Ahoy! It's been a little bit! Apologies for that, got both a little distracted with other things and also had a little dry spell for motivation. There's not much to really bring up here as well as the previous chapter, and I'm sure y'all probably just skip the preamble anyways, so let's roggenroll, people!

"Mei, would you mind handing me the Acetylene torch?" I ask, not even looking up from the robot I've been working on as I reach my arm out to the side and make repeated gripping motions. Within seconds, a set of two thin steel canisters meeting into a nozzle at the top is flung into my grip from who knows where, and I flip my goggles into its 'Bright Light Protection' mode before getting to work. I idly hum a tune while I flick the torch on, feeling a bit stuffy from the added heat as I begin to carefully weld a piece of titanium-alloy plating onto the arm of the machine.

Now, you may be wondering, "Izuku! Where are you? How old are you? Why are you with Mei? And Why is there a robot?!"

And the answer to those questions is… hold on a minute and let me explain.

See, after my fateful encounter with my lifelong rival (her words, not mine), things began to move rather quickly in my life. Every other day or so, I would make the trek down to the junkyard where I would see and converse with Mei about each other's various projects, old and current. And in one of these times, I had lamented the fact that I'm vastly limited in scale due to having to be confined to my room, a problem that Mei said she doesn't share because of her family's shop.

She then got a look on her face that I had come to recognize: the face of getting a sudden great idea. And that's when she said…

"We'll just need to get a warehouse or something similar!" Mei shouts, looking awfully pleased with herself at thinking of the idea.

I shoot her a blank look. "Mhm, right, I'll get right on that, with the money neither I nor my mother has," I sarcastically breathe out as I turn back to the piece of scrap metal I was hauling and pick it back up and begin marching to the now functional and not hastily thrown together cart. Well, I guess I should say I 'try' to do that, because I make it only a few steps before the pink blur of energy zooms to the side not carrying the metal and gets in my face as per usual.

"Nonono, you missed what I said! I said WE'LL need to get a warehouse, not just you," she excitedly huffs and gesticulates wildly. "We just need to find an abandoned warehouse and take over it! People never check those, and no one except delinquents go there! And there's all the space we could ever want to build babies!"

Somehow, my blank look turns even more grim. This girl…

Taking my free hand, I drag my hand down my face starting from my forehead and I sigh a long-and-continuing-to-suffer sigh. "Mei. I don't think… that's a good idea."

"Really? It seems like a good idea to me. Why do you think that way?"

I whistle. "Other than the moral reasons of what is effectively squatting or stealing, mixed with the possible legal repercussions AND how it can reflect on us trying to get into U.A.?" She tilts her head slightly before nodding. "Um, how about the fact that those people who might find us are probably not the type of people you want to run into? Especially for us kids?"

Her grin drops as I can almost physically see her thought process. Yes! I think I might've actually-

"Then we just build defenses and also don't get caught!" She has the audacity to smile again, almost wider this time as I restrain the desire to run my neck along the jagged edge of this scrap in order to dodge this conversation.

I sigh. Again.

"Mei… look, I appreciate the enthusiasm and that you're trying to help, but I can't just sign off on this."

"Izuku, trust me on this one. I believe that this'll work! You trust your friends, right?" Mei pleads, and her face transforms into something I've never seen before: something cute. Her crosshair irises zoom out in just a way that emphasizes her natural pupils and she… is she pouting? Lower lip slightly curling above her upper lip, upturned face, light catching what is most likely wetness starting in her eyes… Yup, that's Mei Hatsume pouting, and it's critically effective.

"HRK!" I grunt out as exposure to her face erodes my composure rapidly. God, when did she get the ability to do puppy-dog eyes? It's unfair!

She continues to stare. And getting closer.

"Gah, alright, you win!" I groan, using my free hand a lightly grab her shoulder and push her away from me. "But this is on you if this fails!"

Instantly, her saddened and pleading expression disappears and is replaced by happiness and triumph. "YES! MOM'S ADVICE WORKED! MWAHAHAHA!" Mei cackles madly as she pulls out a folded and grease-stained piece of paper out of her pocket and makes a check mark on the page with a pen from her breast pocket.

Wait, what?

"What advice was that?" I inquire, suspicion growing that I've been duped.

"Secret mother to daughter information for the control of those of the opposite sex. Can't tell you anything more."

Yup. Definitely got scammed.

. . .

Within a week of her cruelly manipulating my sense of trust and built-in weakness to saddened women, Mei has dragged me out in front of a.. well, pretty run-down warehouse not far from both my house and the junkyard. Judging from the sign posted on the personnel entrance door at the front of the building, it was shut down several years ago due to the previous holder's numerous health code violations and non-compliance of J-OSHA standards… huh.

How ironic.

"Alright. You found the warehouse," I announce, finally giving her an answer in order to get her probing and expecting gaze away from me. "Now, how do you plan to make it so government people aren't going to come in here where they receive reports of loud, mechanical noises in the long abandoned warehouse?"

She laughs, a deeply mischievous sound that can only come from one who has had vast experience in the realm of doing things they shouldn't. I gulp.

"It's as simple as…" she trails off as she digs into her backpack that she'd brought, throwing out a worrying assortment of sharp objects, wire bundles, tools… what ever else is in there. "Aha! Found it," she exclaims as she pulls out a very similar looking notice sign from her bag and walks up to the door. Getting there, she takes the current sign and… just rips it off and tosses it aside, then with a carefulness largely unfound in Mei, applies the new sigh directly over the previous one.

"And… done!" she proudly declares, stepping away from the door and dusts off her hands and I approach her cautiously. Seeing my approach, she steps off to the side and points to the sign. "Take a look! Iron-clad, right?"

Narrowing my eyes, I take a look at the sign and can't help but groan.

'This warehouse has been deemed by J-OSHA to be of operational acceptability under further review issued by Pro Hero Power Loader. Any and all concerns may be forwarded to this number of Power Loader-san's office: 0XX-XXXX-XXXX.'

-Signed,

Kentaro Watanabe

Senior Executive, J-OSHA Shizuoka Prefecture

I look up to her, and am not amused by her waggling eyebrows.

"So? Whaddya think? Great, right?" Mei smugly asks, slapping the wall above the sign excitedly.

"Mei, this is… not legal? And, why're you getting Power Loader into this? One person digging into this is going to blow this all open, and it'll be even worse when they find out you've faked government documentation!" I can't help my voice rising as my brain goes over every single possible worse-case scenario one after another. "No, Mei, this won't work it's-"

"But will they?" the pinkette interrupts strongly, and my voice dies in my throat at the confidence in her voice.

"Huh? What do you mean, of course they can, and probably will, it's just that-"

Again, she cuts me off. "But WILL they, is the question," Mei reiterates, walking over to the door and opens it, rusted hinges making an ungodly noise as the door swings open. Not waiting for an answer, she walks into the building and I can't help but follow her. She flips a switch near the door and old lights flicker to life for the first time in years.

"Izuku, you have to think of the country we're in. Would someone in our very bother-minded society really decide to take the time and effort to bother both the government AND a very busy Pro Hero?" the inventor spins on her heel and surveys the empty, dusty warehouse and tuts disapprovingly.

"I…" I begin, but when I actually think about it, her words make a lot of sense and my complaint never makes it past my lips and I sigh, defeated. "No, probably not."

"Exactly."

…

"Hey, since when did you even care about something that isn't one of your babies, or making new ones?" I can't help but question the girl in front of me, who had already begun to run a finger along an old, motheaten office chair and her finger comes up covered in dust. Turning towards me, she wipes her finger on her coveralls and shrugs.

"Eh, can't make babies if I have no place to work. So I asked my dad what to do, and he recommended this idea, said he's done it a time or three" she answers non-committedly and she cracks her fingers before doing a few stretches in place. "So… ready to start building?"

I look around. Yup, really dirty. But… it sure is a lot more room than I'm used to, and all the more room to build without bothering Mom.

"Sure."

That explain things?

…

What? 'Only answered 2/4 of the questions?' Ugh. Fine, I'll be more specific.

That whole exchange happened back when I was 13, about halfway through the summer and just after my birthday. At present, I am currently 14, and Mei is 15, and that robot I'm building just happens to be my latest and greatest project! Built from the remains of various U.A. robots we'd managed to salvage, I took great care in building this latest invention to be as sleek and future-proof as possible. And in order to do that, I picked up a new area of study in the last few months: A.I. Creation.

See, it's like coding and programming and robotics, except much more complicated, finicky, and more prone to end up being a disaster if things go super poorly. But that's unlikely to happen, considering I barely know enough to get a few spider drones to move around without my exact commands. And even then, I still did it by ripping a script for a self-learning A.I. from the internet and splicing in a few things here and there to make sure it could move the individual legs of the spider drone I installed it in. But can you guess what happened when I booted it up?

If you guessed: stood still, twitched madly, and then promptly exploded, you'd be correct! But that was just SpA. 1; it took until SpA. 12 in order for it to not explode and SpA. 21 in order to actually crawl around without managing to fold itself into a ball.

So the premise was great, and thus began the process to cut down the amount of limbs until this thing could properly walk on two legs. And that's just the legs! I also needed to spend a lot of time making sure the arms could be used properly, and then it doing complex actions, and then it walking and using it's arms at the same time! It was, and still is, a nightmare.

And that takes us to here, where after spending the last few months refining an A.I. that I still had no clue if it would work when fully scaled up to size, I'm finishing up the final bits of armor plating on the robot's arms and head. Really, this thing was a work of art, and certainly one of my largest scale projects to date. Sliding my goggles up off my eyes and into my hair, I set down the welding torch I'd been using and step back and admire the automaton.

It's not huge, actually standing a similar height to me when put into the 'T-Pose' I'd been using in order to reach all around its arm. The coloring is mostly blue, still the color of U.A. that I hadn't yet bothered to paint over or sand off, with a few accents of steel and copper around the joint areas that I also hadn't bothered to cover up, figuring I should make sure it works before I make it look pretty. Most notable are the gauntlets, head, and feet, as these areas have significantly more plating on them then other areas, giving the appearance of this robot wearing proper protective equipment.

Truthfully, I hadn't even thought of the name of it yet. Didn't want to get my hopes too high before disappointing myself as it explodes and… I don't know, probably hurling a chunk of shrapnel into my eye socket.

Making a pleased hum, I turn to the computer I have opened up on the desk next to the robot and I haphazardly scan over the code while bringing up the display for the condition of the machine. Tapping at a few keys, a new window pops up with a 3D simulation of the robot and I drag the mouse over the image and make it spin a few times before going to where the arms are and clicking them, bringing up a menu. In it, information about the limb flashes on the screen and I apply changes to the data to account for the extra plating.

Absorbed in my work, I failed to hear the approaching shuffle of Mei's feet on the warehouse floor but I definitely manage to feel her looking over my shoulder by her body heat. "Yeah?" I mutter, not even looking up from the screen.

"Whatcha doin'?" she asks me, inching closer to me in an effort to see all of the screen over my shoulder, the slight height difference between us acting as a barrier to her sightline. But what this does do is…

*Ba-Dump*

Ah, raise my heart rate from the rush of my teenage hormones when she inadvertently pressed her chest against my back, fantastic. Really, this happens way too often because of the girl's complete lack of a sense of personal space, or respect for other's personal spaces, but also because of our proximity. Even though we work on our own separate projects most of the time, there are times when one of us would get distracted by what the other is doing and come over, or that sometimes two pairs of hands are needed for a task. So this just kind of… happens from time to time.

Does she know what she's doing? I'll give it a solid 99% chance and say she doesn't, because if she did, I have a feeling she'd change her phrasing regarding her inventions.

Ahem. Anyways. Forging bravely on ahead.

"Added some extra plating to the meeting point between the robot's gauntlets and the rest of his forearms. Thought it would be useful to have later on down the line," I answer her, still typing away and looking at the screen while my cheeks bloom crimson. Well, redder than they already are considering my exertion and exposure to heat, but still, you get the point.

"Ah. So when will it be done? I wanna see this baby move!" Mei excitedly asks as she mercifully steps away from me and moves into my peripheral vision in order to start poking and prodding the still hunk of metal and code.

"Well, that'll be difficult to tell," I honestly say, finishing up the adjustments to the data and getting it updated in the rest of the systems before going back to the 3D simulation of the robot. Sure enough, the model on the screen now has the added plating just like the real thing, and I pull up a diagnostics screen. "Could be today, tomorrow, or a few weeks from now. But looking at this here…"

I tap a few keys, and out of the corner of my eye I can see Mei turning to look at me, hope glimmering in her eyes even from this distance. My eyes narrow at the information I see, cross reference it with another tabbed window, and make a small adjustment in another window, seeing minute changes on both previous windows before closing them all.

"I think I can try to turn it on today," I declare, and Mei whoops in celebration and joy. I slightly turn my head to face her and raise up a calming hand. "Whoa now, not too excited. Just turning it on, not giving it a test run." Her excited vibrating stops as she hustles out of the way and to my side again.

"Aw, phooey. Anyways, turn it on! I wanna see it!" Ah, a quick recovery like always. I can't help but sigh in bemusement and turn to the screen and hover my mouse over the long-forgotten 'Boot-up' option.

I turn to look at her. She nods and gives me a thumbs up.

Welp, here goes nothing.

*Click*

Quickly pulling up the diagnostics screen again, I flicker my eyes between the screen and the robot still sitting inert on its stand.

Hmmm… it should be working, looking at the diagnostics report. Power systems operational and running, A.I. is getting installed into the 'brain' of the robot… For all intents and purposes, this should-

*Whirrrrrr* *Whirrrrrrrr* *Clic-Clack*

Ah, there it goes. Within seconds, a mechanical hum and whirring begins emanating from the robot as the battery within its chest powers the limbs, each appendage twisting and turning in a standard activation sequence. It's mesmerizing the way the oiled bearings and sockets move so smoothly and still go back to their proper places when they're done spinning. And it's all going perfectly fine.

Until the eyes open. And they are… huh, since when was there a Greek letter in its iris? I don't remember putting that in.

Turning back to the diagnostic screen, my eyes widen exponentially at the readings. Those numbers… are not supposed to be that high. Numbly, I click the 'Terminate process' button, awaiting the machine to turn off the robot and let it cool off so I can pull up the logs to see where it went wrong.

Except it doesn't shut down. I press the button a few more times.

Nothing.

"Um… Izuku, is it supposed to be smoking?" Mei asks from beside me, breaking me out of my stupor and snapping my head to the now smoking robot.

"No… no it is not," I answer before sprinting over to the fire extinguisher we keep on hand in case of such emergency. Hey, just because we don't care for our own safety, doesn't mean that we don't care for it at all: sometimes our creations want to just combust even though we don't want them to and want to save hours of work.

Me! Not the time!

Right.

Running back over to the robot, I can see Mei tapping away furiously at the keyboard and I quickly get the extinguisher ready and spray the smoking automaton. Foam shoots out from the hose and covers the metal, mostly the hear where I could see most of the smoke rising from. Within seconds, the smoke is smothered by the gaseous foam and I set the extinguisher down and breathe a sigh of relief. Alright, that seems to be done. Time to see what THAT was all about.

Walking over to Mei, she moves off to the side to allow me access, and I bring up the log and diagnostics report. And everything is completely fine, except for one small entry in the log that immediately jumps out to me because of how out of place it is. Nestled in among scripts, programs, and other such lines of code, is a… strange bundle of characters.

Isthwaunse

All in English, too. Very strange. Intrigued and slightly concerned, I cross referenced the phrase with the entire system, and found no results until I got to the A.I.'s dump files of all of its previous sets of data. And there it was only listed one other time, dating back to… some time in the very early morning a few weeks ago. When was that?

Looking back in my mind, I call back my memories of that date and cringe a little bit at the memory. That was the final few hours of a consecutive 4 days awake when I was hell-bent on getting the A.I. updated into working with the parameters of the body and to scale from previous data. That was… not a good time, I barely even remember that day at all. The only reason I even remember anything from those haze of days is because immediately after declaring that I'd probably fixed that problem, I feel asleep so quickly that I fell into the arms of the robot and Mei took a picture of me when she came to the shop.

And wait, in the dump files, there's even more to it here then there is in the log. Here, it reads:

Isthwaunsecoobeftiorelswa

…That means absolutely nothing to me.

I turn to Mei and point to the strange jumble of characters on the screen. "Hey, you have any idea what this can be?"

She looks at the characters intensely as I watch her irises visibly zoom in on the letters. Her eyes flit over the jumble, then again, and again and again before she groans and shakes her head. "Nope, makes no sense to me. And this is where again?"

"A.I. dump files."

"Hmmm…" the pinkette hums, tapping a finger on her cheek in thought before she shrugs and places her hands on her hips. "Yeah, still don't know. In fact, it makes even less sense."

"You can say that again," I mumble out as I flick over between a few windows to pull up other reports and data sheets. I see her body slightly tense. "Not actually." It deflates.

And just then, when I think everything had finally been settled, a new entry appears in the log, just below the confirmation of a cessation of processes.

Isthwaunse

Huh? I turn to look at the robot.

It blinks, and the Greek letter in its eyes glows a foreboding red.

That's not good. Red means something bad is going to happen, and when it comes to my creations, something bad happening usually always means…

"MEI, HIT THE DECK!" I bellow out before I turn my back to the creepy, blinking robot and seeing her uncharacteristically freeze up, make the split decision to tackle her to the floor.

"Izu-" her protest is cut short by the consecutive actions of me dragging her to the floor and the deafening explosion of the robot behind us. Red-hot, sharp metal pieces of scrap find themselves either stopped completely by my thick shirt or embedded into my otherwise unprotected arms and neck and I scream at the pain. But still I keep my hold on Mei, shielding her from the brunt of the blast.

A few seconds pass and my now slightly shaking body roughly pulls itself off of hers, and I look up and survey the damage. Pieces of scrap and wiring litter the warehouse in all kinds of shapes and sizes; a piece of the arm there, half of the head over there…

But strangely, it grows eerily silent save for the sound of rolling and popping metal. That is, except for the occasional sound of a sharp metallic ping ringing from random places around the shop. Wait, now that I think about it, it sounds suspiciously like something ricocheting around the walls and floor…

Head whipping around, I track the last place I heard the metal pinging and hear it again on the opposite side of the shop, drawing the angle and line it approximately took to get to there. OK, if that hit there, then there, then…

*PING*

…There, that means it'll probably hit around…

*PING*

…There, and next is going to be…

My calculations pause, and I freeze in panic and dread.

WAIT NO!

The last thing I see is a speck of grey becoming an impossibly larger portion of my field of vision before-

Nothing.

I snap upright in my bed at home, safe and unharmed. Blinking slowly, I drag a hand all the way down my face in exasperation.

God… Damnit, why'd I have to say anything?

Man, you think I would've learned my lesson by now that – I quickly reach over and make a tally mark on an already quite filled board – I really shouldn't give fate any ideas, but there I went! And in the privacy of my own thoughts and everything. Didn't even jinx myself by saying it out loud this time.

I open the door to my room and walk out into the kitchen where Mom is already making breakfast.

Not even looking up from the sizzing pan, she asks, "Attempt?"

"Two."

"How'd it happen?"

"Robot got like, possessed and fulfilled a jinx I made in my thoughts."

She hisses through her teeth in sympathy. "That's rough. And wait, possessed? I thought there's nothing supernatural, considering well…" she briefly turns away from the stove and rolls a hand in insinuation. "You kind of making all religions irrelevant."

"One: not irrelevant to the ones that don't really care about death. Two: still don't know exactly how this all works, could still be God. And three: yeah, I thought nothing weird like that would happen but here we are." Sitting down at the table with a huff, I idly begin to tap my finger on the flat surface while I wait.

"Nothing like this had ever happened before. I powered it on, it had weird Greek letters for pupils, started smoking, refused to turn off, then outputted some weird, jumbled mess of text," I explain, pulling out a small notebook and pen from my pocket and writing down the letters again from memory.

Isthwaunse

Hmm… My brain pours over the possible meanings of the letters. I twirl the pen around my thumb while I think and Mom sets down a plate of breakfast in front of me and I hear her sit down across from me.

A bit of jumbled code? Unlikely, considering that it's too short is in the A.I.'s files. Something the A.I. was using as a shorthand for a task? No, because it only appeared one other time before, and I doubt it has an exploding protocol. A message? That's… huh, what could that be.

Splitting up the letters, I arrange them separately and begin to run through the combinations of words they can make.

"Well, 'I' is capitalized, and normally code isn't capitalized unless it's designated to be otherwise, so it's probably a singular 'I', as in first person tense. Then that just leaves the rest of the… But, no, probably not that, those words don't make any sense together. So it starts with 'I', and it has to make some sort of sense…" I mutter, too lost in my thoughts to care about my bad habit slipping.

I screw my eyes up when I think I've found something and I put my pen down.

"That's… strange," I begin, tapping the notebook page with a finger and I look at the letters again in order to try to find anything else, but come up blank.

"What?" Mom questions, looking up from her plate and gets up with a piece of toast in her hand and stops behind me, looking over my seated shoulder.

"I think I found out what it's saying… but makes no sense," I explain, grabbing the pen again and forming lines to other possible word combinations, but nothing else makes itself known.

"'I was the sun?'" Mom recites from over my shoulder, and I look up at her, meeting her confused look with one of my own. "What does that mean?"

"No clue…"

"Well, you have the school day to think about what it could mean," she says as she goes back to her seat, piece of toast now all gone as she gets to work on the rest of her meal.

"Yeah, I know," I huff as I scooch the chair away from the table, pick up the notebook, pen, and my backpack near the door, and head out of the apartment.

I walk on the sidewalks with my head firmly in my own mind, stewing over the implications of the deciphered message. 'I was the sun', 'I was the sun'… I'll definitely need to ask Mei about it when I get to the shop.

…And also get through school again.

…And also both make the additions to the plating again.

…AND also make sure to check through the psycho, explode-y code and probably also the weird Greek letter pupils.

…AND wait, why're people yelling at me, I'm not muttering this out loud am I…?

I take my first look up in my entire journey to school… only to find myself in the middle of the crosswalk when it's red, and that's a…

Sigh

A truck, barreling right towards me so fast and close I have literally no way to avoid it.

Ah. I see.

Starting off strong this time, eh?

"Attempt?"

"Three, and don't wanna talk about it," I grumpily say as I take a seat at table and pull out my pocket notebook, making an entry for both the previous death and the one before it in the same loop.

And that's the end of this chapter! I want to put a line above this, but at the same time, it looks awkward to me having such few lines sandwiched between lines, especially at the end of the chapter, so them asterisks will have to do!

So... we got some actual plot on our hands for once! Apologies that a relative few things actually happened this chapter, but this is set up for later on down the line. But yes, while I want this to be comedic, there'll hopefully be bits of actual tension and intrigue sprinkled in here and there. Or also, the main reason: I don't think I can keep a consistent tone to save my life, a part of me aches to either lighten parts up or slow it down, please help me.

Anyways! To the reviews!

-Guest with long review: Haha, yes I... kind of forgot about that! Whoops. I mean, it's a time manipulation quirk at its core, and time manipulation is a convoluted mess that makes little to no sense. If I were to try to explain it logically, then it's essentially Izuku's brain making instructions for when either A). heart stops beating B). imminent brain failure/severe brain damage and when either of those happens, it executes the 'Respawn Protocol'. How that happens, and he just wakes up with the same knowledge... That's where we get to the handwaving.

-Guest with a shorter review: I'm surprised too, and neither can I respectively for your two musings.

-inglesluis05: Indeed. Classic Mei. Love that girl (not in that way tho, I'm a law abiding citizen).

-RoyallyFucked: Thank you kindly, and I hope I have provided both appropriate fluff and now some actual plot!

-Kilo8: We shall see. I got some stuff in store for the things Izuku is going to build, as you can see by this chapter.

-whywouldidothat2230: Thank you kindly! I hope you liked this one as well!

And with all that being said and done, I thank you kindly for reading, and I'll see y'all next time.