"Everyone!" Rei called for attention after he placed a couple of files on a desk. He turned towards the waves of desks and chairs that were lined up in rows around a heavy wooden podium. "Listen up!"
"Good morning," he bowed while holding his hands together in front of him in a gesture of first meeting, "My name is Omura Rei, your professor for the coming weeks. My classes will be four days per seven, evenings only..." He stated whilst he took a seat on a desk in front of his elevated platform,
"Any questions?" He asked as he looked around with one eyebrow quirked and a smile.
A hand rose in the crowd, and Rei made sure to make her stand as she asked her question.
"Forgive me for asking Omura- Professor, Omura. But, what is wrong with your hands?" A softly spoken girl, with short light-green hair and giant red specs, asked meekly in a concerned voice.
All of the students present in the room turned their attention towards their Professor's hands and sure enough, they were dripping with a clear, colourless liquid.
"Ah these?" Rei asked with a laugh instead, "I washed them, that's why they're wet. No other reason, except for…" He began as he got up from his seat and walked up to the edge on his landing and held his hand out.
"Now- watch what happens." With a swing of his wrist downward, the water escaped the grips of atmospheric pressure and travelled towards the students, splashing their ways to their hairs and forearms.
Many yelped and a few stared at him with confused or concerned looks.
"Who can tell me why that happened? In Physics terms, motion-based." He elaborated his question as he began pacing around the edge of the landing, drying his hands with a white handkerchief he pulled out of his breast pocket.
A couple of hands rose, five in total, to which he pointed at the most prominent one nearest to him.
"You there, big man, front and centre."
A giant of a student, with a very impressive beard, stood up and, nervously shifting in his stance, took to clear his throat before speaking in a deep voice.
"Is it the object's... mass that caused it to happen?" Despite appearances, he was very well-spoken.
"Correct." Rei clapped his hands in delight before turning around to face them once again. "But the even more correct answer would have been the object's inertia."
"Now, what is inertia?" He asked with a voice heightening in pitch as he neared the end of the sentence.
"In simple terms; it is an object of mass' desire to stay at rest or in motion along its designated path." He walked up behind his podium and pulled out a couple of papers.
"You may be asking yourselves; 'Why are we studying physics? Isn't this a Robotics class?'"
Many of them looked to themselves and began mumbling in agreement with his statement.
"We'll get to robotics in a moment." He held out a paper and slapped it on the whiteboard. "For now, eyes up here." He snapped his finger two times as a scanner scanned his paper Blue-Print and displayed it via a projector on an even bigger board to the wall.
There on the paper, was two devices with thin, almost transparent lines connecting the two in a wave-like spherical pattern.
"These lovely, love handles are what I call the 'Inertial Shields'. They're a bunch of micro-wave emitters that take the mass of whatever's in the centre and convert it almost to null." He turned to see that the students were starting to take notes about what he had said.
"Basically, it's a G-Force countermeasure. Anything in the field loses some of its inertia, and becomes suspended in a volume of stasis for a change." He began pacing around the landing again.
"Any one of you know the uses for such technology?"
A hand rose.
"Vehicular safety?" A student with lime green hair asked uncertainly as he got up.
"Well… sure, but there are other areas where it's much more useful..." Rei ushered for him to think further with a gesture of his hand.
"… Oh, I got it! Fighter Jet Piloting!" He declared more confidently this time.
Rei hummed in delight and held up a finger, flicking it up and down to signify that his answer had been the one he had been looking for.
"Fighter Pilots suffer massive amounts of G Forces when making huge and sudden turns in the air, risking Unconscious Episodes whenever they do it, due to the blood in their heads rushing to their feet." He gestured for the student to sit down. "With this technology, they won't have to worry about such things."
"But, how does it work though?" Another asked from her seat. "Aren't they still going to move with the jet?"
"We'll… exactly. They will move with the jet. Like this time, every single atom in their being is going to move with it, instead of having their own little individual masses to be left behind."
The student thought for a moment before nodding when she came to grasp his statement.
"Take this for example," he pointed behind him to his desk, towards a cuboidal acrylic see-through container half-filled with clear water, "If I give it a nudge on the side, conventional reasoning should be the water would form waves from the change in motion."
He turned and passed around his desk, arriving at the side of the container before he reached out to rest his hand on its vertical surface.
"However, on this container, I've installed the Inertial Shields on both its foremost points." The crowd nodded as they watched on, their interest piqued, "So if I were to do this..." He extended his arm and pushed on the acrylic container, sending it sliding about 20 centimetres across the desk.
But interestingly, the water present inside never showed signs of shifting. Remaining as undisturbed as when its container remained at rest, still as a pond.
Some released sounds of surprise, disbelief and mild awe when they saw what transpired. One student even made to give applause, but immediately stopped when he saw no one else come to join him. But still, Omura let out a small laugh for the sentiment before he turned to face them once more.
"This will be the first of four lectures on Robotics. Pay attention because I'm moving to a different subject next week, so… make the most of what you can." He stated as he rubbed the back of his head.
Some of the students looked confused,
"I would stay if I could, but I can't. The higher-ups have spoken, and their word is law, I believe." He now turned towards the students again and stared at them for a moment.
He lowered his head and chuckled a bit to himself.
"Sorry… sorry, it's just, me giving a lecture to you guys…" He said as he looked up to the rows upon rows of scholars.
"Inertial Shielding?" Yaoyorozu asked as she watched the Blond-haired student indulge himself on a full course meal during the middle of the school day. They were both seated again on opposite sides of the cafeteria table at U.A. but this time, they were alone.
"Right…" Rei confirmed with a mouthful accord and a nod.
"… I, have a hard time imagining why you would invest your time in such a thing..." She said in a confused tone as she shifted her attention towards his design of the micro-wave emitters present on his notebook.
"I'm making it for something. Something Big…" Rei said with a distant smile as he gave Yaoyorozu an unreadable look from the side of his head, "And bold."
She stared at him for a moment before turning her attention to his sketchbook again. "… Is it, for a new type of plane?"
Rei shook his head, dismissing the guess with his eyes closed.
Her mouth formed into a flat line as she remained silent, and she turned back down at the book with a contemplating expression on her face.
After a while of silence, Rei spoke up garnering her attention,
"How was my little lecture?" He asked as he began digging in his food again. "Was it fine? Was it Terrific?"
"The lecture? It was, good. Concise and Understandable. Not even intimidating, even for someone like me." She said with a smile and nodded towards him,
"That's great," His face brightened up with a smile while he held out his arms to the side, "I was especially afraid I'd do poorly to describe the theoretical constant of the spaces between molecular interactions. Those almost border the lines into chemical engineering or particle physics..." He said with palpable relief before he went back to his meal,
"But... I'm not really one for Robotics." She said almost sheepishly while she lifted her hand up and tucked somewhat loose strands of hair behind her right ear,
"Well, you would have to be. Or you would be stagnant in your growth, and you'd never want that as a hero,"
She nodded again without saying anything.
Rei smiled and laughed delightfully, as he reached out and grabbed his notebook from across the table, taking it back into his hands.
"But, it's pretty nice, isn't it?" He lifted his head and turned to face her again, "To have the ability to create... there's freedom in it."
Yaoyorozu stared at him for a moment, taken a bit by surprise as to how suddenly sentimental he got. But she smiled as well and nodded after a moment's thought.
"… But, I still have a long way to go, to reach the level of a Pro Hero." She said sadly, though not too sad in tone.
"And, that's why we're here-?"
Rei breathed out a sigh of agreement; but stopped short when he noticed something peculiar about the cafeteria of the school.
"Where… are all the others?" He asked suddenly and looked around the hall with an uneasy expression on his face. He found it to be mostly empty except for maybe one, maybe two students and the staff that stayed behind busy in the kitchen.
"Oh, I only arrived shortly after you settled down." She explained as she took a sip from her tea, "The others are still in the classroom taking revisions."
"Seriously? How long have I been here?" He asked himself, a bit under his breath as he pulled back his sleeves to check the time on his Watch. "… Ten minutes?" He muttered to himself in confusion.
Looking to his notebook, he turned the pages back, finding that the one hundred pages he had managed to fill with equations and drafts were still present.
He squinted his eyes in bewilderment and looked back at his watch again.
No matter how much he did the math in his head, a hundred pages of schematics were impossible to draft in under ten minutes, even for him.
And when he recalled his time spent here, he always found it to be more than ten minutes.
"Is something wrong, Omura-San?" Yaoyorozu asked in concern as she bent forward to look at him closer.
"No, no… huh, that's strange." He mumbled under his breath, "It's just doesn't seem like I was supposed to have the time to write through all these pages..." He explained as he idly flipped a page back and forth with his left hand.
She looked at him bewildered while she tilted her head to the right.
He turned to look at her from the corner of his eyes and saw her worried state, "Ah, don't think too much about it…" He attempted to wave off any concerns as he closed his book with one hand, "I'm sure it's just my oversight."
He had finished his meal so he got up to walk back to class, "I'll be going now, make sure you eat plenty of carbs. That wasn't a jab, by the way." He joked and cracked up almost awkwardly before he began walking away with a bounce to his steps.
Turning a corner inside the hallway that led to the School's cafeteria, he got away from Yaoyorozu's line of sight, leaving the girl alone to her thoughts.
"Hmm…" He hummed in thought as he brought up his notebook for inspection again, a hundred pages still mocked him with their mystery of how they had come to be.
Recalling the span of events that took place while he was in the cafeteria, one seemed to have spent at least an hour. He ate all his lunch, wrote down a considerable amount of schematics and he still had thirty minutes to spare for the afternoon recess.
"Nothing about that makes sense…" He held his chin with his right hand in thought, holding his notebook's edges facing down on his left.
"-Put that down!" The muffled voice of a teacher was heard yelling firmly from behind the wall to Rei's left. "Hatsume put that thing down, right now!"
Looking up, Rei saw that he was in the South Wing of the U.A. Building. The Support Department. He had walked all the way from the cafeteria while he had been distracted in his thoughts.
"Might as well..." He said to himself and began walking over to the large metal door. He dropped the mystery of his notes in favour of focusing on the matter at hand.
The Support Department of U.A. was ripe with resources and materials for mechanical tinkering.
It may have been the place most suited for someone like him in the world, other than maybe I-Island.
"I got it! I got it!" A young feminine voice yelled back in a joyful tone, reassuring that she had the situation handled by whoever she was speaking to.
When Rei grabbed the door handle, the lock clicked at the same time an abrupt, panicked yelp and a metal clang sounded out from inside the room, reverberating through the floor and the entire building.
"Hatsume!?" The same voice of the teacher called out again, followed by rapid steps.
Rei opened the sliding door calmly and saw that a Pink haired girl in a black tank top was under a large metal box of intricate designs. One of the edges of said box was chipped, and the main body was a bit warped from the middle.
A shirtless man with long, uncombed orange hair, in a ridiculous matte Yellow metal helmet, was seen trying to lift off the offending metal cupboard from his student.
This was the teacher, student duo of the Support Department: Power Loader and Hatsume Mei.
"- I'm fine! Totally Fine!" Mei was heard saying that with her voice still full of her usual energy, not even being fazed by the metal piece that was crushing her.
She did her part in helping her teacher to get it off by pushing it herself.
"Now this is what happens when you don't listen to reason. I swear Hatsume…" Power Loader said tiredly, indicating that even though it was just the beginning of the semester, Mei had made quite the reputation for her brazen methods of experimentation.
"Hey, who's that?" She suddenly pointed towards the doorway, obliviously leaving one arm off from supporting the box where Power Loader was seen grunting as it almost fell back down.
In his state of frustration, he attempted to recruit the help of whoever was at the doorway to aid instead of just standing there.
"Whoever's in the doorway-!"
"-Oh right." Power Loader heard the fairly familiar voice of a boy followed by his footsteps approaching them.
Turning his head, the familiarity became clear.
Omura Rei, the top scorer of the Entrance Exam came to place a hand on the metal box.
"… Sorry." Rei apologized with a bit of embarrassment in his voice. Looking to his hand on the Metal box, instead of lifting it himself, a pulse of electricity ran from his palm and a shriek on metal sounded out. "Just- weird scene..."
Not a second later, two thick hollow rods made from the box's already present Steel body, protruded out and planted themselves on the floor.
Despite the speed at which they hit the ground, they had oddly barely made a sound.
"There we go." Rei just said calmly and flashed a proud smile at Power Loader.
"… Nice going, uh... kid. Hatsume, can you get out?"
"Sure can!" She announced, grunting as she pulled herself out from below grabbing the support rods. With her feet out of entrapment, she bounced right back up, holding her hips as she held a toothy smile towards the other two in the room.
Rei just laughed slightly while Power Loader rolled his eyes.
The Support Teacher then turned to the new attendant in the room, "Sorry for the inconvenience, I'm sure you hadn't come here with the thought of helping a student from being crushed due to her own carelessness."
"Uh… no, I did not."
"Then how can the Support Department help you, Young Omura?" Power Loader walked over to his workbench in preparation for the Student's Commission.
He had heard the Omura had requested to personally design his Hero Costume, rather than give pointers and measurements as to how it should have been made by the Department.
"Seven of the eight workstations available to you right now, only this crazy little girl is putting in extra credits from her class..." It was not that the others didn't try to compete with Hatsme. It was just that no matter how hard they tried, she would never tire, always churning out new machines almost every day. They could just not keep up.
Omura stood in thought and held up a finger to them,
"Well then, I actually came here to… oh?" He stopped, feeling that something was travelling through his body. Looking down, a pair of gloved hands were running through his torso and arms, both patting him up and down.
"My, my… You're really ripped, for a nerd." She complimented with her lips forming a downward curve out of surprise and mild admiration. "Yes, your legs are by far the most prominently developed."
"Hatsume! Get your hands off!" Power Loader brought up his arms and threw a small balled up piece of paper towards Mei's head that peered over from Rei's left shoulder.
A small playful laugh came as she ducked behind him, the paper ball bouncing off of Rei's left arm and it hit the floor unceremoniously.
"Say, we haven't met yet have we?" She came back out into Power Loader's view. Walking around him so that she stood in front, she held out a hand for him to shake.
"My name's Mei, Hatsume Mei. Don't bother telling me yours, we know who you are." She stated cheerfully with a smile, looking at him with her giant yellow eyes where a black sniper scope like decal was present.
"… Right…" He shook her hand and turned back to Power Loader, "Well, I came here to-"
"Make your costume right?" Mei interrupted him with her guess, moving up uncomfortable close to his face.
"... Yes, to design my costume. I have a lot of Plans and Ideas-"
"Oh! Oh! Ideas, can I contribute?! I would love to add some of my Babies to-"
"Hatsume, haven't you got a project you're already working on?" Power Loader reminded the Ecstatic Pink Haired Mechanic, not failing to catch that Omura was a bit hesitant to talk to her.
"Baby no. 53 can wait!" She declared with a finger held up between her and Omura. After a moment of silence, she smiled and got up in Omura's face again.
"I can join right?!"
"No no no, You can't..." Rei held her back by placing both his arms on her shoulders and pushing her down. "You have a history of making… overly eccentric designs in your machines." He mumbled under his breath, but it was just loud enough for Mei to hear.
"My… designs?" She gasped suddenly, "You looked up some of my babies, didn't you?! This is Big- no Huge! A real Qualified Support Engineer reviewed some of my work! Tell me what you thought, please!"
"It's less so 'reviewed', but more so… critique." He said after a bit of a hiss, hoping she wouldn't take offence to his stance in her work. "With slight prejudice,"
"Who cares, that means you have some gripes with the designs. Which means I still have areas to improve!" She declared, not even phased by Rei's statement that he found her Engineering skills a bit sub-par.
"Like the Great Inventor, Thomas Edison, who conducted 1000 different experiments just to perfect the light bulb!" She declared excitedly, bouncing up and down in place.
"Well… I'm more of a 'Tesla' fan myself, but that is a good spirit to live by-" Rei said with a small laugh, patting the ecstatic pink-haired girl lightly on her shoulder with his left hand.
"Right! Besides, I've always wanted to design a hero suit myself..." She shifted a little and turned to look towards the row of mechanical tools held on the wall in silence. "It's like... my very own personal dream..."
Rei's smile dropped as well when he saw that she awlmost seemed, sad just now. "Well… I suppose I could make space."
"Really-!"
"-But only if you use the time to actually take some notes." He held her down on her shoulders again, looking at her with a deep look and a single brow raised.
"Of course! Of course, I can behave..." She said with a chuckle through her toothy grin.
Rei's expression morphed into one of dryness from her response, and he asked himself if she was actually serious about her statement.
"Um… Are you still up to order?" Power Loader asked from his workbench that was now fired up, awkwardly holding up his hands in a position where he was about to input commands to the machine.
"Wait… You're still using that old thing?" Rei asked, taking his hands off Mei's shoulders, he walked over to the Support Department's Work Bench.
"What old thing?" Power Loader asked immediately, seeming to have taken a little offence to Rei's remark about his gear.
"That old thing." Rei pointed towards the Bench's display where a 3D grid model was spinning around.
"How… is it old?" Mei asked, blinking a couple of times in confusion while she looked back and forth at the Monitor and Rei.
"Well, back at my Father's Facility, they would usually use Holographic screens and projectors for even the smallest and most insignificant displays for Data." He explained, flicking and sliding his finger on the screen, various applications and software flashed on the screen at blinding speeds.
"I figured that U.A. of all places would use those too. You even sent out Holographic Projectors, just for our welcoming cards." He turned to the teacher when the screen turned black and the Work Bench's low hum seized.
"Well, we only sent those to the Top Ten..." Power Loader said while he scratched his neck.
"Wait, You got Holographic Projectors!?" Hatsume who remained silent until now spoke up in outrage, turning to their teacher with a glare not soon after, who laughed nervously.
Power Loader had imagined that would have been her reaction when she eventually dug up that nugget of information.
Then suddenly, the power supply wire, as well as the input and output Jacks were all yanked out by the use of Rei' quirk, evident by his unchanging position with his hand on the Metal Table.
The low whine of the Bench's systems powering down brought Power Loader to question what Rei was planning.
"… Young Omura, why did you shut down the machine?" He asked a bit worried in his tone.
"I want to try something…" Rei said simply before suddenly, a discharge of his quirk caused the entire Work Bench to collapse and float with arcs of blue electricity jumping between the floating pieces.
The loud creak and the bang caused by the surge of electricity garnered yelps from the other two in the room.
Hatsume was soon to overcome the initial shock and brought her arms down to look through the bright lights. When her eyes became capable of seeing again, she adorned a Star-y eyed expression when she saw what Rei was doing.
She saw how the pieces of metal were being kept floating in the air with the help of the magnetic discharges coming from Omura's quirk, each piece seemed to be as big as a throw pillow while they numbered around fifty-five in total.
With the help of her eyes, she zoomed in on the floating pieces, not failing to catch the edges that would make slight adjustments in their wiring and architecture before they locked with another, coming to be bonded together with tiny chips of metal that flew into their conjoined spots to fill the voids.
She saw circuit boards deconfigure and lose their thin copper wirings before they were etched into new pathways on the silicon wafers in the air, in real-time right in front of her eyes.
"… Hah…" She breathed out a breath of excitation, taking baited steps forward, her eyes never leaving the technopath's display. "This is… something else…"
"Don't come too close," Rei warned, which she surprisingly seemed to have taken to heart. Indeed stopping in her tracks while she looked at the construction.
"… Young Omura! I believe- this is not allowed in here!" Power Loader said in a panicked voice when he overcame his own state of shock. Turning to the boy with his hands held up to cover his head, he called out to him.
"The School has rules about quirk usage anywhere other than the gyms or under Supervision of the Staff!"
"You are my Supervision," Rei joked apprehensively as he turned back to face him. "But, I can assure you, my quirk is completely safe to use indoors!" He gave him a fast, but reassuring nod before turning back.
"That's not very reassuring!" He maintained, but Power Loader's mood shifted when the sparks began to die down as the pieces condensed in the centre. Subconsciously, he breathed out a sigh of relief.
The pieces calmed and collected one another while they spun in the air, and the ground. Forming the frame of a large flat surface held up by a chunky metal base.
"So… what'd you make?" Mei excitedly made her way over to him, resting her chin on his right shoulder by standing at the very edges of her toe due to the height difference.
Then the pieces stopped moving and formed into a chunk of raw Industrial Steel and Aluminium.
Two blocks of fairly large metal pieces were set aside, garnering the attention of the two first.
"Wha-?" Power Loader attempted to ask first but was stopped by Rei.
"That's un-needed material."
"Ah…" Power Loader nodded in understanding, 'I'll be damned, the kid's got talent with this line of work... really damned...' He looked around the room and not a single power port was singed or touched by the electricity.
Not only did Omura seemingly upgrade the school's Support Gear Designer, but he had done it with parts to spare. Power Loader was genuinely impressed with the control he displayed with his quirk.
The New Workbench featured a flat, solid Steel plating on the top with a pattern that ran from the edges to the centre in shallow lines. The Stainless Steel surface transcended the edges of the table's supports and ran for quite a bit over, making for ways to clamp down projects for welding.
The overall shape was still rectangular, and it still sat in the centre of the room. But it was more grounded now, and its overall level was lower, just over the level of both Power Loader and Mei's hips
There was a small dent on the centre where a circular device sat, protruding from the dent just enough that its top was levelled to the flat surface.
The computer system was upgraded as well, Power Loader saw Rei tear the entire built-in CPU apart to replace it with a new one. That whole procedure truthfully scared him.
He knew the boy was capable of Marvels in engineering and robotics, but building a CPU by his own will. There was potentially Trillions of Transistors he needed to properly position and utilize.
While he appreciated the sentiment; and had even considered some upgrades himself for quite some time, but there was something he was mildly afraid to ask…
"Try saying: Sesame," Rei whispered with a hush to them.
"… Oh, I get it, it's like a secret Pass-code." Mei said with excitement as she bent down on the machine's level. "Sesame…"
Then a Beep followed by a whirl came from the Desk. A few metal clicks later, the strip of indent lines lit up on the table's surface with a light blue hue.
Then a few ticks later, a hologram popped up. A hologram of a floating orb.
"Good… evening. My assigned name is… Sesame... yes, how can I help?" A calm robotic and mature female voice called out for all three present in the room to hear.
"Open project… what's its name… Ah yes, Open Project: Goldilocks, and Project: Link." Rei said after a moment to think, then the program did as it was told and gathered all files available on said requested projects.
"Wait… You integrated an AI!" Power Loader suddenly yelled with a panicked voice.
"It's barely even an User-Interface." Rei turned to calm the Teacher's nerves with his right hand held levelled, palm facing the floor.
"It's a glorified but slightly more advanced version of Siri or Alexa from way back then." He said with a bit of a shrug.
"Siri-…? Alexa…?" Power Loader then took to confusion, failing to catch what Rei was referring to.
"Oh! Those Ancient UIs from the early Twenty-First Century?" Hatsume asked to which Rei confirmed with a nod, after a brief contemplation as to how she recalled technology from well three hundred years ago.
"But… still, isn't it a hazard. Giving Intelligence as such," He gestured towards the table, "access to the School's Secure Databases?" He pressed on the issue, having a large opposition towards the UI's presence.
"It's not at all capable of independent thought of its own. I haven't even reached that level of Mastery, with this type of technology… not yet." Rei said with a toothy, ominous smile.
"Well, what can it do then?" Hatsume asked Rei. She was a bit disappointed when Rei stated what the Program could do. She was expecting it to be this Ultra Smart and powerful, Logic machine.
Not some repurposed version of an already existing technology with a different name.
"It's a… Laboratory Assistant of sorts." Rei explained proudly with his hands held to his hips.
"You do all the thinking, it does all the Drafting, Visualizing. Such things like that."
"Like instant 3D renders?" Power Loader asked while scratching his chin in thought, looking towards the desk with intrigue.
"Exactly," Rei confirmed excitedly with a nod.
"Hmm…" Power Loader hummed in a disapproving tone on impulse, his suspicion from before having now been confirmed.
"Why-? What's… wrong? You don't seem all that into it…" Rei turned towards their teacher when he caught his response, wondering what was the problem he had with it.
"Hmm? Oh, nothing much…" Power Loader laughed a bit while he waved his hands about, "It's just that… this Old man liked to do things the more intimate way…" He explained with a short laugh following it.
"Ah, I see." Rei nodded understandingly at their difference in personal preference.
"… What are those?" Mei asked suddenly, blissfully unaware of their sentimental exchange, in favour of focusing on the two projections floating on the space above the table.
"Oh, those? They're Awesome gifts, for an Awesome Older Brother." Rei proudly declared with a serene smile, walking up to the Work Station.
"Uh… huh… But why does one look like an ar- Oh My God! You're gonna give your brother a Metal Arm?!"
Rei nodded cheeky with a slight chuckle.
"Those strands... are they Carbon Fiber?" Power Loader stepped forward, indicating the intricate lines present all around the 'muscle' sections of the Robotic arm.
"Nano-Tubes." Rei corrected with a brief grunt, busily holding Mei back with his arms. She had been trying to climb onto the table to get inside the holographic projections, Rei could tell that much when he saw her with the longing look she had towards the renders on the table.
"… You sure you could manage it? I don't even think this Tech-freak of a student would ever figure those out?" Power Loader asked with a concerned tone while pointing a finger at Mei, but his eyes never left the projection.
"Besides, we can't manufacture those strands here…"
"I'm sure…" Rei answered in a reassuring voice not missing a beat after.
Then the Pink Haired Mechanic slipped from his grip and made a beeline for the workstation. Clambering up to the surface without a moment to spare.
Spinning around with her hands held outwards, she laughed triumphantly.
In her joyful dance, she noticed that as her hands flowed through the glowing microscopic particles of the Holographic projectors, they went around her palms and fingers, almost like a fluid in the air.
"Cool Holograms… Where'd you get the Design for the Projectors?" She playfully asked with a delighted laugh.
"It's, my own," Rei answered after a tired sigh.
She stopped in her spin and turned to face him with a silent look. Then a grin broke into her face, causing Rei and Power Loader to shiver a small bit with what she may have clearly been planning.
"Hatsume… get down." Power Loader softly demanded, and much to the surprise of both Rei and Power Loader, she did as she was told without a word of argument.
After a much warranted moment of silence, Rei spoke up to break it.
"… Sesame, bring 'Goldilocks' forward…" He shifted his attention towards the projection of the arm, held up a hand to it, and flicked.
This caused the Hologram to spin in the place Rei named; 'The Canvas', allowing for observation from all the different angles.
"Everything seems to be fine… Bring up 'Link'." He called and the UI obeyed, accordingly pulling back Goldilocks and bringing forward a round, flat disc.
"And, what will that be?" Mei asked, suddenly popping up from behind Rei, which caused Power Loader to jump a small bit.
"A Neural Transmitter." Rei simply said and waved his hands about, expanding the device to show its insides and Silicon Wire boards.
With gestures made with his hands, he reconfigured the wiring and layout of the system. "I had a muse while I was eating at the Cafeteria… Food's a great way to start thinking."
"So that's how the arm's controlled?" Their teacher asked while he brought up a single hand to scratch his chin.
With a light tap, the projection spun and condensed, collapsing back into a single piece, the shape of a really Flat Ellipsoid once again.
"How did your Brother even lose an arm? Oh! was he born with it?" Hatsume asked enthusiastically, blissfully unaware of how intrusive the nature of her question was.
Power Loader snapped his head towards his student in an instant with a deep frown, while Rei choked on air and coughed inwardly, bending forward to grab a hold of the table for support.
"Hatsume…" He warned with a glare.
"What? I can ask, can't I?" The Girl only smiled and looked to Rei, waiting for her answer.
"Well… I may have had something, to do with it…" Rei straightened his back and looked to the side towards the windows.
"Huh?" She blinked in confusion and stepped back to regard him with a look.
"I made the wrong people angry. And, I didn't even get the blunt of it for it…" Rei said with a bit of sadness in how he looked.
"I shouldn't have done this, I should not have done that. There's a couple of things I still regret; which I want to be made right… And this is one of them." He owned up all he could with silent and fidgety nods.
"That's the smallest part, I can play." He tilted his head to his left a bit as he said that.
"What happened? Exactly-"
"Hatsume, I think that's enough…"
She took to argue, opening her mouth to do so but stopped midway, stealing a glance at Rei. After a moment to consider, and without a word more of protest, she closed her mouth and stayed silent.
"So… Neural interface?" Power Loader asked instead, trying to change the mood of the room.
Rei cleared his throat and stood up, and nodded.
"I have to say, I read up about what you could do…" Power Loader lifted his hand and placed it on Rei's shoulder, shaking the Taller boy a bit. "But seeing it like this… Gives a whole new meaning to the word they would use on you all the time." He said with a gleeful chuckle.
"Hmm?" Rei was curious as to what he meant. There were many things people described him by in this life. "What word?"
'Wonder Boy'; 'Golden Boy'; 'Technical Boy'; A lot of 'Boys' now that he thought about it. So which one did the Support Teacher had in mind.
"Pioneer… of new technologies." Power Loader finished after a pause.
This caused Rei to turn to him with a frown of bewilderment.
Then he shifted his face when he saw that the boy was looking at him with a confused expression.
"It- it was what the writer used to describe you in a magazine, about your work in Robotics and Engineering." He explained.
"Oh… Well, I can safely say I haven't heard that before."
"Genuinely impressed with your work. I… only read up on it about a week ago and, just now am noticing some ways to improve the designs of my own creations." Power Loader said with a laugh, walking away from Rei towards a blue foldable chair to sit down.
"You know I coined a name, for a new method of designing..." Rei smiled when the teacher revealed that he had read his papers, and was then filled with curiosity with the extent of his knowledge on it.
"Omura's Occam?" The teacher downed half a bottle of water. "Yeah, I know; 'The simplest and easiest designs are often the most effective.'" Power Loader quoted with a grin.
Rei was silent for a moment, looking at his teacher with a look of mild shock. Then he smiled giddily with pride.
"Uh… What's 'Oumra's Occam'?" Mei budded in and requested for them to elaborate on what it is they were discussing.
"Exactly what you need to learn about engineering." Rei pointed a finger towards the Pink Haired girl in a dramatic fashion, turning to face her with a swivel of his feet, he marched back over to the table.
He flicked his projections to be away and was left with the empty Canvas. Holding his hands up, he stopped midway and turned to Mei with a look.
"You did save your models on the Workbench's driver, right?"
"Mm-hmm." She nodded with her eyes closed enthusiastically.
Turning back, he reached and tapped an icon of a file floating to his right.
As soon as he did, a wide display of a collection of files was sprawled out for him to see.
Immediately seeing a file that was named; 'Babies!' on the drive, he tapped on it and entered a collective of devices, all labelled; 'Babies' with variations in their number to tell between them.
Randomly selecting one, he plucked it with his right hand and brought it to his front, where he nodded as he grabbed it with his left as well.
Bringing his hands apart, a projection sprang forth from the palms of his hand, encompassing the empty Canvas of the Workbench. The projection was a Quad-bike, only instead of wheels, it had four identical turbines that allowed for it to hover in the air.
The vehicle's design was completely unsafe in Rei's opinion. Leaving the rider exposed completely in the event of an accident that could occur at, who knows what speed.
If the Quad was not set on the ground, with a set of wheels. That meant that its only option for breaks was to point its turbines in the opposite direction of wherever it was travelling.
Besides that, due to the very limited amount of friction one would encounter with the vehicle. It would be capable of extremely high speeds as well.
"Hey, that's Baby No. 13!" Mei pointed a finger in recognition of her device. She had Designed that thing not too long ago, during the very start of the semester.
"See here..." Rei pointed as well, though his hand travelled into the projection and highlighted a chunk of wiring inside the centre of the machine. The system seemed to be all over the place, wires on top of one another and one circled the whole circuit board once before it connected to its Battery Module.
The whole system should still work, but it had many flaws.
"Now, this is where we can apply, 'Omura's Occam'. See the power supply?" He turned back his head and saw her nod. "You did make the Batteries Modular, which is good. But you Un-uniformly distributed them all over the place."
A wire that connected Four separate Barrettes was highlighted. It collected the supply from all of them before it transferred their power to a converter located in the centre of the Quad.
"I… don't see the problem." She cheerfully replied after a moment of pause.
"The problem is the entire layout." Mei tried to spoke up but Rei placed a finger on her lips before she could. "See, this path is shorter. So it disproportionately delivers more power than the other Modules."
"Let's say that its average power delivery is… 10 Watts. And since electrons always travel through paths of least resistance, this battery would be the bulk of the energy utilized. Which would mean, it would be the first to go out." Rei made it so that the projection of the first module was highlighted in red.
"But, the other batteries, since the resistance in the wires is greater than the first one, the power output would be somewhere around… 7 Watts. This would cause a change in the motion of the entire Quad, which would mean the Program keeping the Areal stability would have to re-calibrate the Servers attached to the Turbines."
He turned his head back and saw that Hatsume, even though he was taking massive gripes to her design of the Quad-bike, she seemed to be taking it in stride. Silently looking at the projection, appearing to be in deep thought.
A smile tugged Rei's mouth, and he continued his lecture turning back to point at the farthest one of the battery Modules.
"And, as you can see, when the shortest Module loses half of its power, the farthest one from the converter, is still at 65% of max. And the system reads the average supply between the batteries, it would always show the wrong number."
"… We can fix this by… repositioning the batteries so that they're all levelled with each other. What if we located them near the front and back Bumpers…" Rei began to mumble to himself, reaching up a hand to hold his chin in thought.
"Or… better yet, why not near the Servers for the Turbines?" Hatsume chimed it, walking up behind Rei again, placing her chin on his left shoulder.
"Good thought..." Rei plucked the individual batteries and moved them to be in line with one another horizontally.
"Now the wiring, the shortest is a cord, about half a meter long, while the longest is about Two meters…" Rei turned his head up from the low low. "Sesame, please get rid of the wiring connecting the Batteries to the Power Converter."
The Computer did so, and Rei was left with missing spaces between the Power Supplies and the electric current converter.
"Now if we take this," Rei plucked from the output of the Battery Module closest to him, the one on the front left Turbine. "Highlight that please, good... and drag this along here…" Rei moved his hand, lining a chord to follow his finger as he sailed it through the broad side of the Quad, tracing a bright red path for the wiring.
"Why not just run it Diagonally?" Mei turned to regard him with a confused look.
Rei waved his hand, and prompted for a series of Spectrometers, Devices and Attribute Monitors to appear all over the place. In doing so, he showed that the only space available for the wire was the path Rei choose. Mei wording out a silent 'Oh' with her mouth.
"You think we should run this in parallel?" Rei asked, referring to the wiring to be copied on all the Modules.
Hatsume turned to look at the projection and frowned in thought. Running a series of ideas and configurations in her head, she decided to take one from Oumra and spoke forth the easiest and simplest answer she could come up with.
"Oh course." She simply said with a firm nod.
Rei nodded as well, tapping a prompt so that his wiring design was copied and reflected by all the different Battery Modules.
"… And, we've run into a problem..." Rei said dryly with a sigh.
Hatsume took to ask what it was, but Rei simply pointed to the Power Converter.
The one the Quad used was designed to receive a wiring system from one point on its side. Not built to take in a system of Mirror Module configurations, that in a Parallel wiring Architecture.
Hatsume then looked down and scanned the table, with her Scope-like eyes deep in thought as they looked around.
"Wait… I may have something…" she muttered to herself as she got off of Rei's shoulder and tapped the file icon on the Workbench again.
Rei looked at her as well with curiously raised eyebrows. He saw her run through the files with a swipe of her hand, effectively surfing through them.
"Here!" She suddenly yelled, causing Rei to jump a little bit.
Replicating Rei's gestures from before, she plucked the file in her sights and moved it to the Canvas.
Opening it up, they were greeted with a fine blue hologram render of a weird helmet thingy, with wires and protrusions dotted all around the outside.
Rei had a confused look at him, and Mei smiled with glee.
With gestures to enlarge it, she expanded the machine's projection to single out a cubical device.
"I designed this thing about a month ago." She explained, garbing a hold of the metal cube and taking it out. And with her right, unused arm, she waved away all the other, useless parts of the build.
"That's… an Omni-directional Input Charge Converter?" Rei asked with ample amounts of interest in his voice. switching his hold on the projection to his left hand, he held out his right hand to take it from Mei to admire it.
"Sure is! That Baby I took it from used about a hundred different Battery cells, so I had to improvise." She declared proudly, with her hands held to her hips. She bent forward and egged of for Rei to continue. "Which means...?"
"This is exactly what we need…" Rei told her, genuinely impressed with the design of the device, he shared her smile.
Without a moment to waste, he gestured for her to take out the soon-to-be-old Converter. Which she did happily as she hopped on over.
After she was done, he slapped the new converter on the Quad's Mainframe, and all was now almost complete.
Taking his left hand off of the render finally, he laughed with her at its completion.
"Now… you have to re-configure the entire layout of all the other devices, keep the centre of mass as close to the middle as possible." He turned to her cheekily with a grin.
Unknown to him, however, the entire prospect of redesigning her Baby, with a new lease on Engineering provided for a most joyful smile to split across her face.
"You've got it!" She yelled as she immediately got to work. Stepping up to the workstation, she waved her hands about at wide angles and pieces began flying off of the Render of the Quad-bike. Despite Rei being sure it was her first time using a Holographic Designer, she seemed to be natural.
Rei turned back and attempted to walk back, to continue disusing Engineering with the Resident Support Gear Hero. But he found his seat empty, along with the door leading out of the Support Department Room to be open.
"Hmm, that's rude," Rei mumbled sadly to himself.
Expect to see more, shortly after.
I hope you enjoy this chapter.