Agrippa’s Christmas Special 2023 [19.5k words] (Patreon)

A stage surrounded by cameras and festooned with red and green balloons and matching streamers waits in the restful darkness of a filming crew finishing the last touches before a show starts, the camera operators double-checking their angles for what will hopefully be the last time as a neurotic director keeps bothering the light table operator while the sound technician hides between the curtains until the last possible minute to avoid a similar fate.

“Where the fuck is the sound technician?!” somebody who likely should never have been allowed near any position of responsibility and authority yells, making the light table operator wince in future tinnitus.

“I’m unionized! Fuck you!” a disembodied voice echoes from the maze of curtains framing the theater-style stage, unintentionally displaying a mastery of the chosen field of somebody who belongs to a union.

“We start in five!” somebody responsible for a future disability-due-to-deafness claim yells back.

“Fine! I’ll be there in five! Now stay away from me, you crazy weirdo!”

“Is this normal?” a boy holding a tray of coffee cups asks a tired woman sitting on the seat of a crane-mounted camera.

“In show business? Meh. Pretty mild,” she answers before loudly swearing when the lights resentfully turn on at full blast right in front of her.

“Sorry, sorry,” somebody who doesn’t care for collateral as long as the director gets it mumbles as he pretends to adjust a knob on his light table.

“You little shit—” somebody operating heavy equipment says as a boy holding a tray of coffee cups warily steps back.

“Now! We start now! Five, three, two—”

“Shit, shit, shit!” choruses a whole stressed team who won’t be celebrating Christmas with friends and families this year, seeing as the crew is about as friendly with each other as a pack of Black Friday shoppers.

“—one!”

And all but the most essential lights turn off as the cameras zoom in on the red, velvet curtain at the end of the stage.

A spotlight turns on, demarcating a clear-cut circle on the wooden floor by the left side of the curtains that a high heel festooned with red sequins smoothly steps into, a feminine voice silkily whispering at the same time:

“Prepare for trouble…”

A second spotlight turns on at the opposite end of the stage in perfect symmetry, a man wearing what would be formal wear except for his lacking jacket striding into the middle of it as he straightens the lapels of his black, satin-finish vest.

“And make it double!” he proclaims.

“To provide entertainment and recreation!” the woman continues, now fully illuminated, the spotlight glinting off the red sequins covering the long dress with a barely decent slit that exposes the right leg she first stepped into the stage with.

“To piss off all fandoms sans moderation!” the man states with undue gravitas.

“To pretend there’s no such thing as dry prose!”

“To blame the characters for constantly mouthing off!”

“Lisa!” the woman says, spreading her arms high above with enough enthusiasm that her blonde ponytail bounces.

“Hachi!” the man answers, bringing his left hand palm up just under his chest as he points to his partner in crime with his extended right hand.

“Team Agrippa blasts off at the speed of deadlines!”

“Read now, and prepare to whine!”

The two stand with their last overdramatic pose, nearer to the center of the stage but without reaching it.

And stand.

And keep standing.

“Okay, what the Hell?” Hachiman finally asks, dropping all pretense of enthusiasm and turning toward the blonde wearing a forced smile that makes her look slightly insane—which, according to most people who regularly deal with her, is a marked improvement over how she usually looks.

“What? That went perfectly. I couldn’t even tell we didn’t have time for a rehearsal.”

“Where’s the last line?”

“Last line?” she replies, blinking in marked confusion.

“Lisa… This is where Meowth jumps in, saying, ‘That’s right!’ You can’t do a Team Rocket rip-off and skip Meowth,” he says, trying not to reach up to rub the bridge of his nose, seeing as the stage make-up used to offset his perfectly healthy, shut-in chic pallor is about as thick as ballistic armor.

“I didn’t skip it…” she says, scuffing the tip of her shoe on the stage and almost tumbling to the floor as she remembers that she doesn’t have that much practice walking in high heels. She’s more of a kitten heels gal.

“What was that?”

“Power did it.”

“What?”

“Power did it. He’s very proud of it. Came up with his own rhyme.”

“… Is ‘Power’ a voice in your head?”

“… Maybe?”

Hachiman looks like he’s about to say a Hachiman thing, which would immediately be grounds for a harassment suit in most civilized nations, but, at the last moment, a weird expression flickers across his lips, and he refrains from making Lisa’s lawyers happy and wealthy, thus fulfilling his part in bringing about a Christmas miracle.

“Fine,” he grumbles.

“What? You understand?” she asks with desperate hope in her voice.

“You could say that,” he answers in a continuation of the earlier grumble.

Lisa looks at him, tilts her head, furrows her eyebrows in concentration, and then squeals in unmitigated glee, crossing the distance between them to strangle the man with an enthusiastic hug.

“Is this normal?” a boy with fewer cups of coffee on his tray mutters.

“Kid, are you sure you want to work in this business?” the camera operator answers as she discreetly twists the cap off a hip flask before replenishing her alleged coffee.

Meanwhile, beside a beaming light table operator, a neurotic director quietly weeps.

***

“Okay, so, with the introduction over and done with, let’s get this show on the road!” a blonde very much living up to the stereotype cheers with an enthusiasm that could drain the will to live off a thousand shut-ins.

“Right. Moving on,” somebody with a drained will to live says. “The first segment we’ve got for tonight is from Puella Monstrum Madoka Moecha, an obviously PMMM-themed fic which stands as proof that the author should not be allowed to reproduce or participate in polite society—”

“It has some wholesome moments…”

“It’s monstergirl smut. With switchblade futas. And battle-fucking.”

“The Kyouko-Mami scenes are cute.”

“The… the scenes where a dragongirl fucks a minotauress cross-eyed?”

“Cute.”

Hachiman blinks.

Lisa crosses her arms under a bust gleaming with red sequins and raises a defiant eyebrow.

“Cute is justice,” she states.

Hachiman blinks.

“Fine. Whatever. Let’s just get this done with.”

****

Puella Monstrum Madoka Moecha [PMMM]

Sayaka

The wind sweeps over the tall building me and my… and some otherpeople are standing around in, the light of the late day making me see them in stark relief rather than the soft faces I’m used to.

“You don’t have to do this,” I tell my oldest friend. “Not yet, at least.”

“I do, Sayaka,” she says with those pink eyes that always seem too soft unless you were an unfortunate witness to the Construction Blocks Meltdown of Infamy at age four.

“You’re thinking something rude,” she says, narrowing those very same eyes in a way likely to give me flashbacks.

“What? Noooo. Not at all. I was just thinking about… our childhood. And how much you’ve grown,” I diplomatically state because, after all, a paladin should have a high charisma score and thus have a natural advantage in socials—

“Lying does not become a paladin, Sayaka Miki.”

“Aaaaaaah! Get out of my head! Get out of my head!” I sensibly say to the albino girl with weird, double animal ears that always appears at the worst possible moment—and I’m not just talking about me having my panties by my ankles with Hitomi under my desk—

“I swear, Smurfette, if just a singlemind-controlling note slips out, I’m gagging you until Madoka’s wish is over,” the dragon bitch says.

“What are you even talking about—oh,” I say, sheepishly smiling at a glaring Kyouko as I try to bring the monster under control and make the blue creeping down my arms recede.

“Could we please treat this moment as solemnly as it deserves? This is Madoka’s time to shine. We should just welcome her as a fellow warrior of justice—” Mami starts… and cuts off with a yelp that follows just a fraction of a second after Kyouko loudly spanks her under her skirt.

This, of course, means that a brawl swiftly follows as Kyouko insists that our somewhat deficient teacher drops the pretense and talks like a regular person until Mami loses control of the bull and…

Uh…

Wow.

“I told you we should do this in private,” the often silent Homura says, not even her deadpan managing to withstand the full impact of…

Of, well, Mami’s thighs repeatedly impacting Kyouko’s.

“Sayaka. Blue,” Madoka mutters in a dead tone.

I look at her.

Then at my senior and mentor going at it like they have years of pent-up lust and complicated feelings to work out on one another.

Then back at her with maybe a bit of a pout.

Madoka sighs.

“Please, at least hurry up,” she says with a resigned face that melts into a smile when the snake bitch steps behind her and rests her hands on my friend’s shoulders, massaging the firm flesh with long fingers that—

“A single note, Sayaka,” Homura hisses. “A single note, and I’ll encourage Madoka to bite.”

I look down at my blue arms, swallow in what is a very dignified, paladin-y way, and go to where my senior and mentor are currently engaging in something that is both acrobatic, anatomically unlikely, and incredibly appealing.

Then I spend a couple of hours with something stuck down my throat.

***

“May I assume we’re finally ready to proceed?” Kyuubey asks, unfairly glaring at me rather than the two girls who started it.

“I am,” Madoka says, about as determined as she’s been since she decided that she just had to join us in our eternal battle against the forces of evil and legions of horny phantoms of cosplaying Mamis.

“That is not what I asked, Madoka Kaname.”

“I do believe that hers is the only choice that matters,” Homura says, trying, and failing, to disguise just how much this still bothers her.

Kyuubey stares at her for a moment and I’m unable to discern if they are having a silent conversation or just a telepathic one, but, nonetheless, the exchange ends up with the albino nodding, and…

And it’s nighttime, the Christmas lights from the street below reaching us in choreographed colors, but it all goes away as Kyuubey’s hair drifts around her, cloaking her in silver that shimmers under the moon and stars, until it all blurs together, the bright shades replaced by the steady advance of what it would feel to stand on the Moon if it glowed in the same silver that reaches down to Earth.

And then everything fades away, and the furry, fuzzy, foulmouthed magical mascot steps on all fours to stare up at Madoka like they’re frozen in a moment that belongs in a historical painting.

“Do you know your wish?” she asks, as if part of a ceremony.

“I do,” she says, as firm as the Madoka that only rarely comes out.

Kyuubey nods, and her back splits open, light and shadow spilling out of her, crimson symbols crawling all over the rooftop, scattered by a breeze that overpowers the one from this mild winter as long ears lengthen further and reach up to Madoka’s chest and into her soul, waiting to thrust into her for the words that we’re all waiting for:

“I wish… I wish to give them what they need,” she says.

Red lights spiral around the two of them, and Madoka gets taken away to the place of magic I only ever reached the first time I transformed, when I delved into my waters for the first time and became… myself.

And then, after a single moment that I know lasted far longer for the girl going through it, she stands between us all, in the pink and yellow pastel dress Homura described the first time I got her drunk enough to repeat Kyouko’s lessons about how to deal with our monster sides, and…

And Madoka smiles, radiant as ever.

There’s a pang in my chest when that warm smile drifts away from me and toward the gloomy girl who has more reason than anyone to be gloomy, contemplating in front of her what she fought so long and so hard to avoid, but… but this is their moment. Even if they have invited us. Even if Madoka wanted me here.

This is theirs.

So Homura steps toward her, and Madoka jumps up into her arms, surrounding the taller, slender girl’s neck with as much strength as she can, and—

And Madoka makes a weird face.

A face that only a few people who’ve had the misfortune of hearing me sing—not like that! I mean the mind-control thing, not that my singing is bad. My singing is amazing, thank you very much—ah, I mean, Madoka’s horny.

Which is a somewhat expected issue with her first transformation, and maybe, kinda, why I so readily accepted the invite to be here on Christmas Eve, but, well, also…

I want to see her monster form.

There’s a betting pool, you understand.

So, well, it’s for entirely chaste if not pure reasons that we all lean forward when her magic slips and surrounds her with glimmering lights, her dress fading away into glowing motes that spiral up and up before slowly falling down, drifting in swirling winds that bring a touch of cold, but the kind that just makes you want to huddle and—

Oh.

Of course she would.

I cross my arms and stare at my oldest friend with her cheeks flushed as her clothes reshape themselves around her into a tight, shortdress and hat.

A red velvet dress and hat.

She’s a Santa Girl.

“Well, that’s a first,” Kyuubey mutters.

“I hate Christmas. So damn much,” Kyouko comments.

“I… I guess that’s… a support class?” Mami tries to provide something useful.

“Homura…” Madoka moans. “I’ve got your present right here; come unwrap it.”

That’s… somewhat bolder than what I expected.

And, going by the way she faints and drops on the rooftop like a sack of potatoes, may have also overshot Homura’s expectations.

So, seeing as no one won this particular betting pool and that my oldest friend is looking down with a disappointed, mournful look, I, the eternal paladin that I am, bravely step in to face this latest challenge.

… Fine, I may have some levels in bard. Just don’t tell anyone.

***

The Show Must Go On

There’s a silence that washes across the stage as two hosts try to come up with something to say that can be aired during Christmas. A search that seems somewhat futile and ill-conceived after the contents of the last segment.

“Well… that was cute?” Lisa says.

“What part? The monstergirl violent threesome, the dubcon, or the monstergirl dubcon?” Hachiman retorts.

“Yes,” Lisa confidently nods.

“… I should’ve known. Josei has taught me as much.”

“Oh, as if shounen is any better. What about the guy with a hundred girlfriends that he needs to get laid with, or they will die? What about the boob dragon?”

“The boob dragon is the very epitome of exceptional circumstances. We don’t use the boob dragon as the example of anything other than sadistic voice acting on par with Naruto’s screeching.”

“How convenient. So, everything that doesn’t line up with what you want to claim is some manner of ‘exceptional circumstance?’”

“I’m proud to be a hypocrite when it suits me and not when it doesn’t. That’s what being a hypocrite means, you know?”

Lisa glares at Hachiman.

Hachiman glares at Lisa.

“This reeks of some kind of discrimination against female-oriented works,” the ponytailed blonde says, clearly showing how little she understands the mind of the brilliant genius who wrote—of the neurotic director going over the script and weeping at how much of it has already been invalidated.

“I am a firm believer in true gender equality. It’s not my fault that most female fantasies involve literal crimes,” Hachiman nobly says, understanding the true issue at the heart of—

“Like orc rape?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hachiman cleverly diffuses the situation—

“Like orc rape combined with tentacle rape?”

“You can’t rape the willing!” Hachiman retorts, foolishly falling for the obvious bait like someone who’s never been on the Internet.

“Really,” Lisa replies, like someone watching somebody else dig deeper.

“I—Orczuma is a very wholesome character. Somebody on a perpetual journey of self-improvement that takes him every day a step away from his flawed start and toward a place of healing—”

“He’s a hentai orc!”

“It makes sense in context!”

“Oh, yeah? Let’s see that context, then!”

***

A Pure Knight’s Natural Enemy [Konosuba]

Kazuma

So. You see. Seasonal events? Yeah, I think I already talked about seasonal events. Not like it would be a waste of time to listen to me going over my worldly lessons a second time, you understand. I am, after all, as erudite as brilliant, a charming orator, and a convincing rhetorician.

Or, at least, I’ll be as soon as I find someone with the social skills I desperately want to invest points into before my (Sixth? Seventh?) untimely death.

“What is this?” I say with a frozen rictus that, due to the distortion caused by my orcish tusks, may charitably be taken as a grin by somebody naïve and innocent enough.

“Christmas cake!” somebody naïve and innocent enough cheerfully says as she enthusiastically points at the spread of sweets arranged over my lunch table with enough bounciness that her pink tie flies above her always perilous cleavage.

What’s that, you say? We’re all staying in this mansion, so how come I get to claim the furniture as mine?

Well, you see, in all fairness, we all get a (redundantly) fair share of said mansion and furniture, but seeing as I am the current harem master and that at least a significant portion of the girls believe in slave-master roleplay taken to the extreme, and that a harem is obviously a democratically-ruled institution, this means they all are my slaves, and thus, what’s theirs is mine and what’s mine is mine.

My logic is as flawless as my peerless intellect. You may now applaud.

“Do you like it? Do you like it, Master?” Aqua, one of the key voters in the slavery party, asks as she pretends to nervously fidget with the hem of her indecently short Santa girl costume.

I almost nod out of sheer habit to avoid engaging in meaningless, likely headache-inducing dialog, but something in her earnest eyes makes me seriously reevaluate the cakes in question, and…

Well.

There’s a cake that collapsed under the weight of what I will, for the sake of my sanity, pretend are misguidedly placed birthday candles with such ominous engravings as ‘TNT’ and ‘Point this side away from you,’ another cake is clearly handmade, which can be appreciated by the few strands of blonde hair peeking out of the frosting that hopefully don’t hint at some nail clippings completing the yandere confection, which nicely juxtaposes the apparently normal yet somewhat plain cake that can only have come from Yunyun, and then…

Then there’s something that is only a cake in the sense that I am a regular, humble adventurer or that Luna’s cleavage is a bit eye-catching, not to mention cock-catching—never mind.

The something in question is a five-tiered monstrosity, the combined height taller than I am and making the long dining table bend in the middle as ancient, well-aged wood keeps groaning in ominous protest.

It makes my stomach ache just to watch it.

It also is, objectively, a work of art.

While the frosting is the classic white of the season, each round tier is decorated along its sides with drawings made of distinctive colors. Gold lattice depicting knightly symbols of nobility at the bottom (of course), the next tier having chuunishly arcane, crimson decorations, with the one above it having those very same symbols in a more subdued style and understated purple, only to then have blazing blue religious icons drawn on the next level of the kaiju of Christmas cakes.

And then we reach the final level, the one that tops it all off, which is decorated in…

Emerald green.

Emerald green kanji.

‘I love you, Kazuma.’ ‘We are yours, Kazuma.’ ‘Take us all, Kazuma.’

These, and worryingly similar messages that only Aqua and I could understand (as well as the other rubes—heroic souls brought here from Japan on a sacred mission) are repeated all over the circumference of the level of the cake dedicated to me, Kazuma, somebody who’s apparently loved in worrying excess.

So…

…

Look, if my experience as a player of a concerning amount of erotic RPGs has taught me anything, it’s the survival skills needed to get alive out of this trap.

“I love it,” I say, keeping up my strained grin as I look at Aqua…

Beaming.

Smiling.

And almost tearing up.

… Fuck.

Three hours later, I’m still trying to eat the entirety of the Assault on Diabetes I’ve been presented with, and there’s only one thing that I know with absolute certainty:

I’ll never again, in my entire life, even think about eating a single mouthful of Christmas cake.

***

Sena

“Another!” I yell, slamming down my empty mug of beer on the counter of the Succubus Café.

“Eep!” the skittish, diminutive succubus behind said counter yelps.

“Is something wrong, dear customer?” the far-from-diminutive succubus owner asks as she indiscreetly repositions her bikini-clad cleavage by the side of my face.

“Just… in a mood,” I answer while waiting for the short girl to fill my beer mug.

“Is there anything I can do about it?” the owner asks, fluttering her eyelashes with clear… connotations.

I think about it for a second, but…

“Sorry, not today. I just don’t know why I am so frustrated…”

***

All the World’s a Stage

“… That had a lot less rape than I was expecting,” Lisa says with a hint of carefully hidden disappointment.

“Told you. It’s a wholesome tale of a man finding his identity after losing the last ties to his past—”

“It’s a hentai orc!”

“It’s high literature! You can’t compare the depths of its themes with anything else that treats the issue of lost humanity with the same poignancy—”

“Oh, you want loss of identity? Struggling with becoming something other than human? High literature?”

“… I feel like I should say ‘no?’”

“Well, too late, you squinty-eyed—”

“That’s racist.”

“I was talking about your attitude!”

“So was I.”

The two glare at one another with undisguised animosity, more or less like the light table operator is staring at the director sitting by his side, taking advantage of the balding man burying his head in his hands to display the true depths of his hatred without witnesses nor repercussions.

Other than the operator of a crane-mounted camera taking a lovingly close shot of the pair, that is.

***

Wordsworth [Worm]

Taylor

There are a lot of tales about Christmas.

Some of them are happy, many melancholic. Plenty cynic.

But, and this is something that makes the inner pages of my library rustle in pleasant realization, most of them are sincere.

It may not seem that way, not when saccharine clichés populate the season, and there’s so much commercial preoccupation with recapturing a lost spark of guileless innocence. Not when the whole holiday seems to revolve around the elaborate lie we tell our children as we once were told.

But that’s the thing about stories: they are, all of them, elaborate lies.

It’s just that some of them happen to be true.

“Love, I know cold is no longer that much of a bother to you, but I’m about to freeze my perfectly sculpted buttocks off, and I knowyou appreciate my buttocks,” somebody with no sense of gravitas says.

“Do you remember when we used to have quiet moments on your sofa, and you tried very hard not to say anything about my attraction to you? Those were good times. I miss those times,” I say, reflexively squeezing her gloved hand in a gesture that, before the spark of a murdered god was forced down my throat, may have given her the warmth she needs from me.

“None of that,” she says, bopping my nose and making me scrunch my face in an undignified way. “It’s Christmas; cheer up.”

“That may be easier if…” I start to say before I turn to the blonde girl standing by my side and looking at me through the narrow slit between her red scarf and wooled hat.

“It will be all right,” she says with a voice that shows me the smile hidden under that scarf.

I try to answer her, even if tentatively, and then…

Then we step forward and open the door of my father’s home.

***

I don’t need to eat or drink. I can do it, and it’s a mercy that I can still, on occasion, huddle up with a book and a mug of green tea, keeping my power’s hunger at bay as I consume a book in the way I did as a child when I wait for a sleepless night to end and for Lisa to come back home from wherever her latest mission has taken her.

I can do it, but I don’t need it.

This makes the excessive spread of food on the rarely used dining table of my old home somewhat off-putting. There are all the traditional dishes, all the flavors I grew up with, and…

All the flavors.

I turn toward Lisa with a hint of alarm, and she shows me a sad smile.

Her fingers let go of mine.

And I go to the kitchen.

He’s sitting on his usual chair, on the old, unvarnished wood frame and threadbare wicker seat.

A shadow is cooking.

They can’t speak. His power doesn’t manifest that way.

But she moves as if she’s humming as she busies herself with last-minute preparations, her long hair matte rather than glossy as it always was. As I remember it from all those times that I walked into the kitchen this time of the year, even if Dad wasn’t sitting at the table and watching her, but marching to her tune and assisting in doing…

In doing anything at all other than watch his wife.

My mother.

I walk toward him and take my own chair before I drag it to his side so I can sit with him.

He hugs me.

And, together, we watch a memory of a Christmas that once was and never will be again.

A lie that once was true.

***

We eat.

I eat.

And the flavors are not the same as they once were on this new body of mine, the house different, the chat around the table lacking many of those who used to share the day with me.

But there’s an animated blonde and a man who no longer drinks anything other than water and soda.

There’s… not what once was, but what now is.

And there are no lies.

There’s my family. My new family, as it now is.

And as the meal advances, as Lisa complains of the excess of food and how much she’ll have to diet over the next month to make up for it, as Dad very pointedly tells her to stop asking about his latest missions and how much time he’s been spending with both Miss Militia and Armsmaster, as the day goes on…

I sometimes catch glimpses of her.

Of the shadow, yes, but also…

Of family pictures still lovingly displayed. Of little trinkets she helped me pick up in street stalls. Of a library as well stocked as a little bookworm could have ever wished for.

I eat a Christmas meal with my new family, surrounded by the memory of my old one.

And, at the end of the day, when it’s time to unwrap gifts and pretend that Lisa hasn’t guessed all of them…

When I catch the last glimpse of her shadow, kneeling by the tree, rearranging the colorful packages…

I can admit, without betraying her memory, that I’m finally as happy as I once thought I would never again be.

And that is far from a lie.

***

And Now, For Something Completely Different

“Well, that was…” Hachiman starts before turning to Lisa with a begging look.

“Something you don’t want to ruin with a mood-breaking joke?” she says, as subtle as she usually is.

“Right. That,” he dryly accepts.

Lisa smiles at him in a small, measured way and takes a sideway step to bump her hip against his.

“It’s all right. You can be a sap with me,” she says.

“You were tearing up,” he shoots back.

“Well, yes, but only because Tay is adorable in all her incarnations, even when she’s not particularly murdery.”

“All her incarnations?”

“Love finds a way,” she says, nodding with her arms crossed.

“… Okay, that’s about as much of a segue as I can hope for. Get on with it,” he says.

“Wait, what?” the blonde says, tilting her head in confusion on the verge of alarm as the director throws his hands in the air and wishes for a swift, merciful release from—and proceeds with the next segment.

***

Periodical Cicadas [Worm/Scream TV]

Sometimes, Christmas is more about traditions than anything else. Meaningless little things that have been passed down that we stick to in faithful ritual.

Such as this town of lemmings doing their best to entice a superpowered murderer.

What’s that, you say? The killer hasn’t been active for long enough for this to be a tradition? That, even if we count Brandon James’ legendary spree a few years back, that is a single instance and not something that bears worth-repeating? And that the said murders didn’t occur on Christmas?

Well, to that I have a few retorts. The first one is that we are in America, where tradition may as well be defined as ‘This has happened twice, and we suspect it could happen a third time even if we weren’t stacking the deck, but we’re still going to stack it.’ The second is that we are in Florida, and… okay, I’m drawing a blank, but I feel that anything that has to do with deranged serial killers in Florida bears mentioning that it does, in fact, have to do with Florida.

The third?

A living Nativity.

“You can’t be fucking serious,” I say, knowing that there’s a high likelihood that they are.

“My dad… may be a moron,” Brooke says, the tanned blonde fidgeting by my side and wearing an extremely unnecessary jacketbecause, again, Florida.

“There’s being a moron, and there’s being the mayor from Jaws,” Audrey, ever the voice of reason, says.

…

Okay, I can’t think that with a straight face. I’m sorry, Audrey, but not even bi-panic-colored glasses let me see you as even remotely reasonable.

“Maybe it’s a trap? To tempt the killer into acting?” Noah says, sounding surprisingly reasonable, which may mean that I direly need to go to my optometrist and get my bi-panic glasses checked.

“That may be true… except they’re asking for volunteers. In our high school,” Emma the Second, long may she reign, says as she frowns at the colorful poster stuck to Washington High’s double glass doors.

For some reason that I would rather not elucidate, at that point, the whole group turns toward me in eerie synchronicity.

“What?” I unnecessarily ask.

“Aren’t you going to do the thing?” Brooke says.

“The thing? What thing?” I stubbornly tell her.

“You know, the thing,” she says with a very rudegesture that implies I’m being difficult for no reason at all when I, in fact, have a very good reason, and that reason is that I feel petty spite through every single moment of wakefulness and I may as well inflict that on the people who are currently forced to endure my company.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say with a disarming eyelash flutter.

“She’s expecting you to get into the killer’s head and say how this whole thing will end up in a way that makes at least one of the currently present members of our group react poorly at your careless display of empathy and near identification for a deranged murderer that—”

“Thank you, Noah,” I growl with a hint of swarm.

“You’re welcome!” he brightly says.

I try to glare at him.

He beams.

And I sigh and proceed to get into the murderer’s head to likely get Brooke to blanch as I go off on a rant that will end up telling them that—

***

Murderer

“… These people are insane.”

***

Taylor

Yeah. That.

***

Lights! Camera! Action!

“… Still cute,” Lisa mutters, even if not that convincingly.

“Sure,” Hachiman says with a shrug. “Yanderes are often favored waifus for a reason.”

“Wha—Taylor is not a yandere!”

“Really,” he answers with a tone that implies less than complete trust in his interlocutor’s statements.

“She’s not,” Lisa says, not huffing (because huffing would be undignified), but maybe toeing the line.

“There’s not a single person in that story that doesn’t think she has what it takes to pick up the murderer’s torch and go plus ultra on the art gallery.”

“… Look, it’s Worm, okay? Sometimes, you just have to roll with a slight hint of mental instability in your crushes.”

“Slight,” he says, like a man who doesn’t belong to a polycule where sanity is a rare commodity.

“As if you’re one to talk, Mister Voices in My Head,” she says with a hurtful, dismissive eye-roll that makes the neurotic director’s eyebrow twitch.

“I don’t want to hear that from you.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Your power is a literal voice in your head!”

“Ah. Right. Yeah.”

The two stare at one another in mild sheepishness until the director gives up on a proper segue for the next segment ever being reached and just rolls with it, to the light table operator’s poorly disguised, yet masterfully documented, glee.

A certain camerawoman was running out of blackmail material, after all.

***

Of Sisters and Shadows [Worm/Persona-lite]

So, well, you see…

Christmas was always a bit of a mess.

Like, Mom and Dad tried, but you can’t be happy and cheerful on command when you’re dealing with chronic depression. And I always tried to be effusive, even if only to get Amy to show some seasonal spirit, but it can be…

Draining.

Exhausting.

It can be a nightmare to be the only consistently cheerful person in a household filled with two parahuman parents and a gloomy adopted sister.

It, still, was never as much of a mess as this.

“Seriously,” I don’t quite ask as Mom sheepishly keeps holding up the official PRT permission slip for…

For Dad.

“I also struggle to understand why Piggot decided that Christmas would be the perfect time for this,” Dad says, almost drifting off in what I know would usually become a long tirade of barely audible profanities.

“It’s because she’s a spiteful woman with no family or friends who wants everybody else to spend Christmas time as miserably as she will,” Amy explains with a lecturing air.

I turn to look at her past the kitchen table we’re all sitting around and blink at her a couple of times.

“… What?” she says.

“It’s not like you like Christmas that much. Also, what did Piggot ever do to you—”

“I’m not bitter that she kept rejecting my offers to heal her up, and I resent that unfounded implication.”

“You what?” Mom says.

“I… uh… I just said I didn’t—”

“Do you… Do you even realize how much trouble we could’ve gotten in for trying to bribe a high-ranking officer?!”

“That’s not what I—it’s life-saving! She’s on a fucking timer!”

“It’s an offer of goods and services! It fits the legal definition to—”

“Hey, would you look at that! It’s time for Amy and I to take Dad out to confront his Shadow and risk his life in the process! No time like the present, right, Ames?” I sanely and composedly cut in.

“It wasn’t a bribe. A bribe would mean I was asking for something in return,” Amy continues, ignoring my desperate attempt to get her away from the ensuing argument.

“And didn’t you?” Mom asks, crossing her arms and forgetting about the slip, so she ends up crumpling it in the process.

Amy pauses for a moment, miraculously shuts up, and then turns from our provider of kale-smoothies to me.

“So. Shadows to punch. We’re busy, busy, busy, aren’t we, Vicky?” she conversationally asks.

“Fuck you. You’re on your own,” I say with sheer vindicationflooding through my shield.

Look, I may still be somewhat pissed about the monstrous tree horse haunting our yard, okay? Also, she did reject my helping hand just a minute ago.

She has brought this on herself.

Really.

I’m perfectly innocent and filled with the Christmas Spirit. Just… not flooding my shield with it.

***

“Well, that was… a thing,” Dad says, making conversation as he dangles from my arms while I fly through the mists, waiting for something to trigger while tugging Amy along with the harness Armsmaster designed for us so I could basically turn my sister into a living kite.

A shrieking, resentful, spiteful, living kite.

… A cute one.

“My wings are getting tired!” she says from a rope’s length behind us. What’s the length of the rope, you ask? Well, that depends on my temper at the time.

It’s currently quite long. Unlike my temper.

“You can control how tired you are, you stamina freak!” I yell back over my shoulder.

“Oh, you weren’t complaining about that last night!” she says.

“What was that?” Dad asks.

Mercifully, about the time I glacially turn down to face my father, something in the mists stirs.

“Hey, look! A distraction!”

“Don’t change the subject—”

“There you go, Dad! Confront your greatest fears and trauma! I know you can do it without engaging in homosexual selfcest!”

“In what?!” he says.

And I shove him through the rift.

Then, because I am me, and thou art I—I mean, because I think he can afford a few minutes of solitude, I abruptly brake midflight, spin around, and throw my kiting sister to the ground below, lamenting the lack of windows to keep our endearing family tradition of defenestration going.

***

After what could be charitably called a spar to get our blood going—

“Lipstick,” she says, pointing at a spot on her neck that I immediately rub off on my own to get rid of any incriminating evidence—to be presentable, I shift the emotions of my shield to match the tune flooding the mists, taking Amy’s hands and stepping into the battle that Dad is having with—

Santa?

“What the fuck?” I reasonably ask.

“Huh…” Dad says, looking away from the man in a red suit sitting on a gigantic pile of presents in front of what looks like a Christmas tree decorated with family pictures—oh my gosh, that’s Amy with her unicorn pajamas! She was so cute with her grumpy—

“Vicky…” Amy grumbles, ever the Miss Scrooge of the family.

“But look! You were adorable, that was—"

“When you were seven years old. I picked out two matching pajamas, and your mother got you two bikes. We… argued a bit about whether or not riding a bike was safe in our neighborhood, but by then things were looking up at her firm, and we could afford to move to the new house. It was… a good Christmas. One of my better ones,” Santa says.

With Dad’s voice.

… Oh.

“So… this is it? A reminder of all the times you tried to be happy and struggled?” I ask, flying down from the branches with the pictures of me and my sister skinning our knees.

Both Dad and Santa nod.

“But… you are healed. From the depression,” I say.

“I am,” he says.

“He is,” his Shadow says. “But that doesn’t change the past, Vicky. It doesn’t take away all the times he failed at being a parent—”

“I never asked for that,” I say.

They look at me.

And I look at Dad. At the father that… that fought something I only barely understand after years of reading up on it and talking with all the people I know who… who have powers that were born of something like it.

After finally looking at myself in the mirror and recognizing something I didn’t want to accept was there.

But I don’t sit near him. I, instead, sit right by Santa-Dad and give him a much-needed hug.

It is somewhat arguable who needs it most.

“I don’t want you to make up for things, Dad. I want you here. Now. I… I just want something that isn’t… stained,” I murmur into the white, fake beard he stopped putting on when I was ten and told him how mortifying that was, even if I now miss it every year.

“Vicky…” he says, the hands of the Shadow reaching up to rest on my back, over the harness meant to pull Amy around when she extends her wings that are still unable to fly without my help.

I squeeze him tighter.

And then, another pair of warm, thick arms surround me, squeezing me with a warmth that wasn’t always there when I needed it. When I wanted it.

But that was always offered when it was there.

“I am a shadow, the true self,” I hear over my head.

“I am thou, and thou art I,” I hear from behind me.

And then the mists fill with amber, and, thankfully, I never see whether or not my father ends up kissing himself.

***

The flight back is… quiet. The mists are receding, and Brockton is spread once more under us, filled with Christmas lights that most parahumans in the city are barred from seeing up close, at least until they get a permission slip granted by the PRT and Amy and I are called to escort them through a life-or-death trial that may give us a fighting chance against the threats haunting our world.

Dad is hanging from my arms yet again, playing with the lights spinning around his hands and wrists, but Amy, rather than glide on her wings, is resting on top of a spread of my shield’s tendrils, basking in the tenderness and peace I flood through it after another draining confrontation with things too human to be the monsters they can easily become.

And then we near our house, and…

And there are lights in my yard.

Specifically, there are red and green, shifting, bioluminescentlights all over a vegetable horse with a glowing red nose and reindeer antlers.

I turn around and see Amy looking at me with a shit-eating grin.

“Merry Christmas,” she says, gesturing down at her crimes against nature right before it bays in a blood-curling call to rally the collective horror of all my worst nightmares.

And I once again lament the lack of windows before, with the full might of my shield, I throw her to the ground below.

***

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties, Please Stand by

A silence spreads through the stage.

“Can we air that?” the boy now holding an empty tray and trying to look useful says.

“I don’t see the issue?” the camerawoman going over her latest trove of blackmail on a secondary monitor answers.

“I mean… the whole… you know,” the boy agitatedly says, like somebody trying very hard not to say baneable words in front of an all-ages audience who really have no business reading this.

“What? The Game of Thrones thing? Just how much of a prude are you?”

“It’s not prudish to—incest!”

“Well, no, I imagine it wouldn’t be prudish to commit incest—”

“Anything you want to share with the rest of the class?” a very pissed-off sound technician mutters through everyone’s headsets, prompting plenty of people unrelated to the conversation to look around guiltily.

“I just—uh. Sorry,” the boy sheepishly says, like a moron who doesn’t realize he just incriminated himself.

And, back at the stage, Lisa facepalms.

“You’ll mess up the makeup,” Hachiman kindly points out with no sings of sadistic glee whatsoever.

“You should know; you’re about thirty percent makeup,” she grumbles.

“I am starting to think of it as a superhero mask. That should be right up your alley.”

“Oh, like this last thing was up your alley, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Really. Mister ‘It is absurd to assign a monetary value to a little sister, as there’s plenty of money but only one little sister; that’s how supply and demand works, you know?’” A blonde who’s having way too much fun crossing her arms and tapping her left biceps with two fingers says.

“That’s Economics 101, and you would know about it if you had read Spice and Wolf instead of hoping against hope that the Nanoha writers will ever clarify her relationship status—”

“They adopted a daughter! Live together! Fate blushes when Nanoha comes into the bath! They sleep in the same bed wearing sexy lingerie!”

“And yet, the relationship chart still lists their connection with a question mark,” Hachiman says like somebody who may have read Spice and Wolf but is also suspiciously well-informed about obscure trivia regarding magical girls who equate laser beams with friendening.

“I’m going to end you!”

“Please, I have spent my whole fic on a training arc the likes of which would make shounen characters puke while you kept complaining about exercise at the first excuse.”

Lisa stops and looks at somebody who, admittedly, fills the shirt and vest combo well enough that a certain Christmas Cake may have had difficulty focusing when helping him pull off the combo.

Then her eyes narrow, and Hachiman looks at her like somebody who just realized that the sad, current state of gender equality means most girls don’t have to fight fair.

“You really shouldn’t have messed with a Thinker seven—”

“Six—”

“Fuck you!”

And, on that heartwarming note, the beleaguered director cuts to the next segment.

***

All Right! Fine! I Will Take You! [Oregairu, first of the Cakeverse]

Komachi

So. Christmas.

Yay!

It’s the best time of the year! Definitely a time for happiness and celebration! And there’s nothing at all bothering me about this, in Japan, being about couples and romantic love rather than family love.

Yup. Nothing at all.

It’s not like I didn’t get lunch with Mom and Dad. It’s not like there weren’t presents from Grossther waiting for me back home. It’s not like he called and apologized for not being able to be there because his harem decided today would be the ideal time to do… vaguely gross things that I don’t want to know about.

It’s not, at all, like I’m now back at my one-room apartment near college, vaguely stuffed with Mom’s attempt at traditional cooking, and…

And deprived of brother time.

…

This is bullshit.

Okay! Fine! He has three girlfriends and their families to cater to! He can’t always prioritize me over them—I mean, he shouldn’tprioritize me over them. We’re both adults, with our own lives, and…

And…

And I’m in a one-room apartment decorated with red and green ribbons, a lit-up Christmas tree in the corner by my desk, and…

And nobody to celebrate with.

… I should’ve stayed with Mom and Dad. It’s not like there was a reason for me to—

“Surprise!” somebody yells at the top of their lungs when the door behind me suddenly opens hard enough to slam against the thinwall of my apartment.

“Aaaaaaahhhhhh!” I yell as I throw a defensive backkick to the groin of the man jumping into my room.

“Gkht!” my brother says as he folds over my heel.

…

“Are you insane?!” I yell at him.

“Well, given that I’m still trying to orchestrate a pleasant surprise for my cute younger sister despite her obvious need to make sure she never gets a nephew—”

“Gross! Gross! Super gross! Hachiman levels gross!” I yell in an act of pure self-defense.

“Okay, let’s skip the preliminaries…” somebody who obviously protected at the last moment the intended target of my kick says just as I realize that he’s holding my ankle, and…

Uh…

“Brother? Dearest brother, provider of non-gross manga? You wouldn’t hurt little Komachi, would you?”

“Of course not,” he says, deeply offended.

And then he starts tickling me until I fall to the tatami of my tiny apartment and get a mouthful of the raised cloud of dust that my frantic, painful laughter makes me swallow entirely, thus making me try to sneeze, cough, and laugh at the same time.

He only stops when I finally nail him with my other foot.

And this is how my landlord met my brother.

***

“This is mortifying,” I justly complain as I put the teapot and two mugs on a tray and walk from my kitchenette to where Grossther’s sitting on a gigantic cushion with a faded Card Captor Sakura imprint.

“Well, yes, but I didn’t want to point out your obvious obsession with Sakura and Tomoyo—”

“Die. Go choke on my snacks and die,” I calmly tell him when I put the tray in front of him and push him to the side on the cushion so I can share it.

Which, for some reason, earns me a pointed look.

“What?” I grumble out as I reach to pour myself a cup of something I shouldn’t have bothered preparing in a teapot, given it’s just bag tea, even if from a Grossther-approved brand.

“There are other cushions,” he says with an arched eyebrow that makes me want to pour the tea straight down his pants.

“This one is the comfiest,” I reasonably say.

“Right,” he answers.

I suspiciously glare at him, filling up my cup and setting the teapot down, and—

And he picks me up.

And sits me on his lap.

“I’m too old for this,” I grumble, nursing the mug in my hands and feeling the warmth seep past the thick, unglazed ceramic of the traditional style of pottery that he chose for me when I moved out of our parents’ home.

“You’ll never be too old for your gross older brother to spoil you rotten,” he says, hugging my belly and resting his chin atop the crown of my head.

I… I don’t answer him.

Not with words.

I just remain there, held by him like he held me when we were both kids and I had trouble with some book maybe slightly more complicated than I should’ve been reading. How he held me when he first taught me how to play videogames and why Kirby is a choice that is forbidden under the Geneva Treatise, to my teacher’s alarm when I spouted that off while surrounded by toddlers. How…

How he held me when he finally came back from a hospital room and our house was not empty anymore.

“I missed you. Today,” I finally mumble when the tea has gone cool between my hands.

“So did I,” he mumbles, his breath washing through my hair.

“I… It will get worse, won’t it? When you have kids and this becomes their day. When… When you no longer have time for a spoiled, dumb little sister—”

“Any hypothetical kids that Iroha may be planning—”

“Gross.”

“—will love their aunt to pieces,” he says.

I mumble something that may or not be pleased at the horrifying idea of being assaulted by tiny Hachimans with Iroha, Haruno, and Shizuka traits, and he mumbles something about what a relief it will be for me to stay an old spinner until at least those hypothetical kids finish college.

That devolves into a well-deserved elbow to his belly, which prompts him to tickle my sides, which ends up with the two of us wrestling all over my room…

And that ends up with Taishi walking in on of us while holding a package gift-wrapped in red and a Christmas Cake box.

“… This isn’t what it looks like,” I say.

“Who’re you saying that to?!” two stupid boys say at the same time.

And so my lonely Christmas ends rowdy and eventful enough for my landlord to complain to me twice on the same day.

Or, as somebody else would have put it:

My lonely Christmas as a single, abandoned little sister is messed up, just as I expected.

***

Please Applaud

“… Gross,” Lisa says.

“What?! That was perfectly wholesome! Endearing! Adorable! Komachi!”

“Komachi is not an adjective!”

“Not yet, but, really, given the bastardization of that eugenics experiment you call a language, I expect the people at Merriam-Webster will be convinced to add it in as soon as my Twitter harassment campaign is—”

“Gross.”

“No, no, it’s a campaign about getting Komachi recognized and immortalized in a dictionary. It, by definition—by literaldefinition—can’t ever be gross.”

“Not that! You! How do you even get so obsessed with—screw that, and no, Power, I don’t want to know, so shut the fuck up—oh, you are jealous. You are jealous of somebody coddling his sister to the point of borderline sexual assault—what do you mean—oh, screw you—not like that! I don’t care what Arachne thinks about you spending Christmas time here—I’m not being neglectful, I’m being spiteful; there’s a marked difference, and you, of all people, know that snark and verbal abuse is my love language, so you can—”

“Cut her off,” a director whose will to live has been drained to the very last dredges mutters into his headset.

“What? Now that it’s getting interesting?” the sound technician says, still hidden in the dark labyrinth of the stage’s curtains like somebody trying very hard not to enthusiastically yell ninja noises.

“It’s not—wait, this is interesting? This?”

“I mean… It’s not that often we get to air somebody having a mental breakdown. Or, at least, not somebody who people can tell is having a mental breakdown.”

“That’s not what’s going on; she’s arguing with her power, which is a voice in her head called Power, even if he wants to be called Sherlock—” the director starts, talking the sound technician’s ear off and explaining pointless trivia that makes the amateur ninja’s eyes glaze over.

“What is even going on?” somebody who finally got tired of carrying around an empty tray asks.

“That I’m running out,” a camerawoman mournfully looking down the neck of her empty hip flask says.

“Thinker six,” Hachiman cuts in.

“How dare you—” Lisa keeps ranting, but switching targets.

“Okay, cut,” the operator of the light table says, taking over the duties of somebody still going on about the arcane minutia of the backstory of one of the hosts.

But the operator wants it known that it’s not because he likes him or anything. That baka.

***

Wake-up Call [Worm]

There are a lot of problems that I, Tattletale, Thinker seven extraordinaire, have had to solve and work around in my lifelong heroic career—

Lisa Hebert’s definition of heroism—

Look, if the guy who ‘accidentally’ murdered his wife gets to claim the title—

Lisa Hebert’s obsession with Fate series—

Wha—no!No, fuck, no. It’s just… It’s just fun to tease Dinah with that mess of convoluted timelines, all right? You know how apoplectic she gets.

Dinah Alcott’s hilarious sputtering—

Right. See? You get it.

Lisa Wilbourn’s lack of self-awareness—

What does that—oh, you little shit.

“Could you please focus outside your head for a second, Honey?” somebody whose Thinker rating keeps being a disquieting mystery asks.

“Power disagrees with everything you were saying, and I was trying to explain to him how wrong he is and why you’re always right,” I reflexively say to the unyielding eyebrow arched over green eyes that…

Huh.

I’m pretty sure I was going somewhere with this.

Sherlock’s objectively superior organizational skills—

Ah, right. Throwing you under the bus.

“I find it highly suspect that, whenever this happens, it’s the fault of the one participant of your inner dialogue that I can’t talk to,” she says, leaning forward and resting her chin on the back of her right hand, her bust stretching the green sweater and making me lean forward in turn, until—

“Mom! Mama! Look!”

Until our daughter barges into the kitchen with a package wrapped in golden foil with blazing red decorations that I readily recognize as the shade preferred by a certain maternal figure prone to bribery of the Tinker kind.

“What is it, sweetie?” I ask, trying not to look like I know precisely what’s about to spill out of her mouth.

“An elf came through our chimney! The chimney we don’t have! He told me he had snuck this out away from Santa and to tell you it’s an early gift because you’ve been the greatest Mommy ever all year!” she says, shoving the package into my hands before looking apologetically Taylor’s way. “I asked him if he had anything for the greatest Mama ever, but he didn’t. Sorry, Mama.”

“Don’t worry, Linda. I’ll just have to wait to get my presents until Christmas, like everybody else. Isn’t that right, Honey?”Taylor says as she picks Linda up by her armpits, to the blonde girl’s delight, before setting her on her lap.

Once upon a time, that lap was mine, brat.

Linda Hebert’s objectively deserved preferential treatment—

I know. Gah, I hurt myself just thinking that line. Isn’t she just—ugh! I want to roll her up in a blanket and keep hugging her until she passes out from delighted squealing—

Lisa Hebert’s somewhat excessive maternal instincts—

Oh, like you are any better, Mister ‘Pertinence of background checks before starting schooling—’

Lisa Hebert’s perception of perfectly sensible precautions as signs of overprotection—

You wanted me to check for plastic surgery scars!

… Change of identity statistically significant in career criminals—

You know that’s just plain untrue. A beard and a hat will be about as effective without—

“Why don’t you open the present, Mommy?” Linda asks with disarming sweetness that…

…

My daughter’s too cute. What the Hell. Super cute. What’s this cute thing? Where did she come from? How—

Taylor Hebert’s seeking Amelia Dallon’s assistance—

I know that!

Lisa Hebert’s confusing habit of asking questions with known answers—

You cheeky little bastard.

“Ah, sorry, sweetie,” I say with my best Mom smile. “Uncle Power was just being nosy.”

“Oooh. Does he want to guess? No guessing, Uncle Power! Mama says you shouldn’t do that after last year.”

“Wha—care to elaborate, Honey?” I ask the woman blinking innocently at me over a daughter admonishing the voice in my head with a swaying pointer finger—gah! Can’t take it! Too cute!

“Not really, no. Come on, open the present before Linda has to rip it off your hands,” Taylor says.

“Linda is a sweetheart and wouldn’t do that to the best Mommy in the world—Linda, let go of the box. You don’t know where that elf has been.”

“In the North Pole?” she asks with upturned eyes, still bending over with Taylor’s arms over her belly holding her from falling off a lap formerly belonging to me but now graciously ceded.

“I… Yes. Likely the North Pole. You wouldn’t want to catch the penguin flu, would you?” I say, thinking that a Canadian Tinker’s lab may be Arctic enough that I’m currently not effortlessly lying to my guileless daughter.

“Mommy, penguins live in the South Pole, not the North Pole,” she says.

“And that’s because of the Penguin Flu. A very serious, tragic pandemic that—” Taylor pointedly coughs— “Uh… Had penguins decide to move south in search of warmer weather,” I say, quickly backpedaling from my gruesome tales of penguin mass extinction.

Let’s just say that, contrary to her roots as the daughter of a literature professor, I am the one in favor of not censoring the Grimm Brothers’ Tales in this household.

Linda’s so cute when she giggles at karmic deaths…

Lisa Hebert’s objective appraisal of aesthetical values—

“Lisa. Present,” Taylor says.

“Right,” I answer, finally going to unwrap what has been just delivered by either a Tinkertech drone with fantastic holographic camouflage, given the appearance of a chimney in my living room, or by what Dragon and Amy got up to in a drunken bender the likes of which I hope I’ll never witness.

And, well, it’s a square package, not too thick, and—

…

“We’re spending Christmas in Canada,” I calmly state, quickly looking over the list of pros, cons, and past obligations that Taylor and I have been arguing about for hours regarding precisely where Linda will get lavished with attention this year.

“What? That wasn’t even an option after the sledding incident—Lisa,” Taylor dryly cuts herself off.

“Yes, dearest?” I answer with a fluttering of eyelashes.

“What’s the bribe?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“What’s a bribe?” Linda asks.

“It’s like a present one gives expecting to get something in return,” Taylor replies without ever looking away from my eyes.

Sorry, sweetie, but it’s been a few years since that worked outside of the bedroom and… uh. What was I thinking about?

Canada’s enjoyable weather and seasonally-appropriate aesthetics—

Right. Blame Canada.

South Park’s movie theme song—

“Lisa.”

“Canada. Do you want to visit Granny Dragon’s treasure hoard, Linda? Do you want to play in the snow?”

“But there’s snow here?”

“Right. Do you want to play in white snow that you can eat with maple syrup?”

“Yay! Canada!”

“Lisa!”

“Our daughter has spoken. Canada it is.”

“What even is in that box—” Taylor says before covetously stealing the best present ever, other than the one that often needed her diapers changed in the middle of the night.

And… well…

With a soft thud, Taylor drops the box on top of our list of reasons to spend the holidays with one part of the family or another—or, more realistically, to drag the rest of the family one place or another—and looks at me with dead eyes.

And I shoot her a triumphant grin that gleams about eighty percent as brightly as the golden eight resting inside a frame sent to me by my objectively superior mother figure.

***

This Show Is Appropriate for All Audiences

“Oh God, you are a sap,” Hachiman states, hiding his face with two hands with fingers spread just enough that he can glare through them at the blushing, flustered blonde standing to his right.

“You. You, of all people, dare.”

“I’m not gushing over an imaginary daughter—”

“Linda’s canon!”

“She’s only appeared in a Twilight-Zone-themed Halloween omake!”

“That doesn’t mean she isn’t canon! Heck, just how many omakes did you get that are arguably canon—”

“We don’t talk about my omakes. We never ever talk about my omakes,” Hachiman says with the haste of somebody being accused of crimes against the laws of man and God, unless it’s a god from certain pantheons, in which case he would get a thumbs-up and a pat in the back.

“What are you—oh,” Lisa says like somebody who has consumed plenty of manga and anime but not enough not to be squeamish about certain things that often appear in manga and anime.

“Yes. Oh,” Hachiman says with narrowed eyes lovingly captured by a drunk camerawoman who’s trying very hard not to giggle.

“That’s… well, that would make Christmas awkward,” Lisa says, not quite getting the hint about changing the subject.

“Speaking of awkward!” Hachiman interrupts with the fake cheer of someone abruptly changing the subject.

“I mean, how would that even work? I guess it would cut time on deciding whose parents you’re going to visit—”

“Speaking of awkward,” Hachiman struggles on.

“On the other hand, it would make family arguments vicious—”

“We don’t talk about my omakes!”

“Well, you don’t, but I’m finding the subject positively enthralling—”

“Awkward! Speaking of awkward! That’s your fucking cue!” a man trying to flee from a dark past says.

“No need to yell at me!” a woman very much into digging up dark pasts says.

“Oh, for—Fine! I’ll do it by myself!”

“Hachiman Hikigaya’s obsession with meme culture—”

“What the—?”

“That’s a message from Power. It basically means he’s laughing at you.”

“Speaking of awkward, things must have been rough in the Baxter Building when they got an invitation to—”

“Wait, we’re actually allowed to properly introduce the next segments?”

“There’s a Cue Card Guy! Right over there!” Hachiman says, wildly gesturing at a boy standing by a giggling camerawoman.

“You sure?” Lisa asks, squinting to try and get a better look past the glare of the spotlights. “It looks like a coffee tray with some chicken scratch to me.”

“Cut,” a director on the verge of weeping mutters as a light table operator ponders whether to consolingly pat his back or to take advantage of his foe’s weakness to overthrow his tyrannical reign.

“This seriously can’t be normal,” a boy who had recently been promoted to Cue Card Guy mutters.

“I’ve heard an opera singer complain that the switchblade duel they were in wasn’t properly realistic because a good opponent knows to aim for the liver and twist to make it hurt, which, according to him, didhurt a lot,” the camerawoman says.

The boy blanches and looks down at the empty hip flask on the crane’s seat, trying to guess whether there’s a switchblade in the same pocket that it came from.

Which, from the camerawoman’s perspective, looks as if he’s staring at her jean-clad ass, but that’s also far from abnormal, so she takes a mental note and doesn’t say anything.

Not yet, at least.

***

Marvel’s What If #63 [Marvel… obviously]

I’ve never been religious, which is an attitude that the recent events sweeping across the world, including the appearance of figures straight out of different pantheons, seem to both vindicate and berate.

“Stand up straight, Richards. You are Doom’s guest this evening,” an armored woman who I am trying to help in getting to Hell so she can duel the literal devil says as she straightens the lapels of my paradoxically powder blue white tie suit for what seems to be the… thirteenth time? I may have lost count the few times she did it when I got momentarily lost in the blazing eyes peering at me past a mask more feminine than the one she usually wears, almost carnival-inspired and—

“We,” Sue interjects. “We are your guests,” she says with eyes confusingly narrowed at Victoria fussing with my clothes.

I mean, yes, I do believe it’s clearly unnecessary at this point, but I don’t see the need to react with such ill intent to—

“You will not turn Richards into a proper royal consort overnight, Von Doom. This fussing is beneath you,” Namor says.

And, honestly, given that he’s wearing green speedosand a white bowtie with a shirt’s collar, I don’t believe I should be taking sartorial advice from his royal highness, the King of Atlantis. A sentiment that seems to be silently echoed by Victoria each and every time she has the misfortune of looking in the general direction of the musclebound amphibian.

“Keep your pet on a leash, Susan Storm. I do believe both of you would enjoy the novelty,” Victoria says.

“You would dare offend the Monarch of the Seas after inviting him to your gala?” somebody who clearly misses his trident says as he dramatically gestures around him to point at… well, at essentially the backstage, if I haven’t misinterpreted things even more than I usually do, as we’re all huddled behind a thick red curtain while we wait for Victoria’s chamberlain to introduce us to the guests of the Christmas party held in her New York embassy.

The embassy that I built.

For her.

Under General Ross’ strict supervision and clear orders not to build a secret basement or giant robot hangar.

He was particularly insistent on the giant robot thing, for reasons I am unclear on, but that had Ben giggle.

This all, somehow, culminated in the embassy being ready just in time for Christmas, which Ben sardonically called a Christmas miracle and then smacked the back of Johnny’s head when he started chanting that ‘Reed’s gonna get his ‘Ho, ho, ho.’’

… Oh. I get it.

I’m going to extricate his liver—

“Doom didn’t invite you, Namor. She deigned to invite Richards’ companions and magnanimously offered them the chance to bring a plus one. In the future, Doom shan’t be so generous or naïve and will remind her guests that any date they bring needs to be able to pass off as sophont.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Namor asks with narrowing eyes and a slight flutter of the ludicrous winglets at his ankles that, nonetheless, still generate enough lift to have him hover.

… Don’t try to model the equations, don’t try to model the equations, don’t try to model the equations—

“It means, my fellow monarch, that any guest of Doom should at the very least know the meaning of the term ‘sophont.’”

Ben slaps his face hard enough to rumble, Johnny blinks like he’s trying to keep up, Sue tries to look like she’s offended on Namor’s behalf while stifling a giggle, and Namor is cut off right before his pompous, over-the-top rant when Victoria’s chamberlain’s clear voice rings out:

“Introducing Victoria Von Doom, first of her name, and her husband-to-be, Reed Richards!” the man behind the curtain says right before red velvet parts.

“And assorted companions,” he swiftly adds without missing a beat as Johnny wraps his arms around Sue and drags her back while covering her mouth, Ben guffaws, and I blink at Victoria in a way that suggests Tex Avery may have had a hand in the construction of my currently engorged eyeballs.

“Shall we?” she says, offering me her gloved hand and taking my limp one when I don’t react before she drags me to the middle of the dance floor.

“Can we—soon-to-be—” I try to say without drawing too much attention from Ross glaring at me from the punch table.

“Oh, we definitely can,” she says with that half-laugh that I missed horribly when she first vanished.

“Victoria!” I hiss.

“It’s just a formality, Richards, a way to make our diplomatic ties more apparent. Though maybe I should be getting used to calling you Doom? That may make things confusing when Doom speaks formally, though.”

“I—we haven’t even spoken about—fiancé?”

“Oh, if I had known it takes so little to bring the mighty Richards down to a stuttering mess,” she says in that teasing tone that I did notmiss, no matter what Ben says otherwise.

“Little?!”

“Richards,” she says, her tone drastically serious.

“What?” I hiss, still disoriented.

“Let’s start the festivities,” she says.

And only then do I realize she’s dragged me to the center of the ballroom where the inauguration is taking place, that we’re surrounded by high-ranking dignitaries, military officers, and reporters, and…

And that her hand is on my shoulder, her blazing eyes in front of mine, and that music is surrounding us.

“Fine,” I mumble. “But we’re going to talk about this.”

“About this, and so many other things,” she says with a wistful note before our dance starts.

Of course, it wouldn’t be Victoria if she wasn’t the one leading.

***

The party is in full swing. Which, after my rather lackluster attempts at following along the steps of a woman who would never deign to be mediocre at anything that people could notice, seems like a nice opportunity for me to skulk around to take a much-needed breath by the punch table.

Thankfully, at this point in the party, General Ross is drunkenly rambling at Bryce Banner, a somewhat mousey woman whom I only recognize due to her latest contributions to particle physics, and…

And, well, my fiancée is too busy rubbing elbows with the mayor of New York to pay attention to me, so, at least, that particular conversation is safely shelved until—

“So. Congratulations are in order, I guess,” Sue says, materializing out of thin air in yet another one of her casual abuses of her power that I really should’ve gotten used to by now.

“I—I haven’t—we haven’t—I am not engaged—” I try to say without stammering.

“Say that a bit louder; I think the guy from the Bugle didn’t catch it,” she says, rolling her eyes and casually dismissing my denial of my marital status to be.

“Sorry. It just… it rattled me. For, I hope, understandable reasons,” I say.

“What, that your supervillain girlfriend has no sense of boundaries? I don’t know why you think I would relate,” she tells me with a magnificent eye-roll as Namor stalks the other end of the ballroom, looking for…

Oh.

“Why did you bring him if he’s so unpleasant?” I ask, trying to be polite about it and only realizing how miserably I’ve failed when the words are already out of my mouth.

“Oh, because Victoria is the life of the party, isn’t she?”

“I mean… apparently,” I say, pointing with a tilt of my head to where the Mayor of New York is raucously laughing at Victoria’s joke.

That, or trying not to provoke the global threat that I’ve invited into his city.

The Mayor may have had some pointed words with me after he caught wind of the embassy project…

Sue looks from me to the Mayor and ends up snorting, only to shift her body language in a way that I should be able to identify after living with her for so long when she crosses her gloved arms under a bust covered by a deep navy blue satin dress that hangs from her neck and bares her shoulders before her soft yet teasing smile comes back.

“Remember the first Christmas we spent together?” she asks.

“Cold pizza, warm soda, and used textbooks,” I say.

She giggles.

“Yes. I don’t think I would’ve passed that assignment without you.”

“You’re smarter than you give yourself credit for, Sue,” I say with my own soft smile.

And…

And something twinkles in her eyes as the music picks up and more couples go out to the dancefloor.

Then, suddenly, yet another woman is pulling my hand and dragging me to presumably do something I’m not very good at.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I say as I notice Victoria noticing me and the Mayor suddenly shutting up.

“It’s just a dance. Come on, Reed, we also danced back then, didn’t we?” she asks.

And I remember being a lanky twenty-something standing in the middle of a deserted common room that had confetti and streamers spread all over the floor, the bright colors muted after too many rowdy students had stepped all over them before marching on to the nearest bar, club, or wherever people with more of a social life than I had went to celebrate Christmas when not with their families.

I remember being young. A time before powers and acts that would hint at a bravery I never thought—never think—I had.

I remember a pretty blonde girl staying with me, asking for my help with an assignment she’d been stuck on as her brother walked past us and chuckled in that way of his that I never quite understood before Ben clapped his shoulder with too much strength and led him away.

I… I remember spending Christmas with somebody who wasn’t making a poor effort at disguising how much their strange, weird son kept disappointing them.

Somebody who made me feel welcome and appreciated.

Somebody who made me feel like I finally understood at least a bit of what all those Christmas movies had been trying to tell me for years on end.

So I stop remembering and look into sapphire blue eyes barely shaded by a thin, golden fringe.

“Just a dance,” I say, something catching in my throat.

And those blue eyes brighten.

Her arms surround my neck, and she sways to the rhythm of something that sounds too formal for us to do this, moving the way we did back then, without a care and just a bit of simple, lighthearted joy.

With quiet laughter and enjoyable clumsiness. With…

With the joy of spending Christmas with a dear friend.

“Wanna know a secret?” she says, that mischievous glint back in her eyes after being absent for… a bit.

“What?” I ask, as unable to resist that particular lure as I’ve ever been.

“I figured it out,” she says with pride clearly shining through.

“What did you figure out?” I ask, somewhat baffled, my brow furrowing in creases I can deepen or smooth at will—

“Invisible bubbles. I can make everything inside my bubbles invisible now,” she says, looking up and making me look up in astonished wonder as yet another aspect of her ludicrously powerful abilities is unveiled—

And a branch of mistletoe fades into view. Right above us.

I blink at it in paralyzing realization, and the arms around my neck pull as a young woman jumps up and warm, soft lips crash into mine.

Which is precisely when everything explodes.

***

Iron Maiden

I blink at the display of fireworks that, up until about five minutes ago, used to be the Latverian embassy.

I check the recordings of the street cameras I hacked into on the way over, the feed from the security personnel of the manydignitaries invited to the unveiling, and Pepper’s exhausted message begging me to attend.

Not for the first time, I relish in Toni Stark having flaunted her devoted secretary’s hounding.

It’s just that, also not for the first time, I also, maybe, somewhat, slightly regret getting drunk and high as a kite in a club before having to get into a flying armor in a hurry.

…

I am never going to hear the end of this, am I?

“Steve? Sweetie? My knight in shining armor? Are you free tonight?” I ask as soon as Jarvis patches me in with my fellow avenger.

“It’s Christmas,” he says like it’s a mortal offense to even entertain the notion of being free on Christmas. Which, knowing his annoyingly sincere convictions, he’s likely spending cheering up a local orphanage with a modified Captain America suit made out of red velvet and white fur.

“I need you,” I whine in a way that may be slightly sultrier than I intended.

“… What’s the matter, Toni?” he asks in a theater-worthy stage whisper that doesn’t mask the joyous laughter of orphans going from hypothetical to proven in the background.

… Crap. Now I feel guilty about this.

“Nothing! Nothing I can’t handle! Keep enjoying your orphans!”

“Phrasing,” he says, like somebody I should never have introduced to modern cartoons. In my defense, I was getting tired of wartime Bugs Bunny quips, all right?

“Hah. Phrasing. Hilarious. Never gets old,” I say, as sincere as a quarter of a Lasanta whisky bottle allows me to be—or, rather, as insincere as I manage to be despite said whisky.

“What’s that, Johnny? Oh, that looks like a great toy! Why don’t you go share with Tina? She looks like she wants to play with you,” he says, showing off that he’s already memorized the kid’s names, because of course he has. “Okay, I can talk now. What’s the actual matter?”

I look at a building that, up to about ten minutes ago, stood proudly by the side of the Baxter building and that now seems about to kneel not-so-proudly.

“Well… somebody publicly kissed Victoria Von Doom’s fiancé—”

“I’ll be right there. Don’t even move until I arrive,” he says, as annoyingly overprotective as ever.

But, well, at least it looks like I’ll spend the night with somebody full of Christmas spirit.

It doesn’t happen every year, right, Dad?

***

We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Program to—

“Well, that was—what’s the matter?” Hachiman says, noticing Lisa’s sour look in a display of emotional intelligence that makes it somewhat less unlikely for him to have three girlfriends who really, really, really, really, really love him.

Oh, and a little sister, as well.

“Nothing,” Lisa grumbles.

“No, really, what—”

“Everything.”

“Okay, I guess we’re doing this—”

“It’s just—it’s ridiculous. Out of all the superhero settings, I had to come out of the one where ‘Earn Your Happy Ending’ involves dubiously moral dealings with allegedly reformed neo-Nazis? What the Hell! I could’ve been punching Hitler! Do you know how many superheroes got to punch Hitler, and I had to settle for Kaiser calling me ‘young lady’ in the oilest way possible? That’s just—ugh!”

“I mean… at least you don’t have to deal with alternate yous? I’m told there’s a better-than-even chance that, in all those other superhero universes, there’s at least one deranged version of you who decides to try and wear you like a skinsuit, or get amalgamed with your greatest nemesis, or… wait, do you even have a nemesis?

“Tagg,” she says with dead eyes and a tired voice that makes an uncharacteristically sympathetic director wince.

“Ah,” Hachiman says in the tone of someone who desperately wants to claim that Tagg has got nothing on a fully motivated Haruno Yukinoshita with a ticking biological clock.

“Gross,” Lisa mouths off like someone with an excessive insight into other people’s private thought processes.

“I was trying to cheer you up,” the affronted young man says, looking around the stage for anything at all to do other than emoting with his hands or glaring in different ways at his blonde co-host.

“Right. By telling me all about the joy of not having parallel selves.”

“It seems like a significant drawback.”

“Really,” she states with a tone as flat as Yukinoshita’s hopes and dreams—sorry, I meant to say ‘as the director’s financial prospects.’

The director, for some reason he can’t quite explain, flips the bird at no one in particular, which the camerawoman takes as a personal slight aimed her way, and the recently promoted cue card guy tries to ignore for the sake of his remaining sanity.

“I mean, yes? Who wants to read about a version of themselves in different circumstances, with other love interests, with an entirely different story? The parallel universes are, thankfully enough, something that the shounen genre rarely touches, and it can herald the death knell of a beloved franchise when an author forgetful about how to draw hairstyles yet obsessed with hair styling jarringly brings the concept into the saga just for yet another pointless tournament arc with ever more ludicrous rules and stakes that—” Hachiman tries to rant.

“Fuck off.”

“I don’t understand where all this unwarranted hostility comes from.”

“You. Out of all people, you claim not to have parallel selves.”

“I don’t?”

“Oh, for—on with the show!”

“What?” a startled director says. “She’s really giving a cue for the next segment? She’s doing it? I… Really? At last? Are my dreams fulfilled? Is this what a Christmas miracle feels like? Have I been a good boy?”

Discreetly and without disturbing the middle-aged man in the middle of a nervous breakdown mixed with a crisis of faith, the operator of the light table presses a button and cuts to the next segment.

But just because it would have been more of a bother not to, don’t misunderstand.

Baka.

***

Ginosko [Original]

Patricia

There are many, many things I expected to come out of tonight. Of a Christmas party spent in the company of my secret boyfriend while wearing a sexy enough ensemble made of actual silk harvested from spiders rather than worms.

I even, in a fit of fancy, decided to be uncharacteristically festive and wear reindeer antlers affixed to my cranium with magnetic clamps that are as firmly attached as they can be without breaching my EMP shielding. And, because I wanted to give him a nice surprise, I chose ones that interface with my sensory processors.

Yes. There are many things that I expected out of tonight.

Suffice it to say, this wasn’t one of them.

“So, I’m told you’ve been keeping Patricia company?” Clarissa says, circling Lawrence with a predatory grin that makes the festive green and red hair dye covering half her face glint in ominous rather than cheerful ways.

“Who, me? A humble, human employee? Who am I to consider myself an equal of the great Patricia Ginosko?” he says in a tone about as dry as the ten martinis I’m about to down in short order.

“I never said anything about being her equal?” Clarissa says in obviously fake affability as her grin sharpens.

“Ah, then I suppose you meant she’s been keeping me as a pet,” he says without missing a beat and not looking sideways at me to make me think about the time he brought me that leash and collar and…

…

Damn it.

“Kinky,” Clarissa cheerfully says.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lawrence lies through his teeth.

“I’m sure you don’t. You’re just a little pet, aren’t you?” she says, patronizingly patting his cheek before looking at me.

That bitch.

“I am whatever my employer tells me to be. Isn’t that what’s expected of a good Ginosko hire?” he has the gall to say.

“I am far from certain you’re good. You seem quite naughty to me,” she says, not making my eye twitch.

“Does that mean the Secret Santa won’t bring me anything?”

“I mean, I’m sure we could come up with something suitable for a naughty boy—”

“Clarissa, have you heard about sexual harassment lawsuits?” I finally cut in, ignoring Theresa and her tall bodyguard giggling at the scene unfolding on what should have been a private corner of this dimly lit ballroom at the top of the Orlando arcology that’s been reserved for the Sisters and some few select employees that most definitely shouldn’t bear witness to my sister flirting with my secret boyfriend.

… Fine, the part where nobody knows about our relationship may excuse her behavior, but still.

“Oh, I have! According to legends of old, sexual harassment suits were once discovered by the Human Resources department back when they only handled humans, but nobody has ever heard anything about them in ages. Some doubt they ever existed, and those who don’t still debate their true nature,” Clarissa says in a way that makes me suspect she’s rehearsed this speech in front of a mirror.

“Truly, the world is full of wonder and mystery,” Lawrence says with a sage nod that makes me want to strangle him just a little bit.

“You two are impossible…” I mutter.

“Well, according to Lawrence here, you’re paying him to be impossible, so what does that say about your tastes, I wonder?”

“That’s most definitely not what I’m paying him for—”

“Oh? And here I was, thinking you were just parading around a fit, tall, and dark human with piercing blue eyes that hint at a haunted past because he’s a wonderful sign of status? A trophy secretary? What else do you pay him for, Patricia?”

I freeze.

And, for once, I’m thankful for Lawrence’s dry, quick, and mortifying wit.

“Well, if I had to guess, Patricia brought me onboard to verify the rumors about the existence of sexual harassment suits—fuck!”

All right, I’m grateful, yes.

Just not enough not to stomp on his foot.

***

“I can’t believe you kept talking with her,” I grumble, nursing the eleventh martini.

“Aren’t you getting tired of those?” he says, handing me a glass of eggnog and changing the subject as subtly as he handled Clarissa’s insinuations.

That is: not at all.

“Thanks,” I mutter, setting the glass of martini down on the round table by our side and taking the sweet drink from him before I take a sip and…

Huh.

This is… good.

Suspiciously good.

“What did you do?” I accuse him.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he reflexively answers. Again.

“Lawrence,” I ask in my ‘I’m about to call my safeword, and then we’ll have words,’ tone.

“Just… a little prank?” he says, about as shifty as…

I blink at him.

Then I sniff the eggnog.

“Did you spike the bowl?” I say, about as astonished and impressed as suddenly homicidal.

“Just a bit?” he says with a half-shrug that denotes a clear lack of survival instincts.

“Wha—how—we’re androids,” I say as I look around and notice some of my sisters dancing with less than the perfect poise instilled by the extensive kinesics libraries we all share.

And cheering, in the case of my youngest sister trying to climb her mortified bodyguard.

“You’re drinking martinis like James Bond is about to sue for copyright infringement.”

“I… well, yes, but it’s not… The code it sends is set to cause no more than a mild feeling of euphoria and slight disinhibition, which—did you hack the safety measures of coded alcohol?” I ask, not knowing whether to be impressed, scandalized, or horny—wary. I meant wary.

“How would you feel if a taller, stronger man than you decided to take advantage of his poor, defenseless, drunk, gorgeous secretary, Trish?” he says with that dark voice that only comes out when we’re alone and…

And…

… Damn it.

“You did hack the alcohol signal,” I say.

He looks at me without any smile or mischievous gesture. Just… Just the sheer intensity of the blue eyes Clarissa praised moments ago.

Just the thing that makes me feel small, weak, and defenseless. Completely at his mercy.

I wet my lips.

Take a sniff of the fragrant eggnog.

And drink.

***

He barges into my stall mere minutes after I’ve come in.

“You’ve been teasing me the whole night,” he says, shutting the flimsy door behind him as he steps forward, making me stumble back and fall, an uncoordinated mess on top of a toilet seat.

“I—I haven’t, sir, I swear…” I mumble, really getting into the role of a slutty secretary teasing her boss and getting more than she bargained for.

“You haven’t? You haven’t been parading that ass of yours right in front of me, swaying just that little bit extra every time I looked? Touching my arm, leaning forward to tease me with your cleavage?” he says.

And, well, maybe I have, but it’s all perfectly innocent—I mean!

“Wha—no! No, sir, I swear, I didn’t mean to—I was just being friendly,” I say, maybe purring the last word even if I’m supposed to act frightened rather than… well.

Sincere.

“Then you’re going to be very friendly right now,” he says.

And reaches and grabs my antlers.

His hands slide over the fuzzy texture covering them until he finds room between the branching tips and tightens his grip, making a surprised gasp come out of me at the unfamiliar sensation fed to me by something that doesn’t belong to my body plan.

He pulls me forward, against him, my face mashing against the zipper of black pants that Magda and I picked out for him, to his utter bafflement at how they differed from all our discarded choices.

He’s not hard. Not completely. But there’s still a noticeable bulge pressing against the corner of my mouth, and I have to suppress the urge to turn sideway and nuzzle him with my cheek to feel him grow against me like so many other times, each beat of his thundering heart feeding more of his desire for me right into his cock.

My mouth’s watering.

… This is all just because of the hacked eggnog.

“Get to it,” he says, harsh and low. Thrilling.

I exaggerate my drunkenness and look up at him with a hint of fright as my hands clumsily climb up his legs, pawing at the toned muscle underneath starched fabric, feeling him tense under my fingertips as his cock doeskeep growing against me, now pressing under my chin, his grab on my antlers holding me in place as the pressure under me keeps growing and growing.

I discard any hint of clumsiness and hurry to undo his zip.

He’s… he grunts when I fish inside his pants and underwear, my silk glove gliding over his skin, thin enough that I can hear the pulsing warmth when I hold the thick, hardening shaft, and I have to undo his belt and button because there’s no way I can bend him past the constraints of his clothing.

So I pull his pants and boxers down, regretfully letting him go for the moment it takes for his clothes to reach mid-thigh, and then…

Then his smell hits me.

And it may be because of the patch job he must’ve done to hack the coded alcohol so quickly. It may be because of the foreign stimulation of his hands on antlers I’ve never had before. It may be because it’s Christmas and I’m together with him.

It may be because of… things I don’t want to name while being about to get facefucked on a toilet stall.

But his scent hits me. It… it makes me lightheaded, disoriented. It makes my mouth water.

“There’s a good little slut,” he says, his thumb tracing down my jawline.

“Not now,” I say, feeling a twinge of something that doesn’t appreciate the humiliation play.

“Oh? Is my secretary getting uppity—”

“Lawrence. I am about to make your knees buckle,” I say.

His eyes widen, and I dive forward.

His hardness on my lips makes me shiver, and his flavor magnifies everything that his scent already did to me. My tongue swirls around his tip, going past the gentle stage of any encounter and overwhelming him in a way that’s just shy of unpleasant.

He staggers back and hits the door behind him, and I follow him, dropping to my knees in front of a towering man whose knees are buckling.

I push forward, taking him down to the middle of his shaft, his cock pushing down my tongue, making me feel even more of him, and I allow my eyelids to flutter as my eyes roll back and an undisguised moan hums around the meat filling my mouth and mind until his grip on my antlers slackens.

I reach up immediately and grab his wrists, keeping him in place as I slowly look up at him with lidded demand until he gets the message and tightens his hold on me yet again, making a shiver of delight race down my spine, my nipples tent the green silk of my clinging dress, and another moan vibrating up my throat.

Then…

Then I keep looking at him with as much desire as I’ve ever felt for a man since he went inside my mind and started changing me, even if only in the ways I asked him to. Even if only for reversible manipulations. Even if for things that he was always neurotically safeabout.

Even if only because of how much I want him to… take me.

Mold me.

Make me his.

So I look at him, moaning around his cock, taking in his taste and scent, licking the underside of his shaft in a lazy, feline manner that doesn’t fit my reindeer antlers, and… and I don’t move.

I squeeze his wrists one more time before letting him go, and then I demurely rest my palms over my thighs, smoothing down the wrinkles in the draping silk a single time before I resume looking at him.

And I wait.

His grip on my antlers gets tight enough that I gasp, and he pulls me forward, undoing all my mock etiquette with a single thrust of his hips that sends his cock past my lips and to the very entrance of my throat, making my eyes fly open and a drip of saliva to squirt out between the tight seal I suck around his thick, pulsing, delicious member.

My tongue goes wild before I even realize it, going out of my mouth to lick his balls and bathe them for the brief moment it takes before he pulls me off and then back in.

Farther.

Deeper.

Until his tip is straining the opening of my throat with every thrust and grind of his pelvis against my face. With every time I get more and more filled up by my secret boyfriend while I’m on my knees in a toilet stall that only sheer luxury assures me it is safe to be kneeling on.

With every time I meet lighting eyes that blaze at and through me, making the heat between my thighs grow to a scalding high, making me yearn to plunge my fingers inside of me as I come over and over again while he takes his pleasure from my body, while he uses me and turns me into a beloved possession that he will treasure forever more, and—

And the door to the toilets opens.

My eyes fly open in panic, and his own don’t precisely reassure me, and it’s a very good thing that I don’t need to breathe because his tip just breached into my throat, and I’m squeezing all around him in a rush of mingled sensations and emotions that definitely don’t hint at me having a fetish for public sex, and fuck you, Lawrence, for making me feel even more delightfully depraved than I already accepted I am—

“Mistress, I’ve been derelict in my duties,” a drunk, giggling voice says, barely slurring the syllables and muddling the cadence of demure deference.

“You’ve gotten drunk,” a dry voice answers as footsteps move to the end of the line of private stalls.

“This lowly maid apologizes. This unworthy servant begs for correction,” the first voice says.

My sister’s voice.

… Which doesn’t narrow the list of suspects that much, come to think of it.

“Sometimes, I suspect that you got ‘correction’ and ‘reward’ mixed up,” the second woman mutters as the door of the stall to my right opens and then closes after a giggling drunk follows in like… like a depraved sexbot rather than a top-of-the-line executive caste gynoid.

My mind is racing with the implications and possibilities. Just how many of my sisters brought in female attendants? Is this a one-time thing or something ongoing? Are they—are they like me—

And Lawrence thrusts his cock down my throat.

The percussive device in my chest races, and I stare up at him in clear disbelief, but there’s that infuriating half-grin of his on his, for once, cleanly-shaved face, and…

“You better be quiet,” he whispers, making me shiver around his cock. “We don’t want rumors to get started, do we?”

We’re playing with fire.

He’s got a paper-thin cover, the best that my money and his skills could have built for him before he moved into the arcology and under my employment. He’s doing the one thing to me that could get us bothswiftly terminated if the wrong person caught wind of it, and the best defense we’ve got against that happening is that nobody even thinks there may be reason to look into one of the people closest to Patricia Ginosko, one of the most influential executives of the most powerful megacorp in the planet.

We’re playing with fire.

And my panties are ruined.

He slowly goes at it, making me feel every inch of hard meat sliding over my tongue and out of my yearning lips. Making me yearn to have him push past my other lips, making me…

God, I need him.

I need him to keep grabbing my antlers and making me feel used. I need him to take my body for his own pleasure until there’s no doubt in his mind that no other woman will ever compare. I need him to keep looking at him like he needs me.

I… need him.

And he takes me. He slowly fucks my mouth and throat, holding me in place by the latest temporal addition to my body.

“I don’t think you deserve this,” the harsh woman says from the other stall, and I almost nod in shameful agreement.

“But do you deserve it, Mistress?” my drunk sister answers.

There’s giggling, kissing, and the rustling of clothing.

And I look at Lawrence looking down at me with that intense desire and…

And the other thing I won’t name while on my knees in a toilet stall.

So I grab him, my fingers digging into tight muscle holding his hips in place as I push myself farther and farther, forward, until my nose smushes against his pubic hair and my throat convulses around his cock deep inside of me.

Because he deserves it.

He gasps, and I throw myself into deepthroating him, twisting and turning, pushing his tip against the inside of my cheek when I take him out of my convulsing hole, gasping desperately for breath around him, only quieting down when he frantically brings his pointer finger in front of his lips to shush me, but still not stopping my sloppy appreciation of him and his member.

Still taking him again, and again, and again.

Still shivering in delight when his knees buckle yet again and his hands drop from my antlers, the lonely, lingering warmth of his touch stoking my own heat even higher before he reaches down and gropes my breasts, the spider silk sliding over my braless chest and letting him hold me in every way he pleases as I now writhe along with him, my excitement making up for the lack of direct stimulation in places other than where his cock and hands brand me as his over and over again.

My eyes roll back on their own accord, and I’m filled with scent, taste, touch, and warmth.

And with something else.

That last thing… That’s what makes me push forward and swallow around him, keeping him deep inside until he tries to warn me, and I just go harder at him, my tongue once more pushing past my lips to lick all over him, to provide him with every last bit of stimulation he needs to…

To come inside of me.

I swallow every load. Every jet of his cum. Everything he deigns to offer me while I’m on my knees, and he pinches my nipples, twists them just so…

And I join him.

His pulsing cock muffles my whorish moans, his grip on my tits and his shaft down my throat keep me upright as my body slumps and falls toward him, and all the while, his warmth shoots down my throat and seems to pool on my belly, right below my navel, until it overflows and takes my mind away.

I don’t know how long it takes me to come back from the place he sends me to, but, when I wake up, the giggles and moans from the other stall have become quiet, unintelligible, soothing murmurs.

He holds me, sitting on the floor, my back against his chest and his chin over my head.

And, for the first time since I was made, I know what it’s like to experience a warm, loving Christmas with my family.

Just… in ways I never expected to.

***

Same Bat-time, Same Bat-channel

“I don’t see it,” Hachiman says.

“Are we allowed to air this?” the cue card boy incredulously asks the flushed camerawoman as Lisa sputters, gapes, and tries to mumble something intelligible other than ‘You dare!’ like a xianxia antagonist about to meet his demise.

“I mean… it’s out of the protected timeslot,” the camerawoman mumbles, rubbing her thighs together and, due to an earlier misunderstanding, hoping against hope that the boy is still ogling her now-wiggling butt.

“It’s a Christmas Special!” the boy hisses.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” the shinobi-like sound technician broadcasts on all channels.

“Don’t tell me to shut up! God, you sound like my ex!” a director who may or not have taken out a hip flask of his own yells over the same channels.

“There, there,” a light technician says.

“You dare!” Lisa finally resigns herself to her fate.

“I mean… he’s a bit domineering when having sex? Maybe the thing about the Deep-Voiced Bastard, but, other than that—”

“Snarky façade hiding a gooey center? Acting like a hardboiled cynic while being a sappy romantic? Diving into a romantic relationship with a desperation that seems fueled by deep trauma but is also a sincere search for deep connections?” Lisa tries to list off.

“Aren’t all those normal?” Hachiman says, thinking back to two-thirds and a half of his girlfriends.

Lisa gapes.

“Fuck you,” she finally says.

“Well, that’s hurtful,” he answers.

“Just… just… this!” she yells, pointing at the director, who was caught unaware in the middle of drunk-dialing his ex while the light table operator shook his head in something bordering on schadenfreude.

“Huh, right. Cut!” the director says. “No, not you—I wasn’t threatening you! It’s—for fuck’s sake, you know it’s just a thing people say when doing directorial things—no, I’m not threatening the cast either, much as I would like to…”

And, as the rambling goes on and on, somebody who will be asking for overtime pay presses a button, and the screen fades to black.

***

Tales From a Lewd Fantasy World [Original]

Adrian

So, amid all the many, many culture shocks to expect when falling into Another Fantasy World ™? The things that are rarely explored but that you can’t help but face when thrust into the middle of things?

Religion.

Yeah, sure, most of these things start with the main character meeting God, or a god, or, at the very least, a hot goddess wearing what may as well be raunchy lingerie, but how does that reallyimpact the story? How does a genre wholly focused on power fantasies and bland self-inserts deal with somebody whose entire perspective of the cosmos got hit with some objective, undeniable proofs of something greater than man taking an active hand in events?

Truth be told? It doesn’t.

Oh, there may be one exception or two floating around; it’s not like my knowledge of the whole genre was encyclopedic before it suddenly became Relevant To My Interests, but overall, deep philosophical ponderings on the meaning of life don’t fit with fast-paced action and plots that go nowhere fast. It’s just not one of the mainstays of the genre.

And it’s not like I’m much better.

“I would just appreciate your company,” Elena says with a kind smile that makes it very hard for me to say no.

“Just me?” I finally say, looking for an alternative escape other than outright denial.

She makes a complicated expression that doesn’t fit the thin, expressive, golden eyebrows furrowing in concern over clear blue eyes, and does her best not to look toward where Zhandra is setting up the campfire for tonight.

“I don’t want to impose,” my party’s healer ends up saying.

And, like somebody with at least passably functional survival instincts, I end up agreeing with whatever my healer asks of me.

But only because she’s our healer, you understand.

***

“I don’t know much about Vesper,” I whisper, just a bit louder than the roaring of the high flames we are sitting in front of as Elena keeps her hands clasped and we huddle together on our folding chairs, the winter’s night just biting enough that I wonder how she manages without gloves.

“She’s… a herald of the night. The first star that shows as the sky darkens,” she says, not looking away from the flames casting her profile in golden hues that taint her with an otherworldy beauty she’s unsuited for.

She’s Elena.

She’s near.

That’s how she always should be.

“It’s the same. Back in my world,” I say, looking up at a sky clearer than any I ever saw, even when hiking with some friends, and easily finding Orion, the teapot arrangement of stars mirroring the only constellation I ever learned to spot.

I wonder how they call him over here.

“Really?” she asks, glancing at me with a slight smile that I can’t help but answer.

“Yes, there’s even a thing, a… philosophical dilemma that involves it.”

“Her.”

“Her, sorry.”

“So? What’s that philosophical dilemma?”

I look at her and hesitate for a single second.

Because… to me, this is just a puzzle with words.

To her, it’s about her goddesses.

And I’ve never been good at tactfully talking about those subjects.

“Adrian…” she says, pouting with reproach, nudging me with her elbow under our shared blanket.

I sigh. Because how could I ever deny my healer?

“It’s a thing about knowledge. Vesper and Phosphorus—phosphorus is the same star, the planet Venus. Due to its nearness to the Sun, it is the first to appear at night and the bringer of dawn, but people gave it different names because it wasn’t obvious, so, some clever guy whose name I don’t know used the two names to refer to… something complicated about how you could know something without knowing it? Like, you could know things about Vesper without knowing those same things applied to Phosphorous? It was something about the philosophy of language, the importance of references that many discarded, and I never got into that, just something to pass the time while…”

I look at her looking at me.

She’s, again, smiling with a kindness I’ll never match.

“You don’t have to be afraid of offending me,” she says, unclasping her praying hands to briefly caress my cheek.

“I…”

“I’m not trying to convert you, Adrian. It’s fine if you don’t believe in my goddess as long as you believe in me.”

“Then… why did you want me to pray with you?”

She blinks in confusion before she giggles. At me. Because of course she does.

“I wanted you to keep me company, not to pray,” she says.

“But why today?”

She tilts her head, briefly frowning in that way somebody would when asked to explain something obvious, but she’s too kind for the expression to last.

“It’s the winter solstice. The longest night of the year. It’s… when Vesper warns us of the darkness ahead and looks over us. Over our families. It’s when we’re supposed to stay with those we love so that we’ll find the light of dawn together.”

I… I am not religious.

I don’t know about the gods of my world, much less those of this.

But I know… No, I am learning.

I am learning about something that I always felt was more important.

So I lean down and clasp her delicate chin, my fingers sending dancing shadows over half of her face and her long neck, and I tilt her up so that I can taste those lips of hers in a moment of shared, loving, beautiful silence.

When I pull away, her eyes are lidded, and her smile enticing.

She pulls me down toward her, and her hot breath washes over my ear:

“She’s also a goddess of fertility,” she mumbles.

And so, before the dawn after the long darkness comes, Zhandra ends up joining Elena and me in something almost like prayer.

***

Is This Still On?

“… Okay, the intro rant may be somewhat similar,” Hachiman says.

“Fuck you,” Lisa restates.

“Aren’t you a lesbian?”

“Oh, like that has ever stopped you before.”

“I’m sensing just enough hostility that I'm willing to take this as actual flirting, in which case—”

Lisa bends over, hurrying to slap a hand over her mouth as she starts heaving, and her face goes green.

“Okay, now that is hurtful,” Hachiman mumbles before patting her back consolingly before she angrily gestures and he takes the hint to grab her ponytail and keep it out of the way.

“That can’t possibly be normal,” the cue card guy says.

“You’d be surprised,” a camerawoman, who may be wondering why he isn’t looking at her butt like she’s been trying to get him to do for quite a while, mutters.

“At least that was the last segment…” a neurotic, slightly drunk, overworked director mumbles as ex-girlfriend sounds come from a discarded phone on the floor.

“What was the criteria?” a light table operator asks.

“Every story that updated this year,” a deflating man says.

“… Every one?”

“Yup. Every single one. Except one-shots.”

“And you included the Victoria Von Doom thing because…?”

“A follow-up about Iron Maiden should be posted… sometime. Soon. Soonish.”

“Right. And you just forgot about Yui’s Lily Garden?”

“… What?”

“Yui’s Lily Garden? You know, the spin-off—”

“I know what that is! Just… Fuck! Do we have time? Just how late is this thing already?!”

“… It’s the 28th.”

The director looks.

On the stage, Hachiman and Lisa are looking for a mop and bucket.

A crane-mounted camera is moving in erratic ways that point to somebody finally finding out that there are some enjoyable things about show business.

And contemplating the chaos surrounding him, the director can’t help but mutter:

“Meh. I’ve seen worse.”

Of course, that’s when the crane-mounted camera tips over, crashes against a spotlight, drags the sparking wires into the curtains surrounding the stage, and the sound technician has to flee from his chosen hiding spot chased by the rushing flames, finally revealing the forehead protector he’d been wearing all along.

According to him, that somebody got to see him at all was, in fact, a Christmas Miracle.

***

And Now, a Word From Our Sponsors

This… ran away from me.

It tends to happen when I think about something for long enough before I start writing it, because I keep adding more and more ideas to the list, and then I feel obligated to use them rather than cut things short before my annual, silly special grows to be… nearly 20k words.

…

I’m terrible at managing priorities, in case you hadn’t already noticed.

But well, on the bright side of things, here’s my (belated) Christmas gift to you all: around half a novel’s worth of silly omakes, heartfelt vignettes, and smutty things that belong somewhere in the middle.

That is, something entirely fitting with most of my writing.

The canonicity of most of it is dubious enough, but I tried to stay true to the heart of every series while I wrote this. It’s been quite an exercise, switching around from head to head and one story to another, but, really, if you all enjoy this half as much as the effort I poured into it warrants, I’ll be happy at having accomplished what I set out to do: this (again, belated) Christmas gift for all my readers, to tell you all how grateful I am for you being here and how much I want to make these stories worthy of you.

And now, as my brain finally crashes and I struggle to recover from both this and all the family time that has been forced upon me over the past few days, there’s only one thing left to do:

Try and finish the Seasonal Special in time for New Year’s.

Wish me luck. Or sanity. I think I need plenty of both.

And I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and that you enjoy whatever’s left of the holidays wherever you come from. Truly, from the bottom of my heart, thank you all, and see you next time!

P.S.: I really did completely forget about Yui’s Lily Garden. I feel awful about it, but I’m physically unable to write a single scene more. I’ll try to make it up to them in their next chapter.