Sunspot [Magical Girl Mutations]

None of the prosthesis prototypes were ideal. That wasn't really the fault of the students who had made them; it was legitimately hard to come up with useful features to cram into the space of the front half of a person's foot, and they'd put a truly admirable amount of effort into coming up with novel solutions and a wide range of features that I might have liked.

Ai and I took our time working through the remaining feet. I couldn't think of use cases for the combination taser-lighter when I had access to actual magic, a spear for self-defense, and no interest in smoking, but Team 4's deliverable redeemed itself by having a USB charger and ripple battery with enough capacity to fully recharge my phone several times over. That was the kind of thing that could legitimately be useful, albeit only in scenarios that took a lot of discussion and hypothesizing to torture into even distant plausibility. Perhaps if I were for some reason camping out in reality's fourth-dimensional backstage and needed my phone to photograph the novel and mind-bending sights out there? But that was certainly a stretch.

Meanwhile, Team 5 had initially conceived an active camouflage system, then quickly ran into a number of issues that meant the effect in this prototype only reached halfway up my shin. They'd adapted admirably, though, and flickering through the various illusions of different types of boot they'd come up with to cover my foot was mildly entertaining, but there was simply no way this feature could prove useful for my needs. It didn't even get points back for being especially funny, not compared to the howling laughter of the foot-phone. We had briefly descended into another fit of giggles when I'd posed the image of facing down some Peacie exo-suit and then balancing on one foot to take off my shoe and take a call right in the middle of the standoff.

Team 6 was Kyle's, making it the other team to include a matching sock for mobility. They'd kept the features remarkably less overboard than the others, opting to focus on extracting as much extra utility from the booster's kinetics-focused lattice as they could. The fruit of their labor was a remarkably easy-to-use and high-power telekinesis module; I didn't dare fling too much stuff around the expensive lab, but I could definitely appreciate the multipurpose nature of the device, putting it through its paces with carrying simple objects and jacking furniture off the ground. It certainly wasn't a match for the extreme precision Amane had demonstrated with her far more advanced bionic limbs, but Ai nonetheless opted to award them high points for mirroring her own design decisions in focusing on a feature that could actually help a person with disabilities do common tasks.

The fun took us from mid-morning past noon, and by the time Ai had finished assigning grades to each team and I'd assembled a tentative list of features I'd most like to see, it was verging on one in the afternoon. I had tentatively pinpointed the booster sock, the translation module, the telekinesis apparatus, and of course, the phone as viable features for further prototyping, in descending order of preference. My reasoning was that those all had practical applications and were difficult to match with snapweaving at my current skill level. Ai wasn't particularly happy that I was insisting upon the translation module, warning of dependency, but in my opinion, it had already shown its value in that brief discussion with Amane, and having the option was certainly better than not when shit really hit the fan. To appease her, I promised not to rely on it when I didn't need to.

I wouldn't even have access to it for the time being; for now, all the prototypes had to go back to the workshop so the students could iterate on the designs. Ai stacked them all in, appropriately, a shoebox, and left briefly to store them somewhere. When she returned, though, she had a frown on her face, which was a little disappointing after how much fun we'd been having since that first burst of relieved, long-overdue laughter.

"What's up?"

"Alice wants us for a moment before lunch. I can't quite remember, have you met Otaki-san?" Upon seeing my brow furrow as I tried to consult my fragile database of Japanese names, she waved her hands quickly. "It's fine if you haven't. Good, even. He's in charge of Todai's legal things," she explained.

"Ah. He's probably been pretty busy since I showed up." I swallowed, suddenly feeling self-conscious as I looked down at myself, adorned in sweatpants and a hoodie. I was in no condition to meet with a big-shot lawyer about anything, especially not being accomplice to murder or any of the smaller crimes I'd probably abetted in the Radiances' night operation. "Um. Dress code?"

Ai grinned reassuringly, though it was tinged with stress. "Don't worry. We've all had very serious conversations with him dressed worse than that."

Thus I was taken to a new part of Lighthouse Tower: the 10th floor, home of Todai's in-house legal counsel. As Ai explained it, the department was broken into two key components that could roughly be summarized as dealing with the "celebrity" and "VNT" sides of Japan's magical girl squad. The former team did things like licensing and took up two thirds of the floor's space. The latter helped the Radiances navigate—and exploit—the many, many grey areas of Japanese and international law that had suddenly popped into existence along with the fourth dimension, the Spire, and people who had no true checks on their power except for one another.

Ai brought me directly into Otaki-san's office without so much as knocking; I immediately noticed how the general noise and bustle of the wider office space outside quieted to nothing. This room was aggressively soundproofed and probably had many other measures for confidentiality besides. Ebi had once told me that the Radiances' personal documents had some terrifying infomantic seals on them, and it was easy to imagine that their chief lawyer's office was equipped similarly.

Otaki-san was old enough to have significant gray streaks in his hair, had a heavily lined and textured face, and all in all looked exactly what I would have expected for a Japanese high-power corporate lawyer—deeply intimidating as he pored over the thick binder on his desk. But the frightening impression only lasted as far as his person and his heavy walnut desk, because the rest of the office was cozy and heavily decorated, with pictures of his wife and kids on one bookshelf and a framed baseball jersey—absolutely covered in signatures—hanging on the same wall as his various degrees and certifications.

What really gave him away as somebody the Radiances trusted, though, was a much smaller framed set of newspaper clippings next to the jersey. Most of them were in Japanese, but the one I could read said it all: PCTF Drops Case Against Japan's 'Magical Girls'.

Alice was in here too, waiting for us in a big, plush chair with a gap between the seat and back that had clearly been procured specifically to accommodate her tail. She stood when we entered the room and made swift introductions between me and Otaki-san—or "Mr. Otaki," he claimed to not have a preference—which on my end consisted mostly of nodding and half-bowing a lot, trying not to hunch my shoulders too much as she spoke, and remembering Dad's advice about a firm handshake when he reached across the table.

The meeting turned out to be little more than an introduction. I was now deep enough in the Radiances' shit that it seemed prudent for me to at least meet my main legal representative—and because apparently, I had been mentioned by name when the authorities had come knocking just this morning.

"They wanted to know your whereabouts and intimated that you might be staying here under duress," Alice explained. "They didn't quite threaten us directly, but I think the Peacies are after a face-to-face meeting with you."

"Which we're not doing," I guessed.

"Not until we've solidified where we stand with Hikanome and can trust we have their backing, no," she agreed. "And just to be safe, in case the monsters make an actual abduction attempt or something, we don't want you leaving the building without one of us escorting you. I don't know why you'd do that in the first place, since you're not exactly the type to go out for solo tourism, but that's the policy."

"Sounds good," I agreed. "Yeah, not too interested in wandering around Tokyo by myself. You really think they'd try to scoop me right off the street in basically your backyard?"

"They shouldn't," Otaki-san put in. "Todai will object in the strongest possible terms if something happens to you." His wide face broke into a grin that reminded me of the one I'd seen on Amane's face when she'd opened fire on Sugawara's ghost. "And a large part of our relationship with the PCTF hinges on the fact that if things come to violence, we cannot guarantee we can keep Ms. Suzuki from retaliating."

"So you're threatening them with…death by Hina if they do anything, uh, untoward," I surmised. "Not unlike the barbecue, feels like."

"More or less," Alice confirmed. "Hina's good at playing the heel when she needs to, the bad cop to Amane's or my good cop. You aside, the government knows they can't reasonably bring a murder case against us, and we're in a holding pattern of playing dumb about everything but our rescue of Kiriya-san—she's doing fine, by the by, stable and they're going to transfer her to a more local hospital soon. It's admittedly kind of a delicate dance, since, well, it's always sort of wild west between us and the government, but I think things are firmly in our control for now. That might change depending on how far they escalate when Yuuka's prophecy comes true." She rubbed her forehead, more due to definitely-not-horns than stress, it seemed. "I recognize that's a lot of information at once, but for the most part it's not really your problem. For now, just don't talk to the cops and you'll be fine, yeah?"

It was a relief to know that we'd apparently gotten away with what we'd done last night, if only because the Japanese government didn't have the teeth to even level charges against Todai. That was the power of flamebearers; when enough of them—us—managed to band together, the only real leverage a government had over us was in bringing flamebearers of their own and making it a nuclear standoff. That went double for the Radiances, who also wielded significant cultural cachet in their own right. Of course, with the PCTF foretold to be on their way, that escalation would come in time—just not that day.

In fact, the rest of that day was rather relaxed once that meeting concluded. Ai, Alice, and I went back to the penthouse for lunch; my cerulean-eyed girlfriend had prepared a big vat of thick curry in the morning, which Alice flash-reheated with magic and we eagerly helped ourselves to, gorging on cubed carrots and potatoes and chunks of chicken thigh. It was the same curry formulation that I'd now had a few times here, only slightly modified from the package-recommended recipe on the packet of curry roux; variations on this were a staple in the penthouse. It wasn't necessarily something Dad had ever served while catering, even the cheaper events, but it was definitely in the same vein, something easy to make in huge quantities and reheat in individual servings as people came and went. That made it comforting, though my recently reemerged culinary sensibilities were suggesting a number of further modifications that might make it tastier. Galangal, maybe, to bring it closer to a Thai red curry.

We had a good time filling Alice in on what we'd been up to with the prosthesis prototypes; she didn't quite see the absurd humor in the foot-phone. You had to be there, I supposed. In turn, she talked about work, giving me a rare window into what she actually did all day outside of the special circumstances brought on by my arrival. In this case, she regaled us with the difficulties of negotiating her own and Yuuka's appearances as guest hosts on talk shows next month. The network had really wanted a segment focusing on the inconveniences of living with Alice's thick tail, playing it for slapstick comedy, and then something similar for Yuuka's breasts. As Alice explained it, she had practically breathed fire at them until they'd walked those suggestions way, way back.

It was sometimes insane what regular humans tried to get flamebearers to do, given the inherent power disparity—of course, such things would be completely unacceptable even if they were human celebrities, but you needed some serious lack of basic self-preservation to pitch it to somebody who could unmake you. This was also a valuable insight into how the Radiances operated as celebrities; my prior understanding of showbiz had been that there were supposed to be agents acting as intermediaries for this sort of thing, and Todai did have those, but Alice was a bit of a control freak about vetting the team's public appearances. And in the context of that specific anecdote, I couldn't blame her.

Ai and I shared a few nervous glances across the table as Alice kept periodically rubbing her forehead, but ultimately, neither of us dared bring up the dragon in the room, even with the topic of her tail already having come up. The closest we got was Ai trying to pivot the conversation away from work and toward the topic of my budding mutations, but by that point, Alice was already getting up to clear her spot and return to work. Once she was gone and we had washed the dishes, Ai yawned.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

"I might take a nap."

"Alice could learn something about that," I ribbed, before yawning reflexively as well. "Oh, damn."

Ai grinned, stretching in a way that pulled up her shirt to show her abs, then letting out a breathy little grunt. "Want to join me?"

The view plus the proposition made me freeze up. "Uh—I kind of wanted to keep poking at my mantle," I stammered. "Or do some weaving practice, or something, or—"

"You don't have to," she interrupted with a chuckle. "I just think it would be healthy for you to have more exposure to us as…the piles of meat and bone that we are, rather than pretty girls who you're scared of. Last night was nice."

"I just—you won't be uncomfortable? It's kind of different when it's just two people instead of one big group. More…culpable?" I wasn't sure if that was the right word, so I tried again. "Like, er, isn't it sort of cheating on Hina to…"

"Ezzen. I'm comfortable with you. Do you really think she would be upset that two of her favorite people took a nap together? We could have sex and she'd probably celebrate instead of being mad."

I flushed at that. "Uh."

Ai flinched, then shook her head hurriedly, turning red herself and suddenly seeming as embarrassed as me. "Oh, no, I wasn't—no, we're not going to do that. It was an intentionally absurd example, because I don't, etto, do…sex," she explained bashfully. "Or, ah, I can do it, but I don't feel the desire to do it with people, and…" she trailed off helplessly, having massively derailed from her original point into too intimate of a topic, from trying to be clinical and helpful to oversharing some very intimate details. She buried her face in her hands. I was similarly paralyzed, having no idea how to respond. She'd technically just come out to me as some kind of asexual, I thought, but I didn't know what to do with that information that wouldn't lead to me shoving my foot deep into my mouth. After what felt like forever, but was probably more like twenty seconds, she squeaked. "Just nap. Normal nap?"

"Okay," I agreed. That really seemed like the only reasonable course of action at this point. "Normal nap. Yeah."

—

Despite all the awkward nonsense the two of us were capable of injecting into an interaction, it turned out that having a normal nap together was quite pleasant. Ai's room was, predictably, as much of a secondary workshop as it was a living space, but it was laid out such that the bed was separated from the work space by a heavy curtain, as a way of enforcing some work-life balance. She also had a speaker system that played some ambient rainfall sounds that added to the sense of cozy seclusion and helped put me to sleep shockingly quickly despite my overwound nerves and my habitual checking of my phone to keep up with the chatroom.

By the time I woke up, darkness had fallen outside. To my credit, I had once again managed to not grope anything inappropriate in my sleep; it seemed my body knew that Ai was not for limb-entangling the way Hina was. When I groggily reached for my phone, which had wound up half-wedged under Ai's insensate body next to me, I was slightly shocked to see the time.

"Oh, shit."

It was four in the morning; our afternoon nap had knocked us out cold for over twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. Apparently, we had both needed more rest than we'd gotten in the Todai Cuddle Puddle, and it had come at the price of a sane sleep schedule. I felt gross, too—thankfully not in the moralizing way like I'd done something wrong by spending the night with a girl who wasn't my girlfriend, rather the physical and musculoskeletal results of a nap that had gone on way too long. In the dim light of my phone, I could see where the folds of the bedsheets had impressed themselves on my skin, and overall, I felt rather oily and unwashed. I sat up groggily to locate Ai's bathroom and quietly scrub my face of the worst gunk.

By the time I returned, she was also awake, lying on her side with her phone shining directly into her face from three inches away. I'd never seen how that looked from the outside—not good.

"Mm," I grunted by way of acknowledgement.

She paused her video and rolled over halfway to grunt back at me. She looked as groggy and disheveled as I did, perhaps more so; in that regard, she had succeeded in making me less intimidated by her. In this pre-dawn darkness, we were two cave creatures freshly emerged from hibernation, no pretense of being illicit paramours or any other nonsense my anxiety could brew up.

It bears mentioning that I wasn't completely immune to Ai's physical charms, and I couldn't help but sneak a few respectful-as-possible glances. Her extensive back tattoo tantalizingly peeked out from where one of her T-shirt's sleeves had gotten rolled up, and an animal part of me did still respond to the strip of exposed skin above the waistband of her shorts, less slender than Hina's and instead bolstered by sculpted muscle. And her hair, though neither as long nor glossy as Amane's and messily splayed out over her pillow, did inspire envy in me. I wanted to brush it, or her to brush mine, or some combination. That seemed nice. I wasn't going to ask.

Still, the closeness was very different from my mornings with Hina, which were always about grasping and rubbing and nibbling, gratuitous contact for contact's sake. She thrived on that, and it had wound up being sort of the only love language I knew. With Ai, by contrast, it was just nice to exist near one another. I turned over what she had shared about her own proclivities, or rather lack thereof, in my head; knowing she wasn't interested in sexual relations with anybody somehow made it easier for me to discard my own fears of coming off as thirsty in this intimate situation. There was probably something to unpack there.

At this point, there was no chance I was getting back to sleep. Normally, I would have pulled out my phone for an hour of watching videos before actually getting out of bed, but that wasn't really an option when Ai was also watching videos of her own; we'd naturally irritate each other with the audio, even with the insulating ambience of the artificial rainfall, and I didn't want to be a nuisance. So instead, I just sat on the bed and looked out the window, gazing down at the lights of central Tokyo, ranks of cars trundling along the roads even at this ungodly hour. Eventually, Ai paused her watching, and I heard her sit up and shimmy closer to me.

"It's nice in the dark." Her voice was soft; a little raspier and deeper from overnight disuse, which I didn't mind at all. If anything, it made her sound a little more like Hina, though maybe that was just my only point of comparison for girls sounding like that in the dark.

"The city?"

"Yeah." She shifted until she was sitting next to me. "What Alice said yesterday, about you not going out alone. Is there anywhere you want to go?"

"In Tokyo? Uh…honestly, I don't really know what's out here. Star keeps pestering me to go out and do stuff, but she hasn't really given me specifics. Tokyo's like…I know there's fashion stuff, but Hina already took me clothes shopping." I thought for a moment, then realized I was being silly. "Oh, uh, food, obviously."

"We could do food," she agreed, letting her legs dangle over the edge of the bed as she looked down on the city with me. "Very easy for us to get reservations at any of the big restaurants. I mean, I don't go much, but Hina-san would like to go with you, I think. She really wants to take you around."

She pressed her shoulder against mine, and I stiffened before forcing myself to relax. "I…guess we could? Other than her job, is anything stopping that?"

"No." She gathered her hair loosely over one shoulder, running her hands through it. "I'm glad you like her so much."

"Uh. So am I?" I shifted a little bit. This felt surreal, and I vaguely wondered if this was a dream. "Ai, I don't want to be reading into anything, so I, um. Directness." I took a deep breath. "Is this a really weird and roundabout…confession? You're not, um, jealous of Hina?"

She pulled away from me slightly and leveled with me, eyes glinting in the dark. "No. I'm not trying to kiss you, if that's what you mean. I'm just happy I like you as much as I hoped I would when you first arrived. And I want to be friends who can do this kind of thing together. Without—not romance," she clarified. "No kissing, no sex, not lovers. I don't want what Hina-san wants with you—well, touching you is nice, but I don't want anything that has…fluids," she stammered. "I just like that you're here. I don't know if there are words in English for it, but there aren't really any in Japanese, so…"

"Oh. I like it too," I replied, not needing to deliberate on it at all and a little embarrassed about that. "Um, yeah, I think that's just…close friends? Not friends-with-benefits, certainly, that would have implications specifically against what you mean."

"Then can we be friends?"

"I'll…try." I looked over at her. "That's what I'm supposed to say, right?"

"Yes," she chuckled. "Thank you. You're more restrained than Hina-san. She tries to be this kind of friend, too, but she can sometimes…forget that's where it ends with me. I don't want more than this."

The conversation trickled down to comfortable silence as I chewed on this. It was nice to be liked. And it was nice to officially be friends with Ai—of course, we'd already been friends, but now it was official, the terms spoken aloud and verified between all parties. That was helpful for people like us. In-person friendship was very novel to me, and I was finding that I liked it, if this was what it entailed.

There was only so much city one could watch from our vantage point. Lighthouse Tower, for all it housed some of the most important people in the country, was still only twenty stories tall, and many of the buildings out the window towered above us, blocking sight lines to the wider city. This also wasn't an especially interesting part of town this late at night; sure, there were still plenty of cars and trucks moving down the street, but Todai's corner of Tokyo, Akasaka, was more business-oriented than a place where youths gathered to party into the wee hours of the morning. I had no practical experience with that lifestyle, but I wondered if the Radiances ever did that, shed their literal and metaphorical mantles of power to just be young women for a night. Hina did seem to go out quite a bit on her own, and I could somewhat picture Amane or even Yuuka partying, but Alice and Ai seemed far too married to their jobs. Ai in particular was enough like me that I could scarcely imagine her at a bar or club.

"Recreation," I blurted. "How do you…have fun? As a team?"

Ai grabbed her phone, scrolling what looked like a news site. "We do…movies, sometimes. Here, in that middle area. Amane and Hina play games. Hina cooks, of course."

"You don't…go out? I'm not sure what I'm asking," I admitted.

"For fun? Ah…" she put the phone down, thinking and counting it out on her fingers. "Alice and Hina go shopping. Sometimes they bring Amane. Amane and Yuuka go to bars and comedy shows. Yuuka has other friends at school, too. Alice and Amane go on dates, obviously. Yuuka and Hina do, mm, mahou shoujo things. Like what we did last night, but smaller or further away. We all do it sometimes, but never all together."

That sounded more or less like what I expected. They'd seemed not only practiced, but quite at ease with last night's strike, aside from the relatively high stakes in the rescue portion. Mr. Otaki had seemed quite unworried that any of this would reflect on them, and naturally, that meant they had done things before. "Against who?"

"Traffickers. PCTF-related people. Yakuza, sometimes. We don't kill them, just break things and be a little scary. So not as extreme as the Vaetna's…" she searched for a word for a moment. "Ultimatums. And we stay mostly within Japan. Only Yuuka and Hina try to enter other countries' airspace."

"And, to be clear, you're still talking about recreation? Fighting isn't work?"

Ai shrugged, taking a sip of a massive water bottle on her nightstand. "For me, I don't think it's fun, but I think the others do. It makes things better for people."

"Makes sense. We don't have to talk about it if you don't like it."

"Do you?"

"Uh." I thought about the chaos of last night, and the Barbecue Inferno before that. "Not really? Er, fighting is kind of fun, when it's friendly and sparring and stuff. I want to do more of that. But VNT stuff? Not all it's cracked up to be, at least when you're not a Vaetna, I'm finding." I flexed my scarred and newly plated hand for emphasis. "This won't cut it."

"But a mantle might," Ai pointed out. "We can work on it now, if you want."

"It is four in the morning," I pointed out, but a smile was spreading across my face. "But I don't really have a bedtime."

"Me neither."

And, predictably, neither did Hina. As we entered the kitchen in search of brain-fuel, she was already there, happily chopping away at various vegetables and nurturing a large stock pot on the stove. She waved at us as we descended the stairs. Her work was illuminated by only the trio of overhead lights over the kitchen island, which cast stark shadows all around the rest of the penthouse's first floor and set her vivid sapphire eyes pleasingly near-aglow. She blinked over to us, gave us a snuggly hug, and then returned to her work as we set about procuring our own breakfasts; I thought she would have insisted on sitting us down and letting her cook for us, but she must have read the goblin energy we were putting off and simply waved us toward the fridge. For Ai, her idea of minimum-effort nutrition was a reheated deli container of leftover bulgogi, and for me, after some deliberation, it was…another deli container of leftover bulgogi, as we both thanked Hina for her foresight in making a truly frightening quantity.

After we gobbled down meat and peppers and rice under the kitchen's spotlights, it was time to get to work. I'd been expecting Ai to take me back down to the basement, but instead, we just went right back to her room, where she had another glyphcraft-oriented workstation ready to go. She booted up GWalk, loaded in my files, and we started getting the most barebones version of the mantle up and running. This v0.1 prototype would have none of the aesthetic features I'd discussed with Hina; it was very close in appearance to a mannequin, or perhaps the most streamlined and human-baseline-shaped versions of a suit of Vaetna plate. Either interpretation served me fine.

By the time the lazy winter sun had fully come up, we'd finalized the design, and I was excited to get the substrates printed and woven so I could hop in and get a feel for what it was like to pilot an entirely artificial body. But just as we sent the design's central lattice substrates off to Ai's trio of personal 3D printers, she got a notification in the bottom right of her screen. She turned to me, looking relieved, additional stress unwinding out of her expression and posture beyond what I had thought was the minimum, finally free of a burden she'd been carrying for almost a week now, in some form or another.

"Takagiri is awake!"