yootie
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2.16 Patreon Release
🕑 Added 2025-02-23 15:57:15 +0000 UTCSorry this is late! I really wanted to make sure I got it right. You'll hopefully understand why by the end.
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If only getting back to reality were as easy as letting gravity drag me there. Even though we were supposedly ‘above’ the three-dimensional slice of the universe humanity calls home, the physics of the space beyond was a complex balance of countless other forces that overrode Earth’s familiar homeward pull. I was instead sent plummeting through the kaleidoscopic abyss.
I screamed for the first few seconds as Hina’s room fell out of view above me, pitch black from the outside. It was when my lungs ran dry and I gasped in a fresh breath that I realized that there was, improbably, still some air out here, though freezing cold and distinctly oily. At least I wasn’t going to die by asphyxiation after everything else I’d been through in the past few hours.
Aside from that, though, the abyss was a thoroughly hostile place, not at all meant for three-dimensional meat-creatures like me.
I call it the abyss, and it’s true that it was darker than even the emptiest voids of the night sky, the same kind of unnatural shadow that my Flame cast when I let it burn—but it was not truly empty, and I was not truly blind. I could see vast objects—the equivalent of asteroids, perhaps—and stranger shapes, some sinuous like Jormungandr or branching like the roots of Yggdrasil, others jagged arcs so vast and distant they could pass for confused horizons. I fell past shapes that did not seem to obey the visual laws of perspective and parallax, rippling in form as my view of them changed, distending, twisting, sometimes simply blinking in and out of existence in an instant or flickering between two different shapes.
The greatest wrongness lay below me, in the direction I fell. The shapes there were distorted in a way I can only describe as poisoned. There lay the only true colors in this place—an entire rainbow so scattered as to be random noise, the ruined and crushed-apart edges of the inferno in realspace being washed out here by the tides of ripple. So in a sense, I was still falling Earthward, but striking that border would probably be a worse way to die than impacting any of the mammoth objects blinking into and out of existence around me.
So, looking down as I hurtled ever closer to the chaos was a bad idea.
Unfortunately, so was looking anywhere else. The sights of this out-place inspired a nausea wholly unrelated to my acrophobia, and I understood why Hina had told me to close my eyes the first time she had brought me into her extradimensional hideaway. I needed to shut out the sickening view of the beyond—but when I tried, a whole different kind of terror burst forth in my subconscious. There was an unaccountable urge to peel my eyes wide open, to keep my head on a swivel, to be on my guard; a prey-animal instinct, a hundred million-year-old inheritance from some prehistoric rodent that found itself suddenly stripped of protective underbrush and left exposed to predators.
Of course, neither keeping my eyes peeled for monsters—that weren’t there—nor squeezing them shut in a vain attempt to deny my situation would have made my chances of survival any better. And the screaming didn’t help, but could you blame me? My composure was at an all-time low. I spent maybe thirty seconds falling through the space beyond space.
A new mass of darkness flickered into existence directly in my path, and I had all of one second to brace to be turned into a wet smear, not even enough time for one last attempt to spark my Flame that might avert the impact. But instead of becoming Ezzen paste when I struck the object, I instead dove into the universe’s largest dust bunny at speeds no human body was ever designed to go.
This felt as awful as it sounds. I couldn’t tell you what kind of stringy particulate made up the accumulated mass, only that it was dry and unbelievably filthy, and it rubbed excruciatingly against my exposed skin as my momentum carried me through the cloud, gradually converting the speed of my fall into friction burns. At least my clothes somewhat shielded me, though a poor excuse for armor. Bits of the filth stuck to me as I went, awful little cobwebs that threatened to invade my mouth. I was terrified that I would come to a tangled stop while still inside, and then I would suffocate, or otherwise simply be stuck here for who knew how long, lost in the void.
Thankfully, I punched through the other end of the disgusting mass. My fall turned to a lazier drift, and then at last, I came upon a real object upon which I could land, something bizarrely familiar and maybe even more displaced than I was: a chunk of bona-fide driftwood out here in the abyssal sea. I thought it was a mostly intact fragment of one of the trees that had been caught in the inferno’s edge, but that was impossible; it was far, far too large, easily twice the size of the largest trees on Earth, practically a skyscraper of wood. Maybe it wasn’t an Earthly tree at all, which raised questions I was in absolutely no condition to consider at the time.
Regardless of its origin, I will be eternally grateful to fate or whatever other serendipity brought me to it. I half-landed, half-impacted the piece of wood, scrambling to grab hold of the crags in the bark before realizing that wasn’t really necessary.
I laid on the uncomfortable bark, suddenly too tired to even pick out the remaining clumps of filth from my hair and clothes and wanting to just rest here a while—I didn’t know how long I had until this new surface would abandon me, but my body didn’t care. My muscles had had enough action and pain for one day, burning in protest from how I’d pushed them so far with the Flame. Surely, I could just stay here for a few minutes and rest, wait for Hina or one of the others to swim-fly out to me and retrieve me after they’d won, which would be soon. We’d hopefully taken Kimura out of the fight, after all, and I’d struck Takagiri with a blow very similar to the one that had taken Yuuka’s mantle out of commission. I was in no condition to rejoin the skirmishing.
But, my rational mind argued, I still had to get out of here. As much of a boon as the gargantuan driftwood had felt like it was in the moment, an island of distorted familiarity and something that at least passed for solid ground, simply lying atop it didn’t actually change my situation. I was no more protected from the freezing cold or the almost-too-thin air, and every moment we continued drifting out here still increased the odds I would die by some incomprehensible interaction with one of the other vast, dark objects overhead. I needed to get back to Earth.
How?
The problem was that I had no idea where I was. I could still sort of see the edge of the inferno, that most-fucked up of horizons and the only splashes of color visible. It lay in all directions, since I was still technically on the inside of the bubble. Those edges, that chaotic storm of ripple, remained the most dangerous places of all, not a way out or even a useful landmark.
Pain and exhaustion warred in my body as I tried to think my way through it, crunching through everything I knew about my situation and the more general principles of fourspace navigation. It was cold comfort that this “side” of the outside was actually the less dangerous of the two, compared to going “down” from realspace. I stared up into the darkness with its churning shapes, feeling very small and starting to get overwhelmed.
For one, I didn’t even know how to maneuver across the fourth dimension; I fundamentally lacked the intuition for it as a simple three-dimensional creature. For two, even if I could move in that direction, re-intersecting with the main area of reality was not something to be done lightly. That Hina could do so with abandon was a sign of how far her anatomy had diverged from a typical, three-dimensional human body. I’d probably explode from a kind of dimensional depressurization even if I didn’t just pulp myself on impact. For three, there were more hazards to navigation than the simple risk of messy collision. Portions of outside-space were known to be curved in strange ways, and if I stumbled into one of those, I could wind up going in completely the opposite direction and not even know it.
And all that was to say nothing of the lingering feeling that I was exposed to things adapted for this environment that would view me as a snack—like Hina, noted some cynical part of my mind unhelpfully.
What about landmarks? I knew—in theory—how to use magic to calculate my location relative to a known reference point, and that would at least solve the problem of being lost; it was actually a fairly straightforward calculation, an almost idiomatic operation with {LOCATE}. But that wouldn’t work for me, because unlike every other flamebearer in the world, I didn’t have even a single persistent lattice of my Flame sitting somewhere in realspace to use as a reference point for that equation. My wig was made of my Flame, but that was right here with me, merged onto my head. When I’d been tugged out of reality in the first place, it had been via my hair, which probably meant something of significance, but I lacked both the energy and the analytical toolkit I’d have liked.
Just to cover my bases, I brought my aching arm to my head to spin a few strands of the oddly bright hair between my fingers. It felt…like hair, no great revelation there.
“Don’t suppose you have any hidden secrets to get me out of this?”
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the hair didn’t answer. At least the extreme isolation meant there was nobody around to catch me talking to inanimate objects. Did my hair even qualify as an inanimate object, now that it was apparently merged with me? That made it more like talking to myself, really. At least my spear would have solidly qualified as a separate companion and would have made me feel a little safer from the instinctual feeling of being exposed, but it was back in the grass on—
On Earth.
A jolt of adrenaline accompanied the realization, and my Flame shifted in my chest as it felt hope electrify my system. My hand reflexively went to my left forearm, where my tattoo conspicuously wasn’t. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I attempted to recall my spear to me at such a distance, in this space outside reality, but there was still an inherent link to the lattice embedded in my arm, and that gave me options. I just had to shift some parts around, re-weave the magic in place like I’d done in that moment I’d anchored myself with my prosthetic, so that it would point the way home.
Easier said than done. I didn’t dare try this with blood magic, not out here; reopening the old cut on my arm in this unnatural cold and strange atmosphere felt like it’d be gambling with my life even more than it already was—and my instincts were warning me against it, too, saying that whatever was out here would be able to smell my blood in the water. Irrational, of course, especially given that lighting up my Flame to do it manually would be the equivalent of a beacon around here anyway, and moreover there was nothing alive out here to hunt me anyway.
That’s what I kept telling myself as I tried to ignore the shapes moving in the darkness. They were just debris.
Manual re-weaving it was, but the conditions were abysmal. My Flame was infuriatingly sluggish to ignite, seemingly out of energy after my stunt to strike Takagiri, and the act of forming it into thread in the abyssal cold stung my fingers with frostbite, making my already poor dexterity even more stiff and cumbersome. I was starting to shiver, too, and that made it even worse. Why was my Flame so cold now, when it had been searingly hot when I’d been pushing it through my body? But I couldn’t split my attention between a simple heat-generating lattice and my attempt to find my way home.
It felt like it took minutes to simply spin my Flame into usable thread. Then I had to feel around for the weave in my arm, an awkward process halfway between feeling with my fingers and trying to pay attention to the not-quite-pressure my Flame exerted as it responded to the space in my arm where the thread lived. After that, I had to partially unwind and loosen the lattice so that I could stitch in more of my thread, but not too much or the whole binding would decohere and then I’d be stuck.
It was slow, delicate work, and now I really did feel like I was torturing my Flame with how it was being crudely contorted. I whispered apologies as I wove, which rapidly devolved into a kind of prayer for survival, a mantra I could focus on to stave off the pain and cold and just keep going.
Unfortunately, my body failed before my willpower did.
My fingers turned blue, eaten through by the cold. The shivering became worse and worse until attempting to work the thread with the necessary precision became hopeless, fingers pathetically twitching against my forearm, so very cold. Yet simultaneously, I could feel myself getting hot—the final stage of hypothermia. I was going to die of exposure, not be eaten by some monster of the void. Salvation did not lie in more useless fiddling with my tattoo.
The cold brought a dream-like haze as I began to die.
In that fugue state, on my way to the final sleep, a memory bubbled to the surface of my mind. An action, divorced from context. I let the thread in my fingers decohere back into Flame and engulf my hand, and then reached out toward nothing in particular, as I’d done once before, in another space beyond space, in a dream. And as I had then, I touched…something. Resistance, a barrier I could not see or even truly feel. With my muscles failing in the deathly cold, sweat freezing on my brow and in my armpits, I reached out as far as I could, pushing, desperate for survival.
Take me home, I pleaded with my Flame.
And my hand brushed something else, something solid, something rough and round and cylindrical. I grabbed the haft of my spear—and something grabbed my wrist. I was yanked forward, through, out—or perhaps back in.
Then there were arms around me, something wonderfully warm and soft against me and rumbling deeply. Something warm moved through my chest as Hina’s Flame chased away the deathly cold. She hugged me close.
“Hey, hey, hey, I’m here. You’re okay. I couldn’t find you and I don’t know how you did that but you’re here now and I’m here and you’re okay—”
“Nngh,” I groaned in reply, sinking into her arms, high on the feeling of grass under my knees. The ground was cold, but it was a familiar cold, a natural one, not the abyss, and the air was clean and breathable and not oily and Hina was so warm. I snuggled as close to her as I could go, all our drama temporarily wiped away by the animal desire to seek the warmth of life. I didn’t let go of my spear, though. “Mm. Hi. Home.”
“Home,” she agreed happily, stroking my back.
As the worst of the cold began to ebb away, I regained some higher brain function.
“Is Yuuka okay?”
“Hospital. And you—”
“I’m here,” I groaned. “So it’s over? Please tell me it’s over.” I didn’t even have the energy to open my eyes at this point.
My reply came as an earth-shaking thud—which the Ezzen of a few hours ago might have panicked at, but at this point, I was just too tired to give a fuck from my dwindling supply. I sighed and forced one eye open to see that Amethyst had landed next to us. I blinked a few times, trying to get my vision to focus properly as I looked up at her glittering form looming over me.
She was untouched—not a scratch. She warbled what sounded like a greeting, but hadn’t turned to face me. Instead, she had her enormous arm-cannon raised, pointing at something away from us. Her spindly, digitigrade legs were set in a wide stance and dug into the dirt, acting as enormous stabilizing piles for the walking artillery. The chilly air momentarily dropped to the abyss-cold again as her cannon flashed, loosing a lance of purple light at something in the sky a few hundred meters away—where Takagiri was still brawling mid-air with Alice.
“…You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” I slurred, wincing at the blast of fresh life-sucking cold caused by the weapon’s discharge and automatically huddling closer to Hina again. Frustration blossomed in my chest; I had really been hoping my blow against Takagiri would have taken her out of the fight, like she had done to Yuuka, but everything I’d done, the haze of exhaustion and pain I was feeling, hadn’t even been enough to stop her.
Hina sighed. “God, you look great.” Her hands groped over my body, and I winced in pain as fingers felt my abused muscles. Her hands were so wonderfully warm, but the pressure was unwelcome. I pulled away from her, frustration mounting.
“The fuck? We’re still in a warzone.”
The hands stopped. “Sorry.”
“Why are you with me and not stopping that?”
“Um. I can. Aren’t you cold?”
“…Hina.”
She winced. “Yep, sorry, on it.”
She disengaged her limbs from mine, stood, and catapulted away from me, bounding toward the fight. I groaned and sat back on the grass, still struggling for function but trying to refocus on the danger at hand. I squinted as Amethyst fired again, another flare of light and cold snap, and this time, I saw the shot make contact with Takagiri—but deflect off her wards. That jogged my memory, the last thing I’d been thinking about before falling into the abyss. I rubbed my head, trying to drill into the chaos and remember despite the way my brain felt like jelly. What had it been? We’d taken out Kimura, and then Takagiri had showed up and hurt Yuuka, and I’d grabbed the sword and lunged at her, and—
Right. No blood when I’d cut her.
“She’s a mantle!” I called out to Amane, realizing that I should have told Hina before sending her back in. “Um. Fuck. Tell the others that. Do you have, uh…anti-LM munitions?”
Amane’s spike-snouted head turned to look at me, and even though it completely lacked facial expressions, I could tell from how she slightly lowered her cannon that she was asking if I was sure.
“Yeah. Cut her with her own sword. Looked like…uh, what happened to Yuuka. I don’t know if you saw that. Pink ripple disruptors in…in the blades,” I rambled, vision getting wobbly again as I went through the events in my head. I gasped for air to keep talking. “Thought it would cut her connection with Kimura, but that’s not…” I gave up on trying to explain the full thread of logic in detail. “…point is, anti-LM.”
The mech-girl’s massive shoulders shifted in what looked like a sigh, then she projected a hologram of light at me. Translated text, like a blown-up version of what she usually did with her phone to talk to me.
Don’t have it.
“What do you mean you don’t—” I caught myself. “Why’re you using beams instead of the void munitions thing we did last week?”
I didn’t like invoking our collective sins at the oil rig, but I had to admit the situation was getting uncomfortably similar. But we were trying to destroy a construct, not kill a person—and besides, I had a plethora of bones to pick with my stalker at this point, even disregarding the fact that I was so very exhausted.
Because of the inferno.
“Oh. Right.” Of course using the highest-power options in her arsenal would be dangerous in this ripple-amplifying zone, so relatively close to squishy civilians. And me, but I was finding it hard to care about that part. “So that’s the best you’ve got.”
She shot another beam at Takagiri by way of confirmation, rather than nod or say something else in reply. It lanced past Hina, who’d leapt up several dozen meters and was now slashing at the assassin with oversized claws of a familiar, painfully bright blue. It was hard to make out much more detail at this distance, other than the periodic flashes of light as the flamebearers flew around and traded attacks, sword against claws against lasers, a properly spellsword-y battle. So anime. I might have it appreciated more if I were watching from the comfort of my chair, curled up in front of my computer screen with a warm mug of hot chocolate in hand.
That was the exhaustion and lingering wooziness talking. This wasn’t a livestream or a TV show—this was still life and death combat, and I was right there with them.
I squeezed my eyes shut once more, focusing, trying to picture the general diagram for the Radiances’ mantles, the basic template of commonalities from which each of theirs were customized. From what we’d seen of how well Takagiri and Kimura had dealt with the Radiances, it stood to reason that the former’s LM body was at least based on the same core principles, likely somehow copied or stolen—though seemingly upgraded, given that she was still fully functional despite taking a similar blow to the one that had taken Yuuka out. The idea that she was advanced beyond the Radiances themselves was a distressing prospect, but I had to trust that she wasn’t too far beyond, that the same chinks in the armor would apply if I could find any.
No luck. I was too scattered, and didn’t know the intricacies well enough off the top of my head anyway. But Amane surely would, as the one who had most extensively customized her own mantle and spent the most time in it.
“Amane—”
I was interrupted by a warbling, ringing noise, and opened my eyes to see that Amane was way ahead of me. Her gun had begun to change, and even through my exhaustion, I managed to extract a little interest at watching the massive arm-cannon reconfigure. The concentric focusing rings shifted around, their mounting spines rotating in place and producing those strange, unearthly sounds as the gemstones flowed. A piece underneath the barrel slid further back, up to her elbow, and more lumps of crystal emerged to mirror it. The result hardly looked like a gun. I eyed it warily; even without knowing exactly what she had done at a glyph level, the improvised, hacked-together nature of the design was obvious.
“That’s…not gonna blow up in your face, is it?”
It might.
“And if it does?”
Only me.
She dropped to one knee and aimed down the sights again. Well, the weapon didn’t have sights per se, but the message was still clear. Despite that brisk assurance, I edged away from her a little, scooting on the cold grass as though another meter of space between me and the jury-rigged weapon would make a difference if things went wrong.
The Radiances engaged with Takagiri got clear, signalled by some radio communication I wasn’t privy to. Hina peeled away by propelling herself straight down, and Alice jetted sideways. Takagiri seemed to understand what was happening, but instead of going to ground, she launched herself directly toward me and Amane, covering hundreds of meters in moments—
Amane fired with little fanfare. Unlike the clean beams of light previously cast from the tip of the barrel, there was no flash of light, no clear line of energy reaching from cause to effect. The first signal that anything had happened at all was a crack from next to me. Amethyst’s body fractured. Pieces of gemstone began to melt and slough off her titanic figure as the backlash of her weapon catastrophically damaged her mantle.
But Takagiri’s destruction was far more complete. Her body fractured mid-dive, and she screamed—a horrible noise, the same kind of broken, glitching screech that Yuuka had made after being stabbed. Then she shattered into a million shards.
Shards that were still flying directly toward us. She was weaponizing her destruction as a plume of twinkling death, a final blast of glassy shrapnel. It happened too quickly for me to do anything but cower uselessly, but Amane was faster. She lurched forward, putting herself in front of me, a disorienting purple blur that moved far too quickly for something so big and so heavily damaged. The shards struck her with hissing vengeance, like a storm of hail striking a glass roof, interspersed with more ear-splitting cracks as the impacts took their toll on her already damaged body. Then it was over, and silence reigned for a few moments
“Amane!”
Alice skidded to a landing next to me, white-hot jets of flame arresting her momentum, scorching the grass in front of her. She looked terrible, parts of her mantle cracked and warped with fuzzy distortion—but that was superficial compared to the horror show that was her girlfriend’s ruined body. She knelt by the inert mound of half-melted gemstone.
“Is—is it supposed to disengage?” I asked, heart pounding.
“Yes!” Her voice was distraught. “Amane, no, you can’t have—”
There was a snap as Hina appeared next to us. She was gently propping up Amane’s true body—sans prosthetics, eyepatch dark and inert—in one arm. Alice abandoned the destroyed mantle and rushed over to her. She shed her own transformation and wrapped Amane in a hug, babbling something full of relief.
Hina’s other hand was holding Kimura by the throat. He made no attempt to escape her grip, stoic and sullen.
Alice turned to him, still hugging Amane close, and said something in Japanese before switching to English.
“—explain.”
“I have nothing to say to you.” He sounded defeated, as exhausted as I was.
“Bullshit,” Hina snarled. “Why the fuck are you after cutie?”
“Sugawara wants him.”
“Sugawara’s in a fucking coma. You’re the one who helped put him there!”
“And you should have killed him,” he growled.
Hina exchanged a confused look with Alice. “…Okay? Then why the hell are you working with him?”
“He is in my dreams. I had no choice.”
Alice held Amane tighter. “Why not?”
He didn’t respond, looking down at the ground, avoiding all of our eyes. Hina brandished her free hand, blue sparks playing off her claws. “Talk.”
“Fine,” Alice sighed, waving her off, but there was something dangerous in her voice. “We’ll cover for you if you give us the names of everybody who’s working with him. Where’s Takagiri?”
Where indeed? My brain still felt like soup, but the well-worn grooves of magic were still functional. The mantle couldn’t have been remotely operated across the inferno’s boundaries. And according to Hina’s nose…something finally clicked in my head.
“I think we’re looking at her,” I muttered.
Kimura raised his head and glared at me.
Alice looked at me, frowning. “Ezzen?”
“She’s his mantle. You’re my stalker,” I declared, staring back at him, too tired to be afraid. “The same weapons. The same tricks. Bailing each other out at the last moment every time. Hina says you smell the same, and she only named you two when she first showed up. Nobody else could have been operating the mantle from inside the inferno. More advanced, too. Both bodies at once?”
Alice had gone very stiff, looking from me to him. After a long moment, Kimura’s expression broke into a vicious smile, and instantly, my suspicions were confirmed. That was the same expression I’d seen Takagiri make. The anger, the loathing. He turned the hateful countenance on Alice.
“He’s smart. And I did it better than you,” he spat.
Alice met his eyes. I expected her to snap back at him, for the air to heat up in a display of imperious anger, but she looked—so sad. She said something softly in Japanese. He laughed dryly and spat something back at her. She made a sound, a strangled yelp of shock and horror. Hina whined and dropped him.
“No,” she breathed.
Kimura knelt in the grass, coughing, then sat, resigned and angry, with none of the poise he’d had before.
“They won’t understand you,” he told me. “They will use it against you. It will end like this for you as well.”
I was lagging way behind the conversation. “Use what against me?”
“He blackmailed you,” Alice interrupted shakily, horror in her voice. “Sugawara. That fucker. God, no, you should have—”
“You do not understand—”
“You could have told us!” She was…crying? Her voice was hoarse, and she looked terribly shaken, and I still didn’t get why. Stupid. “You didn’t…this didn’t have to happen. We would have helped you.”
Confusion flitted across Kimura’s face, before being covered again by anger. “How could you?” he challenged. “You don’t know what it’s like to live like this. You perfect fucking mahou shoujo.”
“Oh my God,” Hina groaned. “He doesn’t fucking know. Alice—”
“Mm.” She shakily separated from Amane and stood. Hina hopped over and took her place, settling between me and Amane. I sagged against her, muttering into her neck. “I’m lost.”
“Cutie,” Hina sighed. “Don’t you get it? Seriously? She literally said it straight to you.”
“Uh.”
She shifted. I felt her poke my forehead. “How are you so—okay. Cutie. Ez. If Takagiri is his mantle, why’s she a girl?”
“Because…the design is copied from you guys, and changing the—”
“No! Fuck, you’re even denser than she was. We gotta talk about that later,” she muttered. “Just—look.”
Baffled, I watched as Alice approached Kimura. He let her do so, no more fight left in him, just simmering resentment. His expression turned to complete confusion when she knelt and hugged him tightly.
“We will help you. I promise.”
“…Doushite?” He sounded lost.
“Because—I do know what it’s like to live like this. You’re not alone, sister.”
Hina pointed at them. “That’s her. This is what Sugawara was holding over Takagiri to make her do his dirty work. She’s trans. They both are. Get it now?”
Oh.
Oh, of course.
I looked at the two women hugging each other. Takagiri looked back through the eyes of the old man she was trapped inside. She was sobbing as Alice held her—I had the unaccountable urge to cry with them. Something tight had grabbed my heart.
Trying to process the cocktail of emotions and implications overtaxed the last dregs of my energy. I fainted with tears running down my cheeks.
Comments
Yootie
About POV switches: This is not TWI! A lot of this story is about Ez stumbling into the middle of other people's stories, and the reader gets as much or as little context for it as he does. Sometimes "storyteller Ez" gives information that the Ezzen of that moment in the narrative might not have yet known, but entirely switching POVs to flesh out another character when there's ample opportunity to instead see them through Ez's lens is not something Sunspot will generally do.
Hollowlce
Debated about not commenting about this but I think constructive criticism is good if it isn't just bashing on the author. I personally feel that the whole trans aspect so far feels shallow. I definitely don't care or feel sympathetic about Takagiri and Kimura at all. We have no information about the public perception of trans people in Japan to care, if their is stigma/abuse, discrimination ect. We also have no idea about Kimura and Takagiri's home situation or general circumstances to actually excuse their actions even with the blackmail component. Could be fleshed out a whole lot more. It feels like their would have to be a lot more built on the trans topic in the novel in general for this to hit for whatever emotional impact you were wanting to. Comparatively Ezzens entire body dismorphia with is hair/body was done really well but we haven't had anything like that with Alice aside from the general knowledge they don't like their dragon parts. Also kinda make it's hard to distinguish if they are bothered by their dragon parts or hinting at their own dislike for their trans nature. Kinda makes it confusing but maybe that just me being thick. Also for clarity's sake as it wasn't really clear, was Takagiri and Kimura two separate people combined into one? Or were they forced into each others bodies? Or were they both separately trans initially anyway? We only just confirmed Alice's situation and it still just seems a bit flat. Like their trans to be trans as a label rather then any emotional or compelling reason. Probably would be different if more focus would have been put on Alice's situation before hand rather then just focusing as much on Ezzen. Also with it being split with her dragonification it doesn't feel very well directed. Maybe it would have landed better if we had had a few POV shifts to Alice's perspective hinting at the Trans situation and sympathising/empathising with them before the final reveal. I'm not against trans storytelling if it's done well like Sallis in the wandering Inn just to be clear. I also definitely do enjoy everything else you have written so far as well. It's just this really missed for me.
TeaGeek
Thanks for the two great yet very different action sequences in one chapter! This makes me wonder if there’s any particular significance to the tree or if it will return. A couple tiny suggested edits. 1) Word change from “Those edges” and dropping “places” when referring to the inferno bubble perimeter/membrane to avoid plural/singular swapping mid-sentence: “It lay in all directions, since I was still technically on the inside of the bubble. [The edge], that chaotic storm of ripple, remained the most dangerous […] of all, not a way out or even a useful landmark.” 2) Word position swap from “have it appreciated more” when watching the Alice and Hina fight: “So anime. I might have [appreciated it] more if I were watching from the comfort of my chair, curled up in front of my computer screen with a warm mug of hot chocolate in hand.”
