"Something's off about this whole situation."

"How so?"

My eyes tracked the movements outside the car as we rolled slowly past. Every house with their curtains drawn drew my attention. People on the streets were treated with a level of suspicion that none of them had earned but all of them deserved.

Giran's words were stuck with me. There was something about this situation that I was missing, and I didn't like it one bit.

"I think there's a chance we're walking into a trap that isn't being set for us."

"Should I turn around?"

Gentle's eyes were on me in the mirror when I glanced at it. How he managed to keep enough attention on the road to not crash was beyond me, but I'd happily chalk it up to him having some kind of supernatural power.

"Do you want to?"

He stared at me for a moment longer. No more noise came from the front of the car, but there wasn't any deviation from the route I'd planned out for us, so I took the situation for what it was.

Still, that left me in the dark and paranoid. A combination I didn't like, and one I had only a vague idea of how to rectify.

"It might be nothing, but I don't want to take the chance. But we'll need a way to convey if I find something that Manami misses…"

I rested my chin on my hands, flicking my eyes across the numerous black cars we were now passing. All the men in suits had visible wires leading from their collars to their ears, some of the most outdated technology I'd seen so far.

The car slowed as we made a turn. Two of the suited men were talking to each other on the street corner, one of them whirling a finger around the side of his head while the other laughed.

That gave me an idea.

"Alright, here's the plan…"


The pleasant warmth left her body once he'd pulled his hand away. Momo almost tightened her grip before she remembered that she wanted to keep some degree of separation between them.

The kitchen she'd been led to wasn't the one that prepared the family meals, nor was it the one that she'd sneak into occasionally in the dead of night when she needed to replace her lipids. It was smaller than the others, with no room for seating aside from the chairs lined up against the outside of the counter, but it was no less well stocked for it.

She had her own shares in the family business to profit off of, after all. If that profit went to hiring chefs with food based Quirks that she personally knew the struggles of, well, there were worse ways to spend part of a sizable allowance.

This kitchen was the one mainly used by the gardening staff. The large glass doors that overlooked a portion of the ornate lawn her family let in more sunlight than Momo was used to. There were still some muddy boot prints on the tiles from when the breakfast rush had ended, which she stepped around delicately before pulling a chair away from the counter for herself.

Utterly lacking in propriety as he was, Michael hadn't stopped to ask if she knew where anything was. Not that she did in this part of the house, but that was beside the point! Cupboard doors had already been thrown open and left to drift in the slight breeze of the open window, though they at least hadn't been allowed to slam against the walls or each other. In the time it had taken her to sit down and make herself comfortable, an ill-fitting apron had already been thrown over his suit, and the cufflinks he'd been wearing were forgotten on the countertop.

"You allergic to anything?" He'd turned away from her, propping open the fridge door with one foot while he rolled his sleeves up. The way the muscles in his forearms moved as they were slowly revealed to her had her mouth going dry, just for a moment.

"N-no." He nodded, the apron discarded once it was obvious it wouldn't fit easily around his broad frame. With unerring accuracy, he threw it back towards the hook that had held it, leaving it to unfurl itself against the wall while he inspected the fridge. With his back to her, Momo took the opportunity to slap herself lightly across the face twice, hoping that the pain would paradoxically take away the redness she could feel in her cheeks.

Heavens forbid her parents walked in to find her blushing up a storm over a man that had dragged her into an empty room. They would have the nuptials planned by the evening, perhaps even sooner if that had been the plan for this meeting all along.

That thought, more so than any other, was the shock of frigid cold to her spine that allowed her to school her features properly before he turned back around, his arms filled with a random assortment of ingredients. Her parents may have been happy to allow her to live her heroic dreams, but they would also be more than happy to see her settle into a role with less danger.

Especially if she was seduced into it by the handsome, reputable, intelligent man who could cook and was looking her in the eyes, trying to get her attention-

Darn it!

"-Some kind of genius, right?"

"Errr…" Of course he'd been asking a question right when she'd lapsed into being an awful host. His ability to take her off guard was perhaps the most dangerous thing about him, if she discarded the feeling of murder that clung to his face whenever he just so happened to step into the shadows of the kitchen. "Yes, that's right."

He nodded, as though he'd been expecting that answer, and Momo breathed a small sigh of relief. That left her lungs blessedly empty, so she wouldn't end up choking on the air left in them when a worn notebook slapped down onto the counter before her, appearing so abruptly in her vision that she almost fell out of her seat.

She stared at the book for a moment, waiting for it to either explode or grow limbs and flee from the room. When it shockingly did neither, she tilted her head back up, not even surprised that Michael had turned his back to her to focus on the stovetop. He had a few pans out, having somehow done so without her noticing, and the smell of bacon and eggs was beginning to fill the sunlit room.

Valiantly, she gave up on trying to predict what he was trying to do. It almost felt like he was being deliberately obtuse. If not reading this was a test of some kind, then she had full confidence she would fail it, when studying came with this many headaches.

The cover of the book, aside from the slight damage that came with age, was blank. Flipping to the next page and almost expecting the same, Momo paused before the paper had even left her fingertips, eyes scanning automatically across the words and diagrams that were scribbled in a surprisingly neat font.

The words themselves were familiar to her, as were many of the diagrams. Some made almost no sense, while others made an alarming amount of sense, once she'd read through them twice and gone back to link them to things that had been written earlier.

These notes made no sense. Worse than that, they made perfect sense.

"These are…"

"Concepts." Her words couldn't have come out as much more than a murmur, and yet over the popping of the food he'd been cooking, it seemed like Michael had heard her perfectly. "Those are some ideas I've had for new elements, mainly. Once I heard I'd be meeting you, I figured you'd enjoy seeing it."

It could never be said that Momo couldn't lose herself in a book for hours on end. That book could be a textbook or an epic adventure through a fantasy land. But that statement, uttered with detached nonchalance, had her head shooting back up to stare directly into Michael's eyes. For a moment he almost seemed alarmed, perhaps not expecting her to move before he could turn back to the stove.

"And you're just letting me read this!?" Did he have no sense of business!? Something as large as brand new elements should have been wrapped under so many layers of red tape that the creative process of it would never see the sun again.

"It's not like we can manufacture them." He had the audacity to shrug before turning back to the stove, flipping pieces of bacon with the complete confidence of a man who wasn't about to be crucified by his father's lawyers. "They might as well go to someone who can make use of them."

Were she a lesser heiress, Momo would have let her head rest against the counter, hopeful that the marble surface would be cold enough to regulate the temperature of her brain. Unfortunately, a lady of her station would have to grit her teeth and bear the overwhelming headache that was Michael Wise, and his paradoxical priorities. Why he wouldn't patent this and instead hand it over in a worn notebook was a question that could only be answered by whichever of his personalities was in charge of that decision, and maybe one of the Gods.

With his focus once again back on their brunch, Momo opened the notebook again, scanning the words carefully now instead of flipping through as quickly as she could. The descriptions themselves were fairly brief, squeezed in between equations and sketches that built upon themselves on subsequent pages.

"Did you come up with all of this yourself?" It was sloppy, but only in presentation. Like a master's thesis that had been written in a typhoon. A metal with the tensile strength of tungsten and malleability of gold at any temperature was absurd in any other situation, but seeing it scrawled across multiple pages and interspersed with what seemed to be fractions of a shopping list somehow made it seem… possible.

"The ideas came from a few different places." The stove clicked off. With two plates balanced on a single arm, he reached over to the cutlery drawer, inadvertently giving Momo a brief view of his suit stretched tight against his chest as she glanced up. Surely he was doing it on purpose at this point. "I did my own research and you're holding what it was compiled into."

The plate that ended up in front of her was a fantastic distraction. The omelette resting on it wasn't the prettiest thing she'd ever seen, but it smelled amazing. The fork had barely been handed to her before she was diving in, the stomach choosing that moment to remind her that she was supposed to be hungry, not thirsty.

It tasted too good. That wasn't fair. Momo glanced up at him through her eyelashes, taking in the solid jawline as he chewed. The muscles in his neck tensed slightly as he swallowed, and the way he was leaning against the counter with one arm to eat gave her the slightest view of his collarbone and chest.

Was she a pervert, or was he just that unguarded? Attractive, smart, and able to make an omelette taste like one of the best things she'd ever eaten?

He was basically perf-

"By the way, page 52 has Corium. You, uh, probably shouldn't make that one."

He was basically a walking disaster waiting to happen.

The fork that had been approaching her mouth instead smeared egg all over her cheek. She barely noticed, letting her jaw hang slack as she regarded the migraine that the world had seen fit to give her today. Michael raised an eyebrow right back at her, his lethargic chewing giving no indication that he'd just dropped a bombshell that would probably kill her immediately if she tried making it.

She tried to think of something to say to that, she really did. Her lips opened and closed several times, not stopping even when he grasped the hand holding her fork and guided it into her mouth. She chewed her omelette instinctually, refusing to stop examining the enigma in front of her.

Michael Wise was strange. He spoke Japanese perfectly despite apparently never having been in the country. He shifted thoughts and feelings at the drop of a hat. He had absolutely no common sense, and yet she felt like she could trust him with anything.

He was leaping over the counter, tackling her to ground- wait, what?

Michael had moved before Momo could react. The only thing she'd noticed was his eyes flicking to the side slightly, looking just over his shoulder, before they widened dramatically. In the next instant there was a solid weight bringing her to the ground, one of his hands cradling her head and the other slamming into the tiles to their side.

The tiles bubbled upwards, splitting apart in a manner far too controlled to be anything other than Michael's doing. From the gap, a layer of sedimentary rock rose, growing high enough to eclipse the sunlight streaming in through the windows before the deafening sound of splintering glass abolished the previous calm atmosphere.

Something slammed into the rock shield, followed quickly by another, and then another. The impacts inches from her skin had Momo shuddering, each one sounding like a clap of thunder.

After a tense few seconds, the impacts stopped. Still stuck underneath Michael's weight, Momo had no choice but to wait as he rose slowly, the hand that had been shielding her head from the ground gently withdrawing. Now more than ever, she missed the contact.

One hand on the rock wall, Michael closed his eyes, his body heating up noticeably. The hand that had been cradling her head dipped into one of his suit's pockets. From it, he withdrew a mushy pile of eggs and bacon. Two forks stuck haphazardly out of the mess.

"I saved the omelettes."

Funnily enough, she didn't feel too hungry anymore.