina, and Yuuka.
“Fair enough. She’s already in the elevator.”
Satisfied with that answer, everyone finished settling in at their spots at the table. There seemed to be a silent agreement that nobody was to begin eating until all had arrived, which overrode the growling of Alice’s stomach and my own, despite the tempting, alluringly steaming dish placed right in front of me. We waited a few more seconds in silent anticipation.
Right before the elevator dinged, Yuuka scrambled to her feet. “Aw, cunt.”
The elevator announced one last arrival. A grinding ache crept into my hand, and for a moment, I shared Yuuka’s prescience. Amane’s sharp intake of breath told me she did as well. The elevator doors slid open, and there was Ai—with Takagiri in tow.
Overlapping voices broke into a cacophony, with Yuuka’s rising above all the others.
“What the fuck are you thinking?”
Comments
Vessa
"Ezzen, crank that soldier boy"
Doomblade
Ohoho!
