「Zenkichi?」
"Yes?"
Mei had joined them somehow mid-walk. He has no idea how she found them, but Mei's mind is an enigma, and he finds it best to not try to unravel her… rather erratic thought process. And Zenkichi…
「Are you following us home?」
"Yes. Have you briefed your sister on Abnormalities?"
「No, why the fuck would you just say that, Zenkichi? Do you want to tie my sister in an NDA? What's your angle?!」
"What's an Abnormality? Izu-kun? Do you have any idea what he's talking about?" And now they had to explain it. Thanks, Zenkichi.
"We have not, Zenkichi. I assumed the Flask Plan wanted us to keep them classified." Anshin'in chimed in. "I haven't checked in on them, for obvious reasons of not feeling like it. Too much of a hassle."
「You'd think someone with nigh-omniscience would, you know, use the nigh-omniscience to her advantage.」
"Plus-Minus Thirteen classification doesn't apply to Abnormalities." Zenkichi reminded them. "That only extends to Kumagawa's Minus to anyone who knows enough to disclose it besides Kumagawa, the true nature of Not-Equal, Styles, and the full brief of the Shishime incident. Abnormalities are Hakoniwa-level clearance, which allows you to brief your immediate family. Course, Medaka thinks everyone is her family, so we couldn't exactly stop her from writing that blasted autobiography, she didn't even bring it up before she published it. Thank god it went relatively unnoticed." He sighed. "Case in point, why I'm saddling you two with overdue explanations. So long!" 「Thank you, Mr. Exposition, you've doomed us all.」
"Izu? Naa-chan? Hello?"
Wait.
「WAIT, ZENKICHI!」 He stopped. 「What do you mean, they put… erm… Kumagawa's」 God it was so weird talking about himself in the third person. 「Minus under Plus-Minus Thirteen? Isn't that like, need-to-know level?」
Or, at least, if Anshin'in wasn't fucking with him when she decided there was too much awkward silence that one time and started detailing the very inner workings of the Flask Plan to fill the air.
She went on for hours. It is burned into his brain. He'd long decided the least he could do was pass on the trauma with some excruciatingly long tangents of his own.
He shrugged. "Kujira figured if we have a major threat, since Medaka can't exactly hide her Skill, and Hansode had enough trauma warping herself to hold off Iihiko… and well, the fact that Ajimu-san hadn't returned… that it'd be the ace up their sleeve if another Shishime-level incident happened. Was on a whim. See ya."
…
"I AM SO LOST!"
Ah. Right. Mei.
"How much should we tell her?" Anshin'in telepathically conveyed.
「If you bring up my true nature I will bring up that thing that kept me up all night.」
"Duly noted."
"So it's mental-based quirks. Alright, that's fair. What's the big deal?"
Wow, she took to that easier than expected.
"Abnormalities have a tendency to get… really esoteric or really conceptual, or both." Anshin'in answered back. She was caught off guard as well, since she made it a rule to not use telepathic abilities on Mei due to the utter headache trying to unravel her processing was.
"Oh, so they're stands?" Yes, he insisted. He got his entire adoptive family caught up to his manga tastes. He does not regret it. Even if he had to volunteer to be a human guinea pig for a month. Or intern at his adoptive mother's law firm. Or intimidate a CEO that refused to give on a strike for his adoptive father. "Manifestation of fighting spirit? Convoluted, niche and/or broken power. Only present in people with great mental strength? Izu, are you a stand user?"
Huh, now that he thinks about it, Stands and Abnormalities had a lot in common, save for the punch ghosts. Did Araki have a Skill? He was born pre-quirk, and the initial spread only caught about 20% of the population, young and old. Huh.
「Maybe? I don't know. Hey Najimi, do you have a Skill that can tell if other people have Skills?」
"I refuse to disclose whether or not Araki-san has an Abnormality, if just to annoy you." Damn. Another sleepless night awaits him.
"So… what are your stands, then?" Ah, there's the question he's been dreading.
Honestly, Mei's surprisingly good at keeping secrets. One wouldn't think she is, but she just goes on about her babies for so long that one forgets the question they asked.
He'd… defer to Anshin'in on this one.
"My Abnormality is Complete Arsenal. I've got 12,858,051,967,633,858 Abnormalities, 7,932,135,441,523,217 being Pluses and 4,925,916,526,110,641 being Minuses. I have it registered as another famous Abnormality that has similar properties, which happens to be Zenkichi's ancestors' Abnormality."
Oh, she's just coming out with it. Okay.
"Alright, cool! Izu, what's your stand?!"
Oh wow Mei is just rolling with it. Okay. Sure. Why not. He'll spill.
「I've got… four. All Minuses. Two courtesy of Najimi, one that developed from me warping one of Najimi's into my own, separate abnormality. Book Maker, my first minus, allows me to spawn screws that I can use to either physically or mentally attack my opponents, the mental attack bringing them down to my level. Unskilled was given to me by Najimi, and it allows me to undo my own skills. Hundred Gauntlets, which I got from Najimi, reverses causality… And All Fiction allows me to negate reality.」
...
"So, like, Gold Experience Requiem?" Mei said.
"Oh god, not again…" Anshin'in knew my feelings on this subject matter. She knew the reckoning that was to come. He took a deep breath.
「While the two abilities seem similar on the surface, the mechanisms behind them are vastly different! You see, Gold Experience Requiem's ability, besides it's buffed up version of Giorno's abilities, is an ability called Return to Zero, which takes any action and/or willpower directed towards Giorno that would harm him, and resets it to a point of "Zero", nullifying them and preventing the action from being taken-」
「-Gold Experience Requiem can use Return to Zero to put an opponent in an infinite death loop, constantly having them die and reset back to zero. While it's true, I could use All Fiction to put someone in an infinite loop of death and undeath, I'd have to consciously be the one killing them the entire time, which would be pretty boring-」
「-GER is an extension of Giorno's subconscious, while I must consciously use All Fiction, now this might not seem like a major difference, but it's implied by GER that Giorno is not the one using Return to Zero, or can't use it consciously, as GER will have already dealt with the problem by then, meanwhile I-」
"What's happening here, Meimei?" Mei noticed the two familiar figures behind her.
「-talk about the difference between an undo and a negation! GER-」
"Oh, hey ma. Hey pa. Uh…"
「-meanwhile, All Fiction takes reality, and makes it into nothing, which-」
"Long story short, Izu and Naa-chan have stands from that manga he made us read but not exactly which aren't quirks. Izuku is explaining how his not-stand isn't the ability Giorno gets at the end of the fifth part." She watched Izuku pace around the room.
「-the key difference! All Fiction doesn't take reality and set it to Zero, it takes an aspect of reality and removes it from existence-」
"Oh, okay." Her father said. "Where's Najimi?"
「-might say, 'but zero and nothing are the exact same thing!' For that, we have to talk about the difference between an origin point and an ungraphed point-」
"Naa-chan is in her room. She snuck away after he got to the part about Death Loops."
「-happens if you graph (0, 0) on a plot? The point still exists, it's just in the middle of the axes. The origin point! Now, try deleting-」
"How long has he been talking this time?" Her mother questioned.
「-the difference! With GER, it's like taking a point on a graph, and moving it back to the origin point. For All Fiction, it's like-」
Mei glanced at her phone. "I wanna say two hours, but I'm not sure."
「-Now, let's talk about parallel universes. Since we know that Diavolo is trapped in an infinite loop of parallels of his death, GER is a stand that actively-」
「-At the end of the day, the two abilities couldn't be any more different in mechanism!」
He heard polite clapping from Mei… and saw his adoptive parents had pulled chairs as well. Shit.
「How much did you catch of that?」
"Meimei already explained it, Izuchan!" Haia-san said. 「Mei, you traitor, I trusted you!」 "Even if she didn't, we'd probably pick it up after the hour we heard you rant for. Don't worry, your secret's safe with us! Right, honey?"
"So that's what you did at the support gala. Interesting. I'm very proud of you, Izuku." He had a feeling that Eito-san was proud of him for… less than savory reasons.
…
"Oh, right. Secret. Yeah, secret. I won't spill. You know, this reminds me of the time that I found out how dogmatic the Japanese Metacommunist Liberation Front cell I joined was. Those assholes were practically glued to their armchairs, I tell ya, wouldn't take a single action, honestly thought the kalashnikovs were just props after a point-"
Mei made eye contact with him, practically pleading for him not to go on a tangent.
"… So yeah, long story short, I've kept secrets, and another reminder that the union must never know about those insufferable pricks. So embarrassing."
Yeah, he knew. This was the eighty-seventh reminder, but who's keeping count? Him. Unfortunately.
Now that Mei was in the loop, they could use their skills more freely around her. Or, at least he could. Well, Anshin'in could also use some of her more powerful skills, now that she had separated it from the more physics-grounded quirks.
Anyways, Mei was now walking to school with Uraraka, Anshin'in, and him, as she hitched a ride with Anshin'in chaining Alibi Block and Contact Apply together.
…and she was currently grilling Uraraka on the physics application of her quirk.
"But it just doesn't make sense! Why would your power have a weight limit? Especially if you were to be negating gravity as you initially thought! Also, Izu-kun, you dummy! There's no such thing as a 'state of inertia', if it was we'd all be in a state of inertia! Inertia is the law that objects in rest stay in rest and objects in motion stay in motion until acted on by an external force, you're thinking of a state of rest!" Hey, sue him! He's not the one who could practically qualify for a physics and/or engineering degree on their own self-teaching alone in the family, that's her!
"And weight is gravity! It is, quite literally, mass times gravity! It's a force! Gravity is acceleration! F=ma, it's literally basic physics! Newton's second law! Uggggghhhhhh." She put her hands on her head. "I'd say Izuku was wrong, which he is, but he's much closer since your quirk also negates drag. But your quirk would be more accurately described as setting acceleration to zero on the object you come into contact with, and then having the forces that were previously acting on in, other than yourself, not count. The scale analogy was correct, Izu, but your terminology is off. If a=0, F=0. Not, state of inertia, or whatever Izuku came up with. But then why is the quirk interacting with the mass value?! I don't understand! It's illogical! Ughhhhh. Whatever. Quirks are bullshit, but at least most of them try to adhere to basic physics. Hey, Izuku, do you mind shooting a screw at her?"
「I'm not going to assault Uraraka-san, Mei.」 Uraraka agreed, as she was drinking a cup of coffee. His sleep habits are apparently contagious. Anshin'in was content to observe this conversation.
"Not now, later, at Yuuei. Your power practically disregards gravity to a point, I mean, it's like as long as you have visual on it, you can't exactly manipulate the vector of it, but you force the screw to practically adhere to the vector you shoot it at. No arc whatsoever, if you actively make it so it's not arcing, it's like a weird form of external force negation as well. I want to see whether Uraraka's quirk can bypass that. Oh right, she'd have to catch it! Maybe shoot it really slow, and like, next to her, and then she can touch it."
Mei was really good at quirk analysis. Not as detailed as him, since she tended to jump around a lot, but she provided a valuable perspective on things he'd otherwise miss since she was able to make quicker connections. Of course, this was usually followed up by…
"I have so many babies I want to make with you!"
Uraraka choked on her coffee. It's almost hazing, but he adored how flustered everyone got due to Mei's extreme fondness of her inventions. Anshin'in seemed amused too, though she abstained from chiming in. 「Never change, Mei.」
"I- you- I- wha- we're both girls!" Uraraka sputtered, trying to recover from the coffee currently in her windpipe.
"Gender is a social construct!" Mei valiantly claimed, to which…
Oh… oh, he's just obtained so much blackmail… oh my god!
Not only had Uraraka failed to respond to that, but… oh my god, she was actually checking her out… his friend had the beginnings of a crush on his sister, oh my god.
Is this how Maguro felt when he looked at Medaka and Zenkichi?
On second thought, he'd rather not know anything about how Maguro felt when he looked at Medaka, ew.
He shared a look with Anshin'in to confirm his eyes.
She looked… slightly too amused at this development, if that was even possible. Less so playful, more so sadistic glee at the possibilities.
"Now come on! Let's go to Yuuei and get inventing!" And there it is, the punchline.
Uraraka looked... very confused.
"She calls her inventions her babies, Uraraka-san." Anshin'in explained.
The tension released from her shoulders. "Would it have killed you to have led with that?!"
They walked in relative silence, up to the point where they were almost at the Yuuei Barrier. He leaned in to Uraraka, who had her gaze somewhat lazily fixed on his sister's back.
「You know, we're like, fifty-fifty on whether Mei is like, obliviously pan or extremely ace, so that's a fifty-fifty shot if you feel like taking it.」 He whispered teasingly.
She threw her empty cup at him and covered her mortified face with her hands. "Oh my god DEKU SHUT UP!"
A/N: I'm not sure if I want the OchaMei thing to go anywhere. It depends. I don't exactly headcanon any sexualities, but I'm open to playing around with character sexualities if they aren't explicitly referenced to be a certain sexuality. Big fan of pan until proven otherwise, which allows me to explore certain lines I add on a whim further.
For now, though, this is just teasing material for Izuku/Misogi and Anshin'in, and the unintentional charisma of Hatsume Mei working its magic. Might be just a crush, might be a setup. Who knows? Honestly, I'd be more than happy to receive feedback on this one. It's something I inserted on a whim thinking it would be a fun intermission bit while I procrastinate writing the battle trial, and I'm more than happy to pump the brakes or go down the rabbit hole. In the end, I'll decide, but I would appreciate feedback.