CW: nudity, fantasy racism, underage fictional sexualization, online stalking communities, fanservice tropes, nonconsensual verbal and mental sexualization, mind alteration, amnesia, suicide, clowns, public humiliation, self-harm, gaslighting, emotional incest, delusions, verbal outbursts, consensual torture, age gap relationship

Luskonneg’s last lingering memory of his father always seemed to be something different whenever he tried to think of it. He had probably reconstructed it a million times, he was probably remembering a dream when he tried to remember what it was about now. It was about a special golden brick from a set of collectable tessellating blocks, one in a million produced, and he had lost it on the grass at a picnic. It was about a ticket for a Children’s Rock Orchestra concert that had slipped out of his pocket. No, it was a mini figure that had fallen from the funiculars downtown into the abyss of the Lower City.

Why had he been crying so much, as if unaware of all the real suffering life had in store for him? "Are you ever going to stop crying?" his mother asked in a wheedling voice that made him absolutely certain to answer, though he had already been leaning toward it, "NO!"

"We can get another one."

"But it won’t be that one.

"Next weekend, we’ll be back, I promise."

"Even if it was, I’ll never get this week back. There’s a week less I can have with it in my life, forever. So it’s forever either way."

The only thing he would later remember from 12th-grade Literature was the idea of a "timeshape". There was some entire genre about reconciling their loss, Theological Elegy or whatever, and the entire unit had slid off him like water, thirteen years later. ‘Building into the order of memories.’ Oh, maybe he remembered that too? Wait, Seer In The Half Light had said something in their blog post about why it didn’t apply to Elphantom. Lol.

"Well, I guess that’s true. Sorry, that is sad and nothing I can say to make that better. You should hurry up and stop crying, so you can get back to doing other fun things later, or you’re gonna keep losing more."

"But it’ll never stop being sad. You admitted. I just proved it to you."

"You’re already starting to stop crying.You can’t do it forever, you’ll just run out of water in your body."

"Didn’t used to," said Mom, a few steps behind them, almost bitterly.

"If I run out of water in my body won’t I die? Then I’m gonna keep doing it until then!"

"And then what, should I do the same thing? And then your mother, and then grandma? Eventually you’d run out of people in the world, all for one little -BZZZZT-"

["Yeah, that’d be perfect."] Did he say that? It wasn’t in the memory. He liked to imagine it, in Darker and more horrifying voices until he scared or hit himself or… he couldn’t imagine saying the opposite, because then he would have stopped crying on the spot, wouldn’t he? Only both darknesses made sense, the instantaneous reflection.

"AUUUGGHHH! GWAAAHHHHH RAGHHHH!" He threw himself, fist then fist then forehead, at the stone pedestal of the building they were walking past until Dad picked him up around the diaphragm like a parcel. "I CAN KEEP DOING THIS!" His dad picked him up around the diaphragm like a parcel and carried him away from the worried crowd gathering. "But you don’t have to."

"YES I DO! IT’S NOT STOPPING BEING SAD AND IT’S NEVER GOING TO STOP BEING SAD!"

"That doesn’t mean you have to be. You can if you want to, if it helps. But you never have to be sad. There will be plenty of things you have to do when you don’t want them, like go to work when you have kids, but being sad about things isn’t one of them. You can always do something else."

By the time the sun went down he couldn’t remember why he had thought any of that, why he had followed that absurd chain of reasoning. The sun was still small and gold even as it hit the rooftops.

By the time he could have gone back to the funiculars, his father was dead.

After all that, he still hadn’t cried in the course of the past month’s misadventures. At this point it wasn’t a matter of choosing not to. He genuinely thought at this point it would be easier to die.

The Public Morals Committee had been the last time. If this meeting repeated that story… he wouldn’t cry. He had, after all, last time. For it to repeat would simply prove the reason he hadn’t tried - the frozenness of his world. It was almost comforting when he thought of it this way. (So stop thinking about it that way, do you want to make it happen that way? - If you don’t make it go that way, who knows what could happen, you could even start crying again.)

He had pulled so much skin off his fingers that the red stripes from the base of the fingernail almost to the knuckle on the index, middle finger and thumb of both hands looked like some kind of makeup gimmick from a Silmenon visual shock band.

To care or not to care. That was the dilemma that reminded him of his father’s advice.

There was one (1) suit in the closet his mother had left him with, to wear if he ever went on an actual date. Or just outside on a visit with a person. He couldn’t remember which she had said now. Would it be worth calling her to check? Because otherwise he either risked wearing his date clothes on a non-date - an apology no less, which he fully expected to end by promising to never see her again - thereby retroactively transforming it into one, and making his failure to treat it as one a fantasy-killing failure at dating, etc. - or not wearing his date clothing to a date - and frankly he didn’t have many other options that would be acceptable for seeing anyone, period, especially in an encounter that would be judged in terms of respect. Wearing a suit, he already knew, was overkill, especially here where they were mostly a Klauxion or Kamann thing you saw on TV shows. (All the awful ones mom watched - people wore suits sitting around in their living rooms in some of those - which of course she never did, sometimes he’d leave school with her on the couch in PJs and a bra and come home to her in different ones - herself the only thing in the house not spotless.)

At least there were a number (he couldn’t remember or make out from the side, and was still deciding whether to get up) of collectors’ T-shirts he kept shoved off to the left of the closet by themselves, originally for the chance he might go out in them and now for resale value. All simply black and screenprinted, like metal band shirts, all official art, at least four lewd. If he changed his mind about a character or a show in one of them (they were almost all seasonal bullshit, he didn’t feel he had the right to wear his waifus no matter how much he satisfied their pillows), he would sell at the appreciated value of the limited seasonal line and buy another which would go up in the same way - a small investment, though most of them he couldn’t bring himself to part with. He inhabited a persona when trading them he called the Slaver - that would be scary to lapse into in front of a normie - you know they want it, don’t you? the voice he compared prices to himself in rasped. - Since when do you come out if I don’t have a shopping tab open? - The blue fire flashed in the skull’s eyes. No, fuck this. Better to wear the suit. If he was only going to do this once, better to wear the thing he was only supposed to wear once; if he overdressed, it wouldn’t matter, but if he underdressed, it would. The mathematics of it were shockingly simple - terrifyingly, because he didn’t want a clear answer, he wanted to slide into the inexorable feeling of a decision he could then make under too much pressure to say for sure was his own.

But hadn’t Marzanna implied that if it went well, they might do this more than once? Was there not a whole type of character who did shit like that, a whole genre of story he might have stumbled into if he followed the right flags?

He was now trying to think of some reason the answer wasn’t clear. The spirit messenger of Elphantom was haunting him, trying to find ways to ruin his life so much he would have to become a Dark terrorist or something. Heh. How about a Slaver? But that’s not how that worked anyway - remember, that Seer In The Half Light said you have to have love to lose that much. We’re never going to. Since when was he taking that ARG schizo as an authority on anything? Calm down and assess value. Was this retarded voice’s Watchtower Archipelago accent always that thick?

Maybe he wasn’t avoiding the decision or being possessed by one or more entities he made up, maybe he just wanted an excuse to get up and look at the shirts again. He stood up, put his head in a beam of light by accident and found it cleared so rapidly he had to remind himself where he was.

Luskonneg stumbled over to the closet, feeling surreally like a teenager looking at it deliberately for the first time.

1) Nyorube Cyalume. Driving her spellbike on her back from above, a teal-yellow crystal line down the middle crease. An instant contender for seasonal best girl and instant front-runner for presenting to a real person, how had he completely forgotten her show had existed. Well, it said all its cool things in the first episode and then repeated them for every subsequent one.

2) Dandana Machpoche. Dog pussy splayed, covered only by her tail but if you looked closely that fur to either side was from under -

3) oh, he did have one of Smilia, in the nurse outfit, doing the electric nipple twist right where his nipple would be if he was exactly the size of whoever modelled the shirt. Still, what a brilliant design. Absolutely unthinkable to ever wear.

4) Milliaer Flurizet - the religious traditionalists kicked up such a big fuss about her being a "parody of Maullan", they even started talking about the Garden Chapels and got the Inquisition called down on themselves. Just innocently weaving her doily. It might actually make him look religious.

5) Bizu Kyurient from Twister Sisters twisting from below in her lemon panties, the coloured spots of the mat overlaid and continuing across the rest of the shirt.

6) Lieur Liaw pleasuring himself with the fish.

7) RyOOOoo, the Genius of Love himself. He had been wanting to sell this one, the character’s gimmick was so obvious, but now staring at the gap between his ribs opening with his wings…

Was that all? There was one more black shirt that didn’t seem to have anything on it - had he been deluded enough at some point to think he was going to design and print something himself? Oh nope, it had the hidden logo gimmick of the front charity from Magical Girl Intelligence Agency printed in same colour on the back.

The Nyorube and RyOOOoo ones looked almost like regular streetwear - something someone who didn’t even know the characters would wear, just because they looked cool. Under normal circumstances, if he thought about them too long that way, the Slaver would start itching for a trade. He could suddenly imagine himself, wearing one of them with the suit jacket over it, the suit pants and… shit, did he even have a belt? The last one he could remember was buried on his floor somewhere, that would take him an hour to find and could cost him the whole encounter if he waited till the last minute and froze too long looking for it, which became parabolically more likely the more he thought about it… wait, there was that webbed nylon one slung over the back of the broken chair. How did he have this many different styles of real clothing that fit together? Enough for a whole outfit that, again, he was now imagining - what the hell was that face he was imagining on himself. Shoujo sparkles and all. Cringe.

He felt dizzy. Like the first time he’d gone to take a shower on his meds.

Should be do that now? While he remembered? With three hours to go?

(While he remembered being in this space at an adult’s height?)

(Or at least a teenager’s?)

(How much emptiness was in the air? How much movable room?)

(He looked down at the tiny kingdom and suddenly realized why he hadn’t dared to clean - he truly loved, wanted to preserve, those caves and mountains.)

He took one step and something pierced the ball his foot. Pierced the actual skin, the circle of numb heat spreading. All the filth and noise and stench and clutter of his kingdom rushed back up from it, collapsing his spine into its usual hunch. The cockroach had probably shit plague germs everywhere that he’d transfer to the normie’s virgin-soil immune system and she’d die like Lost Lenore. (When was the last time he had fapped to Lost Lenore?) He could have solved that himself but it was inside him now, he’d be infectious just by breathing on her or shaking hands (l-lewd!!!)

His world wanted him back. It had pinioned him.

He slowly, slowly sank down to see what he had stepped on, the light receding into the ceiling like a sun behind fog. How much it had punctured. Would he need a bandage or just let it gutter out like when he tore skin on his dick.

The pointed grey lobster claw on the end of a severed arm from a construction toy minifigure he couldn’t remember playing with since he was a kid, still attached to half a shoulderbar, pointed triumphantly a centimetre into the air, stained with bug-brown blood.

Where had that come from? He had brought a few when he had moved in, hadn’t he? Smuggled in the tupperware container… but he didn’t know where that was. Sedimented with crumbs somewhere.

What had the one with these claws been?

What was the one he had lost?

That had been it, hadn’t it. At the funiculars.

He had dropped it over the edge of the window.

This one exactly?

Why not?

Why not believe it?

Hell, why not believe it had physically returned to him through space? Random acts of magic were recorded as signs. They were increasingly difficult to prove, or modern science was explaining more and more of them, but there was a narrow remainder of confirmed cases - and who knew how many, /ma/ speculated, that weren’t reported publicly to suppress mass speculation. That would be a good sign, wouldn’t it? The unreturnable returning, everything that had gone wrong since then reversing? But why had it pierced him? (The hole was barely even invisible, a light trace of red grain in one of the lines of his foot.) And why was it broken? (Had he bought a replacement and broken it in some fugue state? How many?) Why did it look so cruel?

He kneeled on his mattress. The familiar softness embraced his knees, and he rolled over automatically onto his bare shoulder, his bare ribs. His shirt had been off since he woke up, before the sun, when the dark was rubbing its eyes until it could see just a bit of red. Since he had started thinking in the abstract about this question.

It had taken him almost till noon to get up like this. How long would a shower take?

He normally calculated in decelerations, not accelerations.

He didn’t have the outdoor accretions an actual VRA (Vagrant Refusing Assistance, or as users on /nm/ - Nomadism jokingly called each other, "vrah") would have, but smelled like cum and shit at least as much as the more theoretically cozy, pheromonal kinds of body odour. Then again once he smelled himself he wouldn’t be able to stop smelling it for a week no matter what he did, and be just as clueless what anyone else could notice.

Talking to a woman smelling like cum, though, that could count as sexual assault, didn’t it? That was a whole different order of seriousness from anything he had worried about up to this point. All you infinities, roll over, this is Real - real infinite stakes, the kind the minifigure didn’t have but something had to. (Something his dad lost.)

Doesn’t that make it an unacceptable risk to go out even if you shower? There’s the trap you’ve been looking for. You don’t know if that’ll even work.

Ha ha, and then she won’t be able to get married and you can add her to your harem.

Get up and take a shower so you don’t get eaten by the Slaver automatically, even if he does force you to go out, was how they cancelled out-

- force you out? Huh, are you the slave now?

and he found himself arguing with himself as his feet moved. No, don’t you see it right there, you’re going to lose everything - no, it’s the everything you never lost, the most obvious possible reminder of how retarded you’ve been since you were six years old - wouldn’t the smart thing be to just reschedule and get an omen interpretation? but then you’d have to go to an Ecclesia - Inertia was carrying him in the wrong direction. He stood and swayed in the bathroom door, eyes focusing and unfocusing on the grey fuzz of hair and lint coating every white surface, the white stains accumulated on the transparent ones like barnacles. Or the obvious thing it could be reminding you of - what will you do if you cry? What will you do if you break down in some other more plausible, less comprehensible way? Will you stop or keep going forever - the piece is lodged in your mind, the question is

Under the water, which alternated between feeling too hot and too cold and both at the same time as he adjusted the knob by centimetres, he settled half-consciously into the image of getting ready, cleaned and dressed, looking at himself in the mirror like a person, then relaxing back onto his mattress, crisp cool cloth against his skin like schoolday morning air, and deciding he didn’t need to go out anyway. Too much calculation, too much interpretation before he even got out the door. But he would feel like he could, some other day, when it didn’t matter as much.

You really do need me to force you, huh. You realize you are fantasizing about losing something you’ll never get back, on purpose?

What do you mean, we could literally set up the same exact thing another day. Or another day. Or another day. Or another. His father’s already-dead voice and smile.

"Even if it was, I’ll never get this week back. There’s a week less I can have with it in my life, forever. So it’s forever either way."

The shower lasted forty-five minutes, rubbing the same spots again and again until little squares of skin stopped coming off on the cloth. Slicking his hair back in the shower mirror, the voice came back: you’d be a pretty cute slave if you shaved.

He picked up the razor long enough to carve an arbitrary parallelogram in his cheek fur before throwing it at the mirror in disgust.

Now there was a second part to the memory:

"Remember what he said when you lost the minibuilder man?" his mom would repeat almost almost as soon as he started crying. She’d barely give him thirty seconds - "you can keep going, but you don’t have to." The have to drawn out longer and sharper each time.

It started after Dad died, as a way of reminding him how he had stopped before. How Dad had… well, he had taken his own advice, hadn’t he? He had stopped dead. They didn’t really acknowledge that yet. He wasn’t even told it was suicide at first, although there was no memorable point of discovery either, just a slow perspective shift as disavowed details piled up. At that point she wouldn’t even try to repeat the full thing, just mumble "minibuilder man… minibuilder man…" and he knew what she meant. It didn’t even seem so absurd to analogize them, since he had already made the minibuilder man infinite - maybe a sort of omen of what was coming. (Or even a cause - spontaneous magic - if he thought about it the wrong way.)

He’d still go on (crying, screaming, pounding walls until the balls of his hands were bruised) for two, three hours. (Mom would hold him for almost all of them.) Stop for fifteen. By the end of the week, the times had reversed. (Mom would sit and stare out the window, completely silent, no matter what he said to her, unless he started again, or did something he wasn’t supposed to. Could she stop doing that? Not doing a thing wasn’t the same as doing thing, maybe not doing a thing you couldn’t stop. Then would he stop being able to cry if he stopped for too long? He couldn’t ask her.)

By the end of the month, he was starting to lose it again over other things. Smaller things. And Mom would snap: "You could even stop for your father, but you can’t stop for another minibuilder man?" Which was technically true, if he did the math, which had been the problem in the first place - one week, at most, albeit multiplied by forever, or half an hour or however long some household inconvenience would take, went into his father’s thirty-nine years 2028 times. (He started falling behind in math with the other kids after this.)

And so it took on another meaning - anything too small, anything smaller than his father’s life, all of which was now flattened into the same stratum. Like that time his third grade class reps tricked him into carrying two bags of dogshit across the yard at lunch recess.

He couldn’t necessarily stop crying or spazzing at all these things - but the distinction between can and have to had long since been lost - or if he brought it up, Mom didn’t take it as an important part of what Dad had said, and if what she took as important wasn’t important, then there was no reason to rule out having caused his father’s death by dropping the minifigure. Nor could he necessarily keep at it about his Dad when he thought about it as much - 2028 times 15 minutes was 30,420, he calculated in the margins of his math homework, 507 hours, or 21 days. The numbers were too unwieldy to make time the only unit of significance - maybe that was what his father had discovered, what he had meant by cashing all his time out as eternity. Only dead was it all the same anyway. He wasn’t sure how to do it, so he started acting out things he saw in image searches, with no inkling how they worked. But Mom saw him, and came to him, and clung to him, and eventually they figured out their little rituals.

One time he saw her meet their social monitor at a cafe (a level of intimacy he was never offered, whether or not he could have reciprocated, as an adult, just dry 15-minute videoconferences) and with a movement almost too gratuitous to be accident, knock the monitor’s cup of gelato off the table. She spent the next twenty minutes bawling, apologizing, berating herself, while he stood paralyzed, his initial attempt at returning their private mnemonic met with a hissed "Not you too" - and walked away, wiping her eyes, with her grief subsidies restored for another three years over their first extension.

The alumni district was on what was known as ‘The Levelled Peak’ - a plateau that stuck out of the side of the mountain just a bit higher than the university, but separated from the apartments where Braz was saying by a split in the shelf. She had to walk to the other side of the Mysteries Department, then up a winding stairway shaded by hemlock and cypress trees, once carefully spaced but long since overgrown, to emerge in a deserted park with rectangular koi ponds on either side, backing onto its rain-grey villas, made from an ancient kind of clay-rich concrete and coated in thinning plaster. Romarosa had been a city so long before magical transit it had many neighbourhoods and features that were easiest to reach by walking, and maybe that was why it was one of the most run-down neighbourhoods in the city, or maybe the absent-minded ex-academics weren’t good at or interested in keeping it up, or maybe (it certainly looked like) less of them felt any sort of ritualistic obligation to live there rather than somewhere with new buildings, midair patios, techno clubs, anime posters. Even Braz had never thought to visit here before - the department head had made all kinds of jokes to warn her, and provided the address to which they were still mailing Selbstember quarterly newsletters, although no one knew if she was picking them up.

She had gone to the address to find all the newsletters - an impressive amount, as if someone had put actual effort into fitting them all in there - crammed in a crooked mailbox. No response when she rang the doorbell, no lights on. It was one of the single top units of a three-layer pyramid terrace, so it had both neighbours below and on a level with it at a distance. The unit along the walkway to leading up the terrace and the one facing the door would be the most important to determining if it was inhabited at all. There was at least one sign of this - the rooftop garden surrounding it on all sides, more than most of the lower units had to themselves, was well-kept.

It was the most fully in her surroundings Braz had felt since coming to the city, although it didn’t exactly feel like Romarosa - more like some crumbling town out of a romystery novel, or even some places she’d seen in Elthazan, castle towns now inhabited solely by hereditary retainers and tourists. There were only a few roads through here even big enough for a bus to go through, and she hadn’t come across any of them yet, although there were little parks or courtyards about the same width. A sprinkler sprayed circles over a balcony garden of soggy parchment-white camellias unattended; another was abandoned to a frozen frolic of scrap iron sculptures, leaping like faeries in a more traditional frieze. A poster for an avant-garde dance troupe she might have seen once on a circus-boat in Crach-Houarnez faded and wrinkled in front of closed blinds in a window, a door was half-plastered with bumper stickers with cracked philosophical slogans like a faculty office. She wondered how it would look under a richer, clearer sky, the kind of sea-green sky sinking upwards into its own depths she had unwittingly imagined all the way here. But the thinnest possible layer of stratospheric white cloud was stretched over the sun and blue.

The facing unit had told her they hadn’t seen the inhabitant go in or out for a few weeks, but that they often saw her in a nearby park. So after performing a cursus to scan for dead or living presence within the house - neither - Braz went to the park and attached a 360-degree glass eye to the underside of a table in the gazebo - an ancient C’harn variant, not the kind that people knew from commercial or even professional cameras, although there was a better chance of some academic recognizing it here than anywhere else. Its age meant it had to be Sustained manually, which she had whittled down to a tic of playing with the hair by her ear. While she did it was projected on whatever else she looked at like an afterimage on her retinas. Then she visited the park at carefully staggered times, not enough that anyone would start asking who she was, but enough to approach everyone she noticed in her now-constant visual background as regulars to ask if they still saw Selbstember and if not when they had noticed her not coming. If they asked - most didn’t, just looked away sadly - she claimed to be an academic acquaintance visiting from the North who had met her at a conference. (She had already memorized the faces of the department for three decades back, in case she saw one of them.)

The absolute last time anyone had seen her, she had been talking to a clown.

There was a corner in the park where buskers set up - accordion, violin, shamisen, pan pipes, hurdy gurdy; various kinds of animal familiars and magically animated dolls; rune-motifs repeated between stanzas of historically reconstructed bardic toasts from the time of the Heroes; haiku and shamisen; mimes performing daring escapes from dungeons of invisible traps; improvised magic. She didn’t see any clowns like she had encountered on her first day; she did, however, start noticing odd repetitions. The same face performing implausibly different talents, snippets of melody copied across genres from different periods, regions. Many performers here were clearly alumni of the performing arts programs with a mastery of their craft unusual even in Romarosa; others strung technically perfect but flat reproductions together haphazardly in ways you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t paying attention the whole way through. This was exactly why intelligence work - even anti-Dark intelligence - still demanded a level of culture. Not only a matter of whether people were who they claimed to be - but whether they were human at all.

After obtaining a copy of the sign-up sheet through municipal backchannels, she determined that a number of the performers with the most incongruities (they seemed to swap out each other’s clothes and occasionally, less obvious features) were registered with a single troupe, the Sangriot Moon-Wine Historical Fusion Players. Their arts registry documents (sparse, with a number of names too generic to be triangulated with other documents and no clearly identified roles) also mentioned clowning - and an address. Their ‘rehearsal space’ was an old stable overlooking the alumni district, discreetly hidden by dense stands of cedar and curling chain-link fence.

She alerted the local police of her suspicions, and stationed them in a dragnet as close as they could get without being seen from the location, prepared to cut off all exits, including a helicopter. Shapeshifters could disperse quickly if they suspected they had been discovered, and often had secret tunnels between their lairs, and some had forms that could swim through sewers. The safest way to bait them out was to approach them as a defenseless civilian, the kind they would as happily eat on the spot.

The broad gravel path, diverging off one of the district’s outermost ring road, up which climbing mules had once been led was now blocked off by a thin plastic construction barrier. She poked at its edges, pushed one of the rusted metal posts over, angled her camera up the hill. Her cover was an amateur photographer; she wore a white T-shirt, patterned yoga tights, a traditional silk scarf with cranes and spider lilies, and a big floppy cloth hat that made it a bit less likely for anyone to recognize her from the park. The camera was a fashionable vintage model she’d bought in town; she’d hollowed it out and put her own magical eye inside. If she was being watched, of course, the tic would be too obvious so she was using it in Snapshot Mode, which had a different Sustain, snapping her fingers against a silver ring in her pocket to obtain a natural, complete 360-degree vantage point at most once a minute.

As she passed under the trees she saw camouflaged shapes in the branches - cocoons. She could still look down behind her and see the ring road, the terraces of rooftops.

Poking into the house, however, was too dark to use the eye - and she needed her hands, mind, paremeters free for improvised magic - she pulled out a flashlight and shone it around inside.

The barriers between stalls lay splintered on the floor. Traces of frescoes on the walls had so decayed that it looked as if their subjects had been dismembered - here, a bird’s head - there, a long-nailed human hand in a show-magician’s mudra - there, the head of a young girl with pearls in her tresses, her eyes faded or even scraped away. In many places the stucco had simply worn through to a rotten yellow, in other places something black had crept over it from its wooden framing, something that she recognized instantly from the squelch as she stepped on it - Black Mushrooms.

Braz stepped back. Pulled her sampling equipment out of the large leather purse she was carrying to test their maturity. And felt something, a hardening in the air behind her. A shadow moving across the edge of her cheap hiking boot. She held her bag open, drawing out a thin chain necklace with a translucent plastic spiral flame at the end, spinning it around her finger as she turned around.

From the whirling end of the pendant jetted a tornado of fire towards the three, four, five clowns framed in the light of the door - identical to the one she had seen on the street corner.

The nearest to her leapt in the air and its surface split apart into the coloured tips of hundreds of fronds, waving from a black stick-figure frame, like the shaft and barbs of feathers. Unfolding and rearranging itself in midair, its arms and several segments of its back extended into a straight spear angling down at her as she dashed forward through the door, into the midst the others. It stuck in the floor like an arrowhead and immediately re-extended two long arms of three or four segments to encircle her. Meanwhile two of the others ran toward her in human form, with only their arms untransformed, ending in chitinous black hooks.

Braz pulled a strip of paper covered in symbols that looked like scribbles out of her purse, and ducking to the right let one of the hooks to her left tear it in two - projecting a shockwave out behind it that tore the one behind her in the same jagged line as the paper. Black oil spouted from its hollow, hydraulic skeleton as she dashed forward and to the right, pulling a stiletto from the thigh pocket of her yoga pants and thrusting at the other’s face, which collapsed around the blade, gripping and sucking it in. She let go, ripping a ring from her ear - the stiletto pulled itself out of its own accord, bubbling mercury spurting from where it had entered, the fronds unfolding and thrashing around to shake off the toxin. It returned to her hand and she parried its hooks while guarding her back with the fire-whirlwind, turning around to point it at the others closing in from the trees as she maneuvered her weakened opponent toward the door. She started speaking under her breath behind closed lips, and kicked the shapeshifter back into the door long enough to trace exactly half its size with her blade-point. An invisible guillotine blade fell across it.

The Black Mushroom caps began to bubble around the top half of its corpse. Crap.

But another was already coming down on her, in its true form, from the eaves of the roof. She used the fire-tornado to jet herself backwards - and two behind her unfurled their bodies, fronds hardening to needle points, across her path to clothesline her. She pointed it down to carry herself over them, landing on the dry needles of the yard. Scanning the trees above her for any remaining ambush as segmented spears zigzagged back at her.

Despite what you saw in anime and Miwa movies, one of the first things anyone learned in combat training was that it was mathematically difficult for even the most skilled fighter to take on multiple opponents at once. The secret Ecclesiastic fighting arts had statistical practices to counter this disadvantage directly; but their flexibility made it an order of magnitude worse with shapeshifters. Holding back this many shapeshifters at once with ordinary combat magic would have been impossible for Silmenon himself. What she needed - and had planned before she came here - was an area effect. She set off running.

Skip twice on the ball of the right foot, land on the left heel and tuck it behind her knee. The cursus looked like a children’s game but required a deceptive level of athleticism, especially at this speed, and if she lost her footing or simply had to defend herself the spell would be cancelled. One shapeshifter was already throwing itself at her side - midair morphing into a mountain lion - another leaping into the trees to ambush her from above - another dashing to intercept her path (she estimated it would meet her about where she would have to corner and tap the ground).

The mountain lion whiffed by her shoulder as she dropped momentarily to one knee and tapped the corner of her field. Of course if she couldn’t fight them off she couldn’t complete a cursus either, but she was using another spell to buy time: an afterimage effect syncing all perceptions of her to the slightly delayed second hand of the watch she wore on a thin leather band. (The spell didn’t allow her to control perceptions completely by slowing down or speeding up the watch, that would have been too broad to Sustain; it was defined to this exact delay of 0.75 seconds, which she now knew by heart how to knock her watch in or out of.)

Shapeshifters weren’t as intelligent as the creatures they imitated, although they were smarter than a lot of people assumed from their limited capacity for autonomous planning and coordination, the tendency of their conversation to break down into stochastic error if you pinned them down longer than they meant you to - they were basically raw pattern recognition engines, which was especially useful in a fight. Guessing the shape of the cursus, after its first corner, would be the same. Of course the option of least resistance was just to fall directly in front of her immediate path, like the one in the trees did, transformed into a bear big enough that its fronds had to be extended at full length. Vulnerable, not as strong as it looked, trying to overextend its mass. Between hops she stretched out the stiletto again, defining its blade along the line of her right foot in the cursus as she pivoted centimetres out of its way to her left.

That would make them a bit more cautious - although shapeshifters were at least as dangerous when they were cautious. One she had been half-watching seemed to have disappeared.

Something moved in the corner of her eye, in the sumac bushes - a skunk. It was outside the range of her cursus, and she already hadn’t seen it before. She whipped a mini-dagger at it -

- its tail reared up, not an ordinary skunk’s tail but a cobra’s markings - she spun the whirling necklace around just in time for the sprayed venom to sizzle into a chemically neutralized mist. Her stiletto guarded her other side as an extended limb zigzagged towards her, jabbing at several places to compensate for the predictable miss on the first strike. Only one got close enough that she had to delicately draw it in a circle with the stiletto, but that was just enough for them to estimate the delay.

One more tap on the next corner - the one that had attacked (probably) was rolling toward her at top speed, its hardened fronds sticking out in equal directions like an urchin’s spikes. She jumped onto the roof just before it reached her - and it rolled behind her up the rock-face, higher and farther as she used the fire-jet to hold it at bay. Above it, the one that had already gotten out of her range was climbing. Red clay shingles cracked and shifted under her feet as two limbs arced out from it over her. At least the requirements of the ritual didn’t constrain what the rest of her body could do, or the exact distance between her steps, which she adjusted one at a time to dodge stabs from both above and below her, reaching over the ledge of the roof from the door.

She blew a bubble of gum and expanded an invisible shimmering sphere in the air to her side not facing the cliff, on which floated a number of the talismans, though only one was struck, sending a line of slicing air far enough to leave a high branch hanging by its bark.

Launching herself off the roof, she found herself falling down on the two that had been outpacing her from above. Maybe she was going to end up fighting them all at once anyway - but who knew how many were in there?

Braz pulled out her camera, popping out the 360-degree glass. Keeping her eye outside the camera closed, she pointed it at them, its analog viewfinder becoming her single wavery porthole on the world from a travelling bathysphere of void. As it snapped, they vanished.

She kept her eyes in this position as she tapped the ground - then dropped the camera just in time to dodge another jab from the doorframe - and bolt along the last leg of the cursus, as the camera shook itself apart and the two captured shapeshifters burst from its shattered lens, whirling their limbs and fronds in a spasm of freedom.

Just these last few metres back to where she started - an awkward parallelogram rather than the pentagon she had intended but it would have to do, hopefully not too many had left its range yet - but outrunning two shapeshifters while skipping like a child, even for someone who had this one down as much as Braz, with a rocket jet at her back…

Before they could falsify her last-ditch calculations, riot grenades filled with repellent fumes hit the two pursuers head on. The tactical police unit she had alerted by sub-spell the moment she had pulled out her stiletto were already taking formation in the street below.

The final vertex of the cursus connected, and everything within the shape she had circled up to a dozen metres in the air refracted through a blue fire-mist. The shapeshifters began to curl and fold up on themselves, their fronds hardening and wrapping around each other into hard black millipede ridges. But even as they clustered for protection the fronds began to melt together, welling up in oil-slick-coloured blisters, like candy on a stovetop. While within the doorframe, within an egg-shape of fuzzy, sickly-green light that effaced both background and foreground, as if it had been spliced in from a separate image, a window into another universe, the same process was unfolding in the opposite direction: from protoplasm to form. The egg, however, seemed unable to move, its edges guttering against Braz’s enveloping spell. The broad, ballooning, droopy-edged witch hat of Romarosa’s Black Mushroom Initiate dripped black slime over her obscured eyes. "Uefuefuefue, Dark Lord consume it, Rraihha Braz! What are you doing over here, so far away from your boooyfrieeend?"

Marzanna was there at the door to meet him, wearing a thin mint green spring parka with the hood up and a plum blossom facemask. Just from having seen her once in person, in shapeless hoodies and blurry undershirts on screen, and of course staked out her socials, he could tell the outfit was very much her style but not recognizable enough that anyone watching from a window or a talisman would recognize her. (Would anyone recognize him looking like a person?) He could have said but he was saving his energies for a conversation that would multiply the risk of kindness exponentially. His ‘thanks’ came out like a kind of absurd whistling snort.

She had decided at the last minute it wouldn’t be safe to go to the same coffeeshop where Scarecrows such as herself might recognize them, but also didn’t want to make Luskonneg take the risk of public transit - even accompanied - so she had picked out a place just a few blocks down the street.

It still wasn’t that far, he had argued - as a Scarecrow, we don’t stake out entire neighbourhoods, she reassured him. (As a Scarecrow - he had tried to make an account once, when he was starting to build his confidence on Feed, getting the hang of criticizing other losers for things only losers cared about. He couldn’t, however, do what Scarecrows did, which was criticize other losers for things normies cared about. He knew the stereotype that Scarecrows were as bad as their subjects, but he couldn’t figure out how they split themselves. He preferred to live in a straightforward world of inverted values.)

"Sorrysorrysorry I still haven’t looked this place up -" When Luskonneg finally spoke it was a confession, the kind of thing that forced its way up his windpipe. He had a kind of phobia of Panoptic Maps that he wrote off as not liking the interface.

"It’s a cafe/bar with a Silmenon theme, I think you’ll like it. It has semi-private booths, so I can be nearby without you feeling like I’m watching you the whole time. Try the strawberry rice wine."

"…do I smell?"

"Not in a way anyone would assume was coming from you."

‘Silmenon theme’ meant golden plaster roses around the doorframe and paper curtains and watercolour cherry blossoms all over the walls. It was called Garden Room but didn’t have an actual Garden Room. There were no windows except a stained glass arch in the door; pink light filtering through elegant conical fixtures across the tapestries on the walls and curtains of the booths gave it a strange attitude of evening at 3:00 in the afternoon. Was it supposed to be a real date? Was the noose of the plot this tight already? But at the same time, the atmosphere was light. At the back of the bar two old men pointed and gestured at things in a nature magazine. Closer to the door sat a woman he had not remembered as that straight up beautiful.

She was wearing a diaphanous shawl over a slightly open coat, slim white leather with sherpa collar, thin bouncy hair slicked back under a fine-toothed purple plastic band tilted more than halfway back over her skull and clustering around her shoulders, another lacey layer of interference. Her nose stood out thin and angular like some urbane josei character’s, a Korriel Fuilloska perhaps. (She looked like the kind of person who might read Korriel Fuilloska, but maybe he was conflating her characters and her readers.)

Huh, he didn’t spend that much time fixating on pores or hairs or the image of it breaking or anything if he pictured it outlined in ink…

But those eyes. Glittering. Slimy. Hints of yellow and pink in the sclera (bruised fruit), uncountable blues and greens and greys sliding under each other beneath fragile dragonfly-wings of lampshine…

"Hi, I, um… OK how did Marzanna explain to you why she wanted us to meet? I’m not sure I totally got it myself." She giggled. He wasn’t looking any more. His eyes were swimming somewhere up around the edge of the lights, clumping in the corner like dust, visual erosion, grey noise, he couldn’t say for sure he was seeing anything. "But, I’m Gallvren Den’kerrig. And you’re… Luskonneg *********?"

All available mental power diverted to keeping his mouth making the shapes it needed to and the rest of his body inert - once a teacher seeing him in this condition called on to answer had assumed he was talking in his sleep - he began his prewritten speech:

"Thank you more than I can express for taking the risk and trouble and inevitable disappointment of meeting me to allow me to apologize for humiliating you in a number of ways I may or may not further humiliate you by enumerating. Although I can do that if you consider it necessary for my apology to have any meaning. Particularly getting you on Punkin Patch, w-which you may not even know what that is, but I do feel responsible to inform you, is a, is a site for and I am not saying you are but I as you can probably already tell qualify as what they call a lolcow-"

"…is this a prank? Are we on camera?"

His eyes were closed now, the backs of their lids were magma, his sweat was magma, the world was subsiding into the fire at its core. He wasn’t sure if he was talking any more or not. Everything was sliding down in streaks of red neon except the inside of his mouth, which was a dry cave in which a miserable shrivelled part of himself could still feel, somehow, only hunger - I wanted to at least get something to eat or drink here, I’m gonna have to go back and cry or hit myself and I’m almost out of chips -

"No, no, sorry, you seem to have a different idea of what you’re here for than I did!"

Slowly, he began to perceive Marzanna’s finger, two fingers, pressing down on a point just above his collarbone. No bandwidth left to pick out anything awkward or pleasant or unpleasant in the feeling - the point of contact was cool, the heat draining away into it. Could this be… rhi stabilization? He hadn’t expected that to work on him since he had been turned down for a clinic that offered it three years ago. Work? You want to go back to that reality? Rhi stabilization isn’t going to put words in your mouth, or rewrite time to make them adequate. She’s doing this to torture you. At that thought - that certainty - he wanted to bolt or lash out, now that his world was stable enough to move in. But the pressure point - or another one she was poking in the small of his back - prevented him from moving at the same time.

"…I’ve never met you before. Marzanna’s mentioned that she wanted us to chat for some kind of piece, but… do you think I’m someone else?"

…huh?

She doesn’t even remember?

Well, come to think of it, why would she? He tried to remember all the things he had offered to enumerate but not dared even to write and cross out, and then remembered that it wasn’t just that he hadn’t dared, he couldn’t remember himself exactly what had happened in that shop, besides that he’d stood in line too long dissociating - had there even been anything else? He had said something embarrassing, right?

What would a normie even think that meant? Magic bleed, sleepwalking in the middle of the day?

"Sorry for the ruse" - the singsong way she dragged out the word made it obvious she knew and was referencing the meme from five years ago (Goddess, he could expose that and humiliate her probably) - "but I had to make sure you experienced that in real time so you couldn’t rationalize it before the fact. See, people don’t think about your embarrassing moments anywhere near as much as you think they do!"

…could that really be true? Not just true in some general, statistical sense that didn’t apply to him, but true in a way that would demonstrate itself so deliberately? That was the kind of twist he would write a 500-word flame about on a review aggregator, but also cry about silently and pleasurably, like a hot spring welling from his eyelids, if he got high enough to fully suspend his disbelief.

The kind of cliff-edge hope he hadn’t felt since Gwaëlle.

She reminded him of Gwaëlle a bit - her name, her elegance, her colour scheme.

That was enough to set him too on edge for the tears to release even though they were halfway up - aching behind his eyes, imperceptible except as a twitch.

How is she looking at you without twitching. Wait, she did just close her eyes.

With laughter. Like a ball stuttering across the ground. "Ahahaha, what even happened. Oh well, I won’t make you talk about it, this already looks like it must have been a nightmare for you. Did she tell you she was like, a weird conceptual journalist at Yn Dahh’t? They have this kinda sense of humour." She redirected her angle of inquiry to Marzanna - "Or would you call it poetics?"

Marzanna smirked over his shoulder as her fingers let up slowly - wait, don’t go! "Humour is an important part of poetics, isn’t it? OK, that’s your first conversation topic, go!" She slapped something on the bar next to them - a tiny, shiny blue plastic recorder. "I’ll let this roll, but I’ll leave it to both of you to decide whether it’s worth keeping. That way it’s not like I’m listening - I’ll even let you edit it." With that she swaggered off towards the baradomoe and treflammes on the paper curtains.

"Can you edit on this thing?" Gallvren picked it up and turned it over absentmindedly. Luskonneg felt the scraping dryness of the roof of his mouth again. The certainty he wouldn’t get another respite like this - "Can I… get a menu?"

Gallvren hastily imitated him, and then they exchanged logistical technicalities until she had ordered and Luskonneg said "don’t wait on me I- I got really hung up on the menu last time, too, the time I… didn’t meet you, I guess. Sorry I don’t mean to suggest you have amnesia or something. Unless you do? Do you?"

"No I’m pretty sure I just forgot… something?"

"Right but like, if it was a date or like something plot important, that would be amnesia. Which would itself be more uhh - plot important- than normally happens in real life. It wasn’t that - it was" and he trailed off into inaudibility, no matter how much he tried to raise his voice. The volume bar wasn’t working.

"Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. Do you write? Is that why she wants us to talk about… poetics?"

A good way of putting it. Amazing how fast talking came back. Like riding a bike - except he had never managed that in the first place. (How had he managed talking in the first place - he had so many memory-scraps of mom, even dad, making fun of him for saying things wrong.) She was overlooking a lot of silence, which she probably just chalked up to the same kind of human awkwardness and confusion as hers - but once he accepted that talking was just a thing he was doing, that the sin of opening his mouth had already been committed, he could just type up words in his head and feed them through. There were plenty of mistakes he could make in text too - but they were at least at the sentence level.

"No I… post… if that counts. Wait, what did she tell you we were doing again?"

"Talking about… fandom. What’s that character on your shirt from?"

He looked down, having forgotten which one he’d picked already. It was the RyOOOoo. Why the hell not Nyorube?? He must have been thirty steps down some insane series of internal arguments where he forgot that Nyorube Cyalume was a cool girl in a neon flightsuit on a bike, and RYOOOoo was a naked androgyne with his chest split open revealing the coiling caduceus between hooked mechanical ribs. (The glowing double helix around his metal spine was cool.)

"Shadow Rangers Kliphot. The direct followup to Hell Harrowing - not like a sequel, but, thematically and chronologically. The next thing he did. Uhhh. Najda. Shunny Najda did - have you heard of…"

"Oh, yeah, Hell Harrowing, I watched about half of it when I was 19 but still need to finish."

"If you remember that RYOOOoo - the character on the shirt - is kinda like a male counterpart to…" he trailed off, forming the name with his mouth before saying it, denying her thrice but at least getting it on a fourth. "Smilia Miyoenra. But like chaste. Relatively. He’s the Genius of Love in a religious sense, but when he makes friends his chest opens and this happens…"

She smiled tautly and looked away at the small plate of spicy cold noodles and magnolia tea the bartender was sliding over to her. Right, he was still hungry. Even hungrier now. "Can I get uhhh - maki crepe and the strawberry sake slush?" He picked the first words he saw randomly looking down at the menu.

"So would you say you’re a fan of Najda’s work in general?"

"That word doesn’t even mean anything here. I’m the closest thing to a real fan you’ll find outside Silmenon." His Feed self slipped out too fast to stop (but really, what else was he going to do once she started him talking about Najda? To "perform" a publicly acceptable, moderated version of his passion would make him the same kind of fake as the Elthazan fandom he was thinking of. Wasn’t fan supposed to mean fanatic?)

"That’s what I heard about you. Well, not about Najda specifically, but… Silmenon animation in general?" Her upward inflection made clear she was hedging any idea what was going on.

"Animation, manga, video games, visual novels, light novels, doujinshi…" Why not lean all the way into it. He stood up, counted on his fingers. "The whole so-called media mix, of which animation is the most plebeian, mass market level. You seemed interested in… literature? I could start there…"

Never mind, when he raised his voice he sounded like a goose. Gallvren put her head in her hands. "What were we supposed to be talking about again? Sorry, I’m really confused. How did Marzanna know you again?"

"Feed." They had discussed this cover story, and he was genuinely happy with it - fleshing out the fantasy that she had stumbled upon his niche NEETposting and decided that he was the perfect voice for her story about a lost generation until he could almost believe it. The word Feed, of course, triggered another solar plexus strike of awareness of the still untouched maki crepe he swept off his plate and crammed into his mouth, rice dropping to the floor. (The associations chaining naturally like a 23chan thread - inertia flowing the wrong way again?) "That’s where I post. Not just what I’m doing, right now." She laughed. A woman’s, no, a normie’s laughter (though he had never heard a guy’s with quite the same treacherous ambiguity) - the thinnest ice in the world. The obvious interpretation was that she was laughing at him, because he was being ridiculous. (Not like the way he was trying to be ridiculous, which was in fact modelled on how Astig would get going when he got fired up, how it transitioned over the course of the series from comic relief bloviation about panty colours and vending machine toys to earnest, hot-blooded speeches about protecting his friends, which she might recognize for the put-on it was if she had watched half the show.) But then why would it sound like that, so bright, so pleasant? (Boys at least brayed.) Wasn’t that one of the things that was supposed to suggest they liked you - in slice of life shows, at least, they were always giggling like that at each other? (Mom said those were unrealistic - but they did the same in her sitcoms, at least at the very end of an episode.) "Oh right, she said… humour and poetics." Had he reminded her? By making her laugh? And what could that mean? He distracted himself from the static starting to seize hold of his body again with more tearing bites…

"Poetics." The term as used in Ecclesiastic or academic discourse encompassed all art in general - the ‘media mix’ he had referred to. Even posting, technically. "You said… you write."

"Oh. Well. Yes. I don’t think even Marzanna knows this exactly, although she knows I’m interested in it." Gallvren gulped, and Luskonneg’s heart almost stopped. "Mostly… Heroes’ Love."

"Oh… like… Silmenon-Miwa?" She blushed and shoved a fork with more trailing ends than he’d seen yet into her mouth. "Or - sorry - like… Kamann… Elthazan."

"I mean there are lots of kinds, even within BL." She sounded suddenly hard and defensive. "I’ve read some really interesting Elthazan/Zorrh fics that have taught me things I wouldn’t have known about Druid spirituality otherwise, and I don’t like Kamann/Silmenon that much because it collapses too obviously onto tropes and ideas but… Goddess I haven’t even told Marzanna about all this. I mean I don’t know if she’s interested in any of it outside a theoretical sense, but I don’t know that about you either, just that you also like…" She eyed his shirt. "Embarrassing things."

She was so embarrassed! So was he, but for him that was simply a condition of existing in public. It was like she had stepped into his world bubble, instead of the other way around. When his voice came out again, it actually sounded 60, 70 percent of the way it did in his head. "I’ve never read much Heroes’ Love because it’s… uncomfortable to me… to think that way about real people." He had heard that said and never really believed it - if he believed it he would have to hammer a nail into the back of his hand for every classmate he had entertained a bad thought about in high school - but it wouldn’t hurt to shore up his advantage, before the tide inevitably turned against him again. (See, the second you get an advantage you use it for evil. Kill yourself.) "But I have read… BL… although it’s not my main thing… I’m not gay… although if a cute girl wanted to ship me with a guy friend I’d probably go along with it."

"Are your guy friends… other otaku?"

"No. I don’t really have any. What do you mean by otaku?"

"I think… that’s what my roommate wants us to figure out. She’s my roommate. Marzanna. By the way."

Roommate. Adrenaline stab he didn’t need right now. "Are you…" (more than) "…friends too?"

"Sort of?" Her voice peaked. "I trust her not to set me up with someone who will totally humiliate me, or I wouldn’t have done this."

The pressure was enough to crush his lungs. "I might humiliate myself. I might humiliate you, by humiliating myself." He had to say it three, four times to get it above the audibility threshold.

"I don’t think you did, and I don’t be humiliated by you doing… anything that’s not to me? Unless… you say you post. Don’t post about this." He nodded, screwing his eyes shut with gratitude. The kind of thing someone says before they kiss you. "You… neither."

>first round of the Public Morals Committee game is over

>Gwaëlle wants to back out

>the one who brought me here in the first place

>the one who pushed it on the rest of them

>I see where this is going and walk off without saying anything

>she follows me all the way back to my classroom door and grabs me by the wrist, starts pulling me back

>says she’s still gonna do it because as a member of the Public Morals Committee she is also meant to set an example by keeping her word

>drags me to a room I’ve never seen before

>introduces me to a bunch of girls I’ve never seen, says she’s going back to the Public Morals Committee to finish their conversation and clear up what she’s doing, but she’ll be back with them next time she has a chance and help me integrate properly

>it’s the Knitting Club

>I forget all their names in like thirty seconds

>they keep asking me if I remember and I can’t say for sure, so I have to go around doing a full memorization exercise like in class

>my face feels like it’s melting but they’re laughing by the end in a way that looks like they genuinely enjoy turning it into a mnemonic rhyme like in elementary school

>they don’t even have the full club together on auricular days because Gwaëlle’s not there; she’s a "part-time graduate", and even I can tell they partly resent her for going on to bigger things

>that day it’s just the core three who are always there: Clwtha, Lochllacha, Atràpy

>2/3 relatively cute; Clwtha is semi-gyaru and wears a lot of her own knitted accessories, Lochllacha wears long classic uniform, Atràpy is small and has a weird big head and is the one who looks at me the most

>after I’ve memorized their names we move on to icebreaker games

>too terrified to answer anything

>they just turn it into a 20 questions type thing where they just narrow down my answers to questions

>mfw it actually works and gives me time to come up with answers that aren’t too humiliating

>don’t pick up a needle or wool the whole time

>by the time I’m going to class it feels like my head has been in a blender and I just got stabbed with three epipens

>feelsgoodman

>next week I have permission from my psych so I can tell them he told me to join

>they haven’t even heard of me so that wasn’t necessary at all

>but it saved Gwaëlle a lot of awkwardness

>tfw she wrote a whole fake backstory for introducing me

>I’m like a friend of a childhood friend, which is the route I’d just started in my first real dating sim (Rainbow of Panties 3: Heart Photograph, look I was 15)

>gives me yarn & needles

>shows me how to start, immediately start missing every single loop

>hands aren’t even shaking or anything, just having to keep the exact right trajectory in the air seems impossible

>even though I can already write and play video games which use the exact same skill

>all three of them are laughing and taking turns trying to show me

>m-maybe one of them is going to put their hands on mine to guide them

>my hands start shaking the more I think about it

>but if I make it necessary I’m doing it on purpose to manipulate them (Mark’eg says this), so now I can’t let them

>finally Gwaëlle sees how upset I’m starting to get and tells them to leave me alone until I figure it out

>go to a closet at the back of the room and practice until I get something, a tangled nightmare worm

>they’re really nice and enthusiastic about it, take pictures and give me lots of tips and Domesday videos to look up to get it right the next time

>walking on fucking air the rest of the day (a lower-ranking member of the Public Morals Committee who doesn’t know the top three thinks I’m high on something, I tell him to ask Gwaëlle)

>still have trouble motivating myself to work on it in my free time

>watching more and more school club shows because it feels like practice for how to talk to them

>it actually kind of feels like that, the way they tease me

>Gwaëlle surprised by how well I take it

>but this takes away from my ability to practice, which makes me think I’m manipulating them again, and turns into a cycle

>this is, tbc, over several months in which I only speak one or two sentences in any one meeting, but spend virtually the entire week outside my schoolwork thinking about or analyzing them in some capacity

>can’t remember or be bothered to type up but there is incredibly detailed documentation I wrote for Dr. Mark’eg of every epicycle of this that I either shredded or left at my mom’s house

>eventually start inserting awkward jokes based on stuff people say in the slice of life shows into their conversations

>get slow, confused reactions at first but eventually they start to laugh, repeat stuff I said when they see me or work it into their own conversations

>they also ask me lots of questions

>half of them I literally cannot answer bc the real answers would be too humiliating or depressing

>start answering with stuff from shows I’m watching

>another reason SoL stuff is easy to get into at this point is that it reminds me of my mom’s sitcoms (remember: the primary criterion of reality for her)

>so it makes sense that I can just insert stuff from them into real life conversation

>maybe mom will even appreciate something I’m watching now

>ask if I can connect aux to TV one night when she’s flipping channels, show her Waxpaper Petals

>shits on every single line and joke - "no one would really say that", "they don’t even look like people"

>don’t mention talking like that IRL, but quieter at next meeting, and ask Dr. Mark’eg about it at next session

>says he’d normally suggest I test this hypothesis but I’m already testing it and the people in your club seem to think it’s normal already

>remind him I have no way of knowing they aren’t just pretending to like me (he knows this bc just assuming people liked me based on tiny imaginary signals and then alienating them is how things generally went in elementary school and it’s in my records from my first ever psychologist)

>objective proof as far as I’m concerned, get more confident, even start to get good at knitting

>start making things from shows I’m watching which are already pretty obscure at this point; the cubist flower face from WaxPeta, Chibi-Geryon from The Sparkling Bluebell Priestesses

>to this day I find myself wanting to believe they genuinely thought these were cute, like why wouldn’t you if you had no context on them. pics related

>of course I have to go and infodump everything about what they’re from, including things I think are funny that are obviously cringey now but Gwaëlle says nothing

>take photos with me and my projects, one gets hung up in the room (it’s Clwtha’s homeroom)

>they start yelling my name and high fiving me when they see me in the halls

>even their other friends who aren’t in the club start doing it, or showing up to club more often, asking me to make stuff more often

>get careless and start reaching back into stuff from my eroguro phase

>guys who never paid any attention to me otoh will find ways to fuck with me in class, call me Morals Committee’s Pet (everyone assumes the Public Morals Committee is just making this happen directly somehow)

>Gwaëlle meanwhile is getting more quiet, start to think she’s jealous

>feel bad that I’m stealing her spot at the club she introduced me to

>get so insanely full of myself I decide to invite her to something to make up for it

>obviously fantasizing a bit in romantic terms but it’s almost diffused by the harem atmosphere at this point

>since we live in Winter City the first thing I can think of for someone who’s interested in knitting is the C’harn Woolwork Museum

>just assume everyone else in the club has been already, I actually haven’t though

>wait for this big show to open called "Naïve Wools of the Early Modern City: A Reassessment" (no clue what that means but look a bunch of stuff up online)

>talk to her after class, clarify that it’s not a date just a thank you and I have a present (my concept art for "Spring Lambs of [school name]")

>awkwardly says she might go

>reset the date a couple times before she settles

>get there and see all three core members on the steps

>start berating me theatrically for not inviting me

>Gwaëlle seems horrified, no idea what’s happening

>demand to follow us around, correct me on wool facts whenever I start to spout off about something I read on the internet, making fun of other stuff I talk about, and also taking photos of us constantly

>instantly take the premise that this is all merited just by their jealousy at not being invited at face value, tough it out all the way through expecting to turn it around like a SoL/sitcom misunderstanding by revealing the concept art featuring all of them

>Atràpy rips it up in front of us

>announces that they put up with me bc it was funny but we’ve never been actual friends and this was fine until I started creeping on or trying to steal their oldest friend

>Gwaëlle objects that she doesn’t want them to do this, bringing me was her idea and they should have told her if I was upsetting her, breaks down crying but doesn’t talk to me after

>freak out so bad museum security has to keep me after hours for my mom

>Lochllacha gives photos to the Journalism Club, which spins a tabloid bullshit story about me, Gwaëlle and the Public Morals Committee

>after this most sessions with Mark’eg turn into elaborate abstract arguments about whether I can trust him (Goddess I can’t remember a word of those but sometimes I dream about them)

Luskonneg had finished his roll and tried out two different The alcohol was hitting with a kind of pain around his eye sockets that felt good, like a sparkling pain. "Well, ‘comic books’ were originally ‘funny books’, like that’s what it meant. And all the Silmenon poetics I’m talking about, which is as much a visual poetic as a narrative one, starts when people associated with ero-guro start thinking this doesn’t just have to be funny but can be sexy. And that links to beauty, but that already was its own thing in the fine arts and doesn’t… deform pictures in the same way. The pictures were originally deformed just to be funny, but then they’re also deformed to be sexy and both of those cancel out to be something that can be cute but also beautiful."

"Hmmm. But I like to think beauty can be anything. Beauty… theologically, follows at one pole from the Order of the Goddess, and at the other from the union of Goddess and Serpent, right? So there’s a sense in which it’s always present in things that are orderly, like pure math, and always present in combinations of Order and Chaos. It’s what allows us to perceive those vectors, of simplicity and complexity, Order manifest and unmanifest."

Was she really just going to quote 12th grade Poetics at him? She had seemed so much more interesting, or was it just because she was listening? "I… didn’t argue with that… did I?"

"No, I’m just thinking it through, because this kind of deformation… well, it’s not really towards either of these axes, is it? I’m not a math person, I don’t think a lot about the first one, my aesthetics are really far towards the second, when I think about things I want to write I think about skies I’ve seen and the marks on somebody’s face and… hmmm, I’m sounding like an Elthazan stereotype aren’t I. I mean, it’s why I write about Elthazan the person, maybe. Do you ever think about how they like, stayed so pretty (as they’re described in the chronicles) out here in the winter?"

Were you allowed to start and stop this much in your sentences? Was that how people talked? Or was she nervous about him - in a good or a bad way? If he was stopping and starting like this, every stop would be an agony, a chance of the sentence ending entirely - so when he ran a full sentence out "prerecorded" it sounded flat and too fast. "Didn’t they invent the sauna or something?"

"It had existed for centuries before them, that’s just something suburban parents tell kids because it’s a catchy explanation. But uhhh. The artist who did this shirt, did some famous Elthazan illustrations for a Heroes’ Festival Book of Hours."

"…huh." Her face, her voice, dropped into some more shadowed zone. "Can I… see them?"

"Do I have that folder on this phone." Luskonneg pulled his filing system up and dove with relief into the screen for not long enough. He slid the phone across the bar to Gallvren with an illustration of the hero stepping out of an ice pond with their silver-blue hair swirling around them and tartan thrown back over their shoulder, lines thick and digitally coloured but dense and ornate, strands curving in close parallel, broken by white swatches of implied droplets.

"Are they… a gay man, or a woman?"

"As far as I’m aware, neither."

"…huhhh. I’ll admit that’s not what I expected from looking at the shirt."

"How so?"

The Elthazan was still slender as representations of the Hero went, but… "The robot guy looks a lot more… neotenous. And masochistic."

Fuck. He had already counted it against himself - no he hadn’t, because it counted too much. But if she not only noticed but said it out loud, it counted on a whole different order. The whole paradox of the minifigure that had haunted his entire childhood, he suddenly realized, could have been resolved by imagining the universe of negative value as a series of concentric infinities like electron shells.

He had just broken through the bituminous firmament of one. As had his father.

Or not. It would be simple (maybe not mechanically, if his control of verbal and body language were inversely correlated) to laugh and say "yeah, it’s kinda sus but I like the character’s arc", like he had seen those fake fans, those fauxtaku do ten million times. If she had made it even halfway through Hell Harrowing, probably at the instigation of a similarly bashful college roommate, she would have heard it before. He was being given a once in a lifetime chance (what the claw represented, what he was about to lose, after all) to exchange this life for that one. He just hadn’t been prepared (after all that preparing) for it to come all at once, or once and for all.

No he wasn’t, there wasn’t enough chance this wouldn’t explode anyway to be worth this betrayal. Even if this was his only chance to escape, it wouldn’t be his only chance to be trapped again. If he made this sacrifice now, he would be asked to make it over and over again. The sunlight of his room rushed back in over his eyes. The warmth of the blanket. This was it, the relief, the option he had fantasized about in the shower. Nothing would have mattered after all. Except he would get one glorious interview out of it, and probably a few hours of pain and blood.

"I’ve heard some men who draw men like that because they think it makes them look like women, and there are some women - I’m thinking of a thing I saw at a HL festival - who draw men like that because… either it makes them easier to manage, or more like children, so they can… combine their maternal and erotic needs, maybe? But they don’t even look like children in a way that works on that need for me. There’s none of the warmth or playfulness or awkwardness, tans or smells, just this weird sharp brittle… wait, are you crying?"

Luskonneg had barely heard any of that. He was dripping snot down into his mouth as he spoke. The tears and sweat probably made his face look equally wet, and red, and lined, engorged. "There’s lots of… playfulness and… awkwardness in Smilia!" Although of course she covered her skin so it didn’t feel like skin, that was an important part of her. "Did Elthazan or Miwa or any of the Heroes even look as pretty as they do in, not just in the Heroes’ Love stuff, but the old fashioned church art, all that Beauty as Order shit? Or just casting pretty actors in a movie, because everyone knows what most people like to look at and the censor says keep it that way so everyone knows who to root for?"

"I’m not mad at you! I’m curious! And they don’t - necessarily do that any more. There was a really good performance at the Igloo Dome last Festival that was all lepers."

He was still formulating his thoughts, he didn’t have time to respond to things like this, it didn’t matter anyway. "I’m sorry. I have a ton to say about this, and I can’t say it right now. I can link some threads, I guess."

"That… that makes sense. I’m sure I hit something there."

Only one thing she could have hit, she had to be thinking, and it blew through all the shells he could visualize, ran down every circle of hell.

He stood shuffling from one foot to another in a daze, still not quite crying, squeaking his chair out of the way, counting how many seconds he would give himself before he went home and cried forever.

The Black Mushroom Initiate, stripped of her hat, hair washed ragged and almost white with symbiote-scourging chemicals, sniffling a bit too deliberately and charmingly in the interrogation room chair, was identified as a herb-and-crystal shopkeeper from the Hanging Plazas, too innocently incoherent to be suspected of anything heretical, but known to the civil courts for a series of elaborate and harebrained attempts at scamming people via under-the-counter fortunetelling. (For instance, telling someone their deceased grandfather wanted them to pawn his heirlooms for a discount price at a community auction house she attended.) A number of suits against her on the verge of escalating to criminal court had been dropped under Dark influences that, as typical for Black Mushroom Initiates, she fully believed to be the proof of her own unique spiritual gift and destiny. But when she talked about her contacts in the Dark underworld she was lucid and careless, conveying no trace of loyalty and a bit of naive eagerness to reinvent herself as a ‘whistleblower’. This didn’t mean, as Braz had cautioned the local interrogators, her information would be reliable; Dark groups loved to use this kind of narcissist, who was likely to give away both good intel and lies of their own, to pass misinformation off on counterintelligence.

Rraihha Braz had awoken in a psychomagical lab at the university, surrounded by cops, one dissociated looking professor, and - towering in her maroon stole and miter and pantsuit, holding her permanent scowl as a Poker face with a twitchy diligence that betrayed real tension, the Inquisitor-General for Romarosa. She had been under the effect of the cogitohazard for six hours until they could find someone with the requisite skills. Nonetheless, she had been cleared to interrogate the Initiate under a spell that would automatically censor the cogitohazard if it crossed the glass.

So Lacriz Aeeth did have access to a cogitohazard, and had been able to get it as high up as her - that would explain both why they were taking them so seriously and sending her out here with so much of her memory missing. Maybe she had already encountered them. Though she seemed uniquely affected: none of the others who had been exposed had needed such complex memory magic to remove it. Maybe it was some kind of trigger word, which she was vulnerable to having heard it; maybe she was investigating this thing she was specifically vulnerable to because they didn’t want anyone else building up repeated exposures. From what she gathered, the Inquisitor-General needed to be there to authorize any spell specifying it, including those wiping it from the memory of everyone who defined or sustained the spells.

"The thing you used on me - did that come from the Seer In The Half-Light?"

The Initiate almost doubled over laughing, then stiffened up. "Y-yeah. All of us knew them through the mycorhizome. Did you know they found a way of using us without being affected themself? And they could commune with us without merging, which was… a lot of fun for everyone involved, let’s just say, so they were like our pet for a while."

"So do all the Black Mushroom Initiates know about their activities? We didn’t get nearly this much out of the previous contact."

"A lot of the current state you washed out along with the slime, I don’t know exactly what the mycorhizome knows. But I remember a lot because uhhh, my own Mother Initiator was the one who found them."

"And do you know her civilian identity?"

"Not anymore."

"Was she Fraxine Selbstember?"

"Ohhh no. Aeeth came looking for Selbstember, and found us instead."

"You mean… you had already replaced her?"

"She disappeared on her own, we filled in the gap. We had no idea what she was researching."

"Aeeth never told you?"

"They could keep secrets better than you. They got you real good, they couldn’t believe it. You just fell into their lap, they barely had to set anything up."

She wanted to pretend this was just trying to psych her out, but it would explain the guilt, the real disgust clumping in the Inquisitor-General’s eyes like mucus. "Barely? How did they identify me?"

"They had a spell they called narrative homing. You can’t even understand it unless you understand their other magic. This shit will revolutionize the world if they don’t destroy it first - unfortunately I’m not smart enough to show you how to actually do it, not anymore. But so OK - the thing they did with the power stations? It was sustained by thoughts. Specifically, thoughts that activate a recognizable pattern in Rhi."

"Goddess." Something was scratching viciously at the surface of her mind. "Is that what - happened to me?"

"That’s not the good part. But basically." The Initiate grinned. "It was a very simple honeypot, they gave a bunch of workers access through a private connection to a bunch of nudes and charged whenever they jacked off to them."

The scratching getting louder - oh no, is that what they got me with? She couldn’t remember anything she had gotten off to in… too long to be a good sign. "Wait, why wouldn’t you just do a basic object relation definition for that?"

"Because where things get really interesting for them is fantasy. Ask anyone in psychomagic, fantasy is really hard to define. It can flow along almost any line of relation to its object, and fluctuate in and out of awareness. It can always find a way to wriggle out of a definition, to plausibly deny itself. Yet as the pervert monks up at Voidhanger know, it can produce its own distinct Rhi signature referencing the object. Which means since it references the bodymind’s first order system of reference, its "private language" rather than its learned one, it can be defined in direct relation to its external object. Which means you can back-propagate spells along it to its object, without even being able to define that object yourself."

"Do… how many people know how to do this?"

"I’m a dumbass, I can’t do it, neither could anyone else in the mycorhizome. Now if you let me talk to the Psychomagic Department people you probably have going in and out right now, it might be possible to reverse engineer…"

"This isn’t a negotiation. Keep explaining narrative homing."

"Pity for you. Anyway, now suppose you’re trying to find something that nobody can reference or define firsthand. Say, the current incarnation of the Dark Lord. All you have of that is… a fantasy. More than a fantasy - a dream, a passion, an extremely specific will irreducible to any other desire. A fantasy that doesn’t reference any specific element of your or anyone you know’s experience - but that exists because a certain entity exists. Now, to base a spell on that is still more tenuous than what they did to you. You don’t have an immediate relation to the object, you can’t affect it via direct reference, but you can define the direct reference by degrees of proximity. So what narrative homing does is - and I don’t know the specifics of like, how they receive this information, there might be an item involved, or a personal interface - but it measures the relation of people and objects to the unknown reference object. Kind of like hotter-colder in a game of hide and seek. So they went off to Elthazan, because either the Dark Lord or something extremely important to finding the Dark Lord is in Elthazan. And I notice you’re from Elthazan, but if I get any more specific than this… oh, I already don’t remember anyway. Sorry, your mushroom remover works too fast. Could you… you could give me some more, right? You already captured me, you’ve got even more spells on me now that I’m in here I’m sure, just a few milligrams. I could tell you a lot more useful things. Maybe I do know something about Selbstember, although I dunno, you’d have to give me a lot, come on come on come on, just a, just a…."

Braz walked away as the Initiate started going into withdrawals and the local agents came in with their sedative. An icy chill wrapped around her shoulders, up from her heart.

Marzanna stepped into the booth and sat down across from the small, thin man in a tweed cardigan and round, reflective glasses, sipping his a rice piquette through a straw.

"I suppose you’re the handler?"

"It hopefully won’t be my full-time job. And yours will be done soon."

"I know you won’t tell me, but who the fuck is this person? I did a bit of digging and everyone who went to his school had to sign an asset activation agreement. Like 300 kids, all their parents, teachers, there was a whole secret assembly no one remembers…"

"And psychologists." He stretched his laugh lines. "Wait, how did you find out about this?"

"Unusual patterns of deleted threads in parents’ and alumni groups, cached versions."

"Yn Dahh’t doesn’t send nearly enough graduates into intelligence. When this is all over, have you considered working for the Ecclesia?"

"Not exactly looking forward to doing stuff like this for the rest of my life, but maybe it would be better if I understood."

"I’d just tell you and memory wipe you, but we’ve had some considerable security breaches through that already. But there are two things I can assure you: Luskonneg deserves everything we have done to him, and it would be necessary even if he didn’t. You can think about it whichever way works better for you. He is hostis humani generis." Enemy of the human race - a term pretty much only used for Dark cultists. "I know this must be hard for you. Telling you that doesn’t make it any easier to leave your friend in there with him. I was in fact wondering if you might need any support with it. I am, by training, a psychologist." He slid a blue-green business card across the table from the pocket of his cardigan. Iolaw Mark’eg, PhD Psych.

"You’re…"

"I also wanted to discuss the next and hopefully last stage of your involvement with us directly, because it will be personal, and I will be giving you some personal leeway in its execution. We are aware, of course, of your feelings for Gallvren Den’kerrig…"