There were numerous downsides to her power. One of the more obvious ones was that anything nearby that wasn't directly touching her burned, and burned quickly at that. Many of her old clothes had been destroyed because of this, among many other things, so she decided it was time to make some replacements. Fortunately, this was something Hikaru was good at. Several people in her village asked her to make clothes for them, and even her younger sister sent some of her designs to her to get made. She had some time today, so she decided to set up in the common room in the academy and start putting something together.

Normally she would have avoided the academy because of the kind of place it was, but this time it was simply more convenient. She had more money than she did in the past due to her raids on bandit camps, but more than that, she had access to higher quality materials from the other universe because she was willing to help other mages in exchange for them occasionally. One such trade happened earlier that day, so rather than try to fly these materials home and risk them getting burned, she decided to stay in the academy and put together what she wanted to make. Then she could figure out how to get them home.

Designing clothes to work around her power was difficult. They needed to be tight enough to be constantly against her skin, but she didn't want to make them so form fitting that they'd be indecent. Further, she wasn't entirely sure how her power worked in this regard. It wasn't proximity because even a belt would burn if it wasn't touching her, but it also wasn't based entirely around touch because she tucked a sleeve into a glove once and the part of the glove that wasn't touching her didn't burn. As much as she wanted to figure it out, the thought of wasting so many resources just to test it was completely unacceptable to her. Perhaps it was her fairly poor upbringing, but just thinking about it left a bad taste in her mouth. So, she just had to guess based on what she'd seen so far and hope for the best.

The design she went with was a fairly simple dress. Fairly tight at the top with a cinched waist, but with a thick material so hopefully it wouldn't look odd. The dress had a few spots that would attach to her legs, so that hopefully it'd be close enough to not burn, with a slit up the back to help compensate for how this kind of design was likely to hinder movement. Hikaru was excited to be working with such nice materials because it meant she could make something fairly colorful with lots of interesting patterns. The top she kept fairly simple, only decorating it with some stitching and some colored fabric around the hems, but the part below the waist had several intricate patterns. Some of it was from the cloth she was using, but a lot of it was from her own cutting and sewing. Even if this design might end up burning, she was confident enough that it wouldn't that she was willing to put all of her skills into this one, and she was pretty happy with how it was coming out so far. She was looking forward to trying it on.