"To the illustrious Hatsume Mei,
You are humbly, personally and cordially invited to I-Island.
Yours truly,
Melissa Shield"
Mei had run nearly every forensic test she could think of to prove the veracity of the letter. She'd compared the flowery, looping script of the note with that of other instances of Miss Shield's handwriting. She'd even gone as far as to test the paper itself, finding the expected ratios of sea salt ions on the envelope and note, proving it'd been written on an island in the middle of the Pacific. The thought to test for skin cells still blared in her mind, her usual ethical reluctance for sequencing unconsenting DNA the only thing stopping her from mapping the writer's entire genome.
Under normal circumstances, the invitation would've been an honor. It would've been something that would've kept Hatsume Mei up all night as her mind raced to consider the possibilities of what was to come. She'd invent a dozen new babies for just the occasion, showing off her best and brightest at I-island. Now, it was a heavy weight on her shoulders, her shame on full display to someone she'd admired for years.
«"Melissa Shield's invited me,"» she sighs, resting her face in her hands as she finally comes to the most logical conclusion, exactly seventeen hours and twenty-six minutes after first receiving the letter.
«"Inviting me is a perfectly reasonable course of action. I'm one of the top five support heroes in Japan. I've patented almost 60 babies a year since starting at UA… I'm a competitor and a colleague,"» she reasons, adjusting her gloves as she talks. For the first time in a long time, the logical, reasonable answer didn't seem like enough to her.
«"Ai, please read the email I sent to Melissa,"» she said aloud. It wasn't necessary, of course, she'd committed it to memory within minutes of realizing she'd accidentally pressed send.
"Achievements like your own defy any and every method to quantify, but I'm stubborn enough to try. Your breakthroughs in fission energy will surely revolutionize at the same rate in which they'll atomize. If god exists in the cracks of our knowledge, then you're the architect of their demise, creating a new religion with each new ounce of mortar. Congratulations, and good luck on your future endeavors, Hatsume Mei."
Mei groaned as she listened to her AI read the email. Writing Melissa had become a cathartic exercise over the years. Write down everything she was feeling towards the older woman- all of the odd emotions she wasn't entirely sure of, all of the admiration and adulation- and then delete it without sending it. Some had been attempts at poetry, some were invitations to meet at her lab, some were even attempts at friendship. They were all deleted without impunity… Until an accidental misclick sent the email to Melissa at near light-speed. The 'delivered' check mark appeared on the message faster than the time it'd taken to realize her mistake. She'd spent the next three days in a frenzy, working on new designs for support gear to distract herself from her own embarrassment. The letter had arrived exactly 76 hours after the email and brought her entire frenzy to a standstill before starting a new one.
«"What am I going to do, Ai, this is the most embarrassing mistake ever,"» she groaned, slipping her goggles off her face. She held them in her hands for a while before pulling a screwdriver from her hip pouch and fidgeting with one of the screws. She needed to do something with her hands or else she felt she'd explode.
«"What's the worst case scenario if I do go? She hands me a cease and desist letter… possibly even a restraining order… Though there'd be no need to hand them to me in person if she did want to put out a restraining order on me, it'd be more efficient to simply have her lawyer email me the documents… God what could she possibly want,"» Mei groaned. It wasn't often she couldn't answer a question, but this time she was truly stumped. She looked over the tickets again, her reservation for a two-person room at one of the most luxurious hotels on the island as well as two coupons for plane tickets having been packed into the envelope as well, clearly indicating she could bring a friend. It was obvious there was no real way to decline without seriously offending Melissa. Not something she wanted to do twice. She tucked her screwdriver away and slipped her goggles back on her head, taking one last long look at the letter.
«"This letter was written by Melissa Shield. Either Melissa saw my email and wants to discuss my shame in person over the course of a week… Or this is entirely unrelated to the email. It's likely she hasn't even seen it- she must receive hundreds of articles of fanmail a day… This… this can't turn out as badly as I'm worried it might."» She spoke the last sentence with finality, her usual assertive enthusiasm returned to her.
"Ai, we're going to I-Island," she shouted excitedly.