Thank you, @DarkLost234, for joining the memberships.
I'm truly grateful.
...
Chapter 93: Suika Wants to Brew Sake from Yogurt.
....
"Making donuts isn't complicated. I don't need help — go sit in the living room."
"Lili" stayed exactly where she was, looking at him with patient, expectant eyes.
Kihara read the room. He set down what he was doing, bent down, and pressed a brief kiss to the soft curve of her lips. Then he drew one flour-dusted finger across the bridge of her small upturned nose, leaving a white streak.
"Happy now?"
She blinked. Bit her lower lip. Produced a smile that was shy in a way that was slightly different from Liliruca's usual shyness, though not so different that it registered as wrong. "Happy now."
"Then go play. I'll have them ready soon — Suika, why are you standing in the doorway watching?"
"I just wanted to see what you were making..." Suika-in-Liliruca's-body directed a look at him that could only be described as the specific aggrieved expression of someone watching a person they have feelings for be affectionate with someone else. "That's all."
"Hehe~ Watermelon, let's go wait outside for the food~!"
The two of them left. The kitchen door closed.
Kihara stood still for a moment, staring at the space they'd vacated.
His eyebrow had developed a small furrow.
"...Must be imagining things," he murmured. "Suika and I are buddies at best. She wouldn't be jealous over me kissing Lili. Maybe if it were Kaguya..."
He shook it off and returned to work.
Shinobu's donut order was not a small one. It never was. Twenty minimum to reach satisfaction, which meant he always produced fifty to a hundred — a number that sounded excessive until you understood that she viewed donut consumption as a lifestyle rather than a snack.
He could have bought them from another world. Faster, easier. But Shinobu had strong feelings on the subject of store-bought versus handmade, specifically that his handmade ones tasted of him, and that this made them categorically superior. He had accepted this as a fact of his domestic life some time ago.
This time, though, he had an experiment in mind.
He kept a small reserve of his special yogurt — the particular kind that required either effort or delegation to produce. With this many people in the house, delegation was theoretically trivial. He leaned out the kitchen door.
"Lili — can you come help me with something?"
"Yes, Kihara-sama~!"
Before going in, Suika-in-Liliruca's-body turned and delivered a reassuring look to the real Liliruca sitting on the sofa. She'd managed the surprise kiss without breaking character. A kitchen task would be fine.
She stepped in. The door closed behind her.
"What do I need to do?"
No answer. Kihara finished washing his right hand, then reached down—
The Black Flame Dragon was suddenly right there.
Suika's small borrowed mouth fell open. Her pupils executed a dramatic contraction.
This is... a non-trivial challenge... but then again, it's Lili's body, not mine, so technically...
With the pragmatic equanimity of someone who had been alive for a very long time and had encountered stranger situations than this one, Suika applied herself to the task.
Her assessment: the consciousness swap didn't eliminate the body's physical memory. Lili's body knew things. Those things were useful, if occasionally disorienting. The process was somewhere between practiced and completely unfamiliar, which produced a technique that was simultaneously clumsy and weirdly effective, and which dramatically exceeded expected yield.
At one point she breathed wrong and inhaled some of the product.
"Cough — cough—"
"Are you alright?" Kihara activated time acceleration and collected most of the output, then produced a tissue and wiped "Lili's" face with the matter-of-fact efficiency of someone who had done this before. "Also — some of the donuts coming out are yogurt-flavored. Those are for Shinobu. Don't eat those ones."
"Understood."
Suika's mouth twitched slightly as she walked back out.
Remilia, she thought, are you certain your sister is a vampire? Because from where I'm standing, she seems to be in a completely different business.
She ran an internal quality assessment. The yogurt itself wasn't remarkable as a beverage. But something about the physical experience had produced a residual warmth in Lili's body that had crossed the line into Suika's own awareness — a contentment that wasn't hers but was influencing her regardless.
She settled onto the sofa with the meditative energy of someone working through a philosophical question.
What if I turned this into sake?
I mean. If it were sake. I wouldn't have strong objections to drinking it.
Flandre and Liliruca both tried to ask her questions. She ignored them. She had fermentation timelines to consider.
It was worth noting, for the record, that Suika had done what she'd just done with essentially zero internal conflict — not because she lacked standards, but because her framework for the situation was simply friend has a need, I can address the need, no further analysis required. Romance didn't enter into it. Emotions didn't enter into it.
She was a youkai who had existed for several centuries. The idea of suddenly developing feelings for a human was the kind of story beat that Aya Shameimaru herself would have looked at and said was derivative.
"Who submitted this? A vampire falls for a human, a warrior falls for a princess, rivals become lovers — these were tired when I was filing dispatches four hundred years ago. Minimum standards, please."
She'd have said something like that, wings already carrying her toward more interesting material.
Suika considered this, decided it was accurate, and went back to thinking about fermentation.
"Lili." She surfaced. "You mentioned a transformation magic that lets you copy someone's appearance."
"That's right — wait—!!" Liliruca launched herself off the sofa, grabbed Suika's face, pulled it close, sniffed with purpose, and stared with eyes that had gone very wide.
"That smell — you actually — with Kihara-sama you—"
"It's not a big deal." Suika removed the hands from her face with gentle firmness.
"Tell me about the transformation. I want to try it."
"Lili doesn't even know when you and Kihara-sama got this close—"
"Magic. Please."
Complaining, but cooperative, Liliruca walked her through the mechanics. Ten minutes of instruction, some back-and-forth on the finer points, and then Suika concentrated—
Pop.
Smoke. Dense, theatrical, the kind that suggested the caster had strong opinions about presentation.
When it cleared, there were two Suika Ibukis in the living room.
Flandre stared.
Liliruca stared.
"That's incredible... she actually looks exactly like Watermelon..."
"Just the appearance. Strength and abilities don't transfer." Suika-as-Suika examined her borrowed exterior with the calm satisfaction of a craftsperson assessing clean work.
"Shinobu. Donuts are done."
Kihara emerged from the kitchen with a plate stacked generously high — warm, glossy with chocolate and syrup still setting, steaming faintly in the afternoon air. He stepped into the living room and stopped.
Two Suikas.
He looked at them both. He looked at the plate. He looked at them again.
"Didn't realize you two were close enough to play 'guess which one is real,'" he said, with the mild amusement of someone who had decided this was charming rather than alarming. He set the plate down. "Yogurt, chocolate, strawberry — help yourselves."
Now.
Liliruca's eyes lit from the inside with the focused brightness of someone who had identified a strategic window.
While Kihara's attention was on the plate, she slipped around behind him and wrapped both arms around him from behind, pressing her cheek between his shoulder blades, voice going up into the register she reserved for moments she wanted to win.
"Kihara-sama~ You worked so hard~ Let Lili give you a shoulder massage~"
"Sure — dig in, everyone."
The donut mountain was considerable. Flandre looked at it. Looked at Kihara, currently being attended to by both Liliruca and Suika-as-Suika, one on each shoulder, both radiating extremely convincing devotion.
She was currently Shinobu.
She could not, under any circumstances, reveal that she was Flandre.
Which meant she could not march over and insert herself into the shoulder-massage situation without explaining why Shinobu was suddenly very invested in competing for proximity.
She sat down in front of the donut mountain.
The donut mountain looked back at her.
She picked one up. She took a bite. It was genuinely very good — warm, soft, the sugar doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
She ate another one.
On the sofa across from her, Kihara had his eyes half-closed with the contented expression of a man whose shoulders were being worked on from two directions simultaneously.
Flandre ate a third donut.
This is fine, she told herself.
I'm having a great time.
Everything is going exactly as planned.
She ate a fourth donut and stared at the ceiling and quietly revised her plan to include a section on how to get rid of Liliruca and Suika within the next thirty minutes.
....
Thank you for reading.