Before the encounter with Mirko...

It was never a good sign when Twice was silent.

His face was all but impossible to make out in the darkness of the backseat. Without a light inside the car, the only illumination available in the tunnel that Vitaceae had dropped them into was from the headlights reflecting against the walls ahead. The interior lights remained untouched, but Gentle could tell from the way his suit rustled that Twice had his arms crossed.

After this long, he found himself missing the chatter and laughter. It followed him through the halls of his new house, warming his heart in much the same way as his quest for justice always had.

Perhaps he was due to make a new video. It had been some months since the last one, after all.

"She clocked onto him immediately."

One eyebrow rose, the perfect approximation of the character Gentle had been playing that afternoon. The tunnel ahead was still straight, which afforded him the opportunity to reach back and flick the car's interior lights on.

Twice's eyes met his in the rear view mirror. There was no prize for guessing just who he was talking about.

"It would seem so, yes."

Truly, that had been the most difficult test for the blank expression he'd been instructed to maintain throughout the meeting. Actually getting to see Mirko in the flesh, after her meteoric rise up the ranking charts? That alone would have been a remarkable experience. It was a shame he'd not been able to get an autograph for Manami.

That had all come to a screeching halt with her instant reaction to their mastermind. Followed immediately by his instant reaction to her.

The man that had charged into a mafia compound with nothing but a shovel and a grudge… hiding behind a teenage girl from a woman that was smaller than both of them.

Gentle's face was blank as he refocused on the unpaved road laid out for them. There was enough bafflement in Twice's expression for the both of them.

"I just… how do they even know each other?" The ceiling of the car took a devastating hit as Twice threw his arms into the air. With his strength, it was a wonder he didn't manage to dent the car. "She went right for him as soon as she saw him! And didja see the look on her face!?"

Gentle coughed out a short laugh at that, shaking his head at the memory. Esteemed though he may have been, in the role of a commoner among the elite, his position on the outskirts had granted him a much wider view than anyone, other than Vitaceae, would have been aware of.

The bewilderment of the Yaoyorozu patriarch, the pinched cheeks and narrowed eyes of the monarch. The intense, if brief jealousy that burned through the heiress. And of course, it would be remiss of him to not huff out a small laugh at the sheer panic in Vitaceae's eyes, as though witnessing his own approaching doom.

"A maiden in love. I would have thought her incapable of such an expression, had I not seen it myself."

Even with her comparatively short time in the limelight, it was clear Mirko only had two moods. Anger, and conceit. Watching her plant her face into someone's chest like an overly affectionate puppy had the same dissonance as Twice's earlier brooding.

Which only made the fact that Vitaceae hadn't been expecting it in the least even more odd. Surely if they knew each other well enough for her to be comfortable with that, he should have built up some kind of tolerance for her presence.

When would they have even gotten the chance to get that close on opposite sides of the law?

"Right!? I mean yeah he's good looking, if you're into the whole 'never smiling' thing, but-!"

Gentle chanced another glance at the rear view mirror. Twice had cut himself off, the blond man looking out his window at the repeating rock and soil walls of the tunnel with a contemplative glint in his eye.

It was the same expression that usually preceded a batshit insane plan that had no right to work as well as they always did. An irrational bolt of fear shot down Gentle's spine at the sight; it would be a while yet before he learned how to ignore the instinctual dread entirely.

"Hey, Danjuro…" Twice spoke slowly, as though reviewing every word before it left his mouth, "how much do we know about Mineta?"

The tunnel was beginning to curve slightly to the left. Gentle adjusted the steering wheel carefully, his mind halfway from the road ahead.

"What do you mean?"

"Minoru Mineta." Twice leaned forth in his seat, his hands clasped in his lap. If the position weren't already taken, he would have looked for all the world like the boss of whatever their little syndicate had become. "How much do we actually know about him that doesn't come back in some way to Vitaceae?"

The memory resurfaced unbidden, of an extremely short boy with a comically serious expression handing him more money than he'd ever seen in his life.

"Hmm, Minoru Mineta…" Manami had been beside herself when she first heard the name and searched for any info she could get on him. He'd listened to her ranting, partially out of interest and partially because her voice was as enchanting to him as the rest of her.

"Son of Katsushika Mineta and an unnamed mother. Eighteen years old. Quirk is Pop Off, which manifests in sticky spheres of hair that somewhat resemble large grapes." Information hadn't been hard to come by on the boy, but it had been sparse. Minoru Mineta hadn't maintained much of a social media presence even before getting in contact with them, and if burning it all to the ground was any indication, he hadn't had any possessions he was particularly attached to.

"Blood type A. A history of complaints through middle and high school of… sexual misconduct." And hadn't that grated on his beloved's nerves? The only reason they'd gone through with meeting him after finding that was because Manami's curiosity only barely managed to outweigh her disgust. "Was on the U.A hero course registry after passing their mock exams in the top three percentile, until his death ten months ago in a house fire allegedly started by a splinter group of yakuza extremists he'd previously stolen from."

Twice nodded absently as Gentle's information ran dry, as though he'd known all of that already. For all the dapper man knew, he had. It was hardly a secret that out of all their little cadre, Twice was far and away the closest to their enigmatic and, oftentimes somewhat frustrating, leader.

"Except all of that is bullshit, isn't it?"

Gentle couldn't help it; he snorted, accidentally spraying the steering wheel with flecks of spittle. That was perhaps the easiest question he'd ever heard in his life.

Mineta's blood type was O negative. He'd needed to be as accurate as possible when registering the Michael Wise persona, seeing as it would be at least somewhat public. Whatever his Quirk had become, it was obviously beyond whatever was happening with his hair.

If the heiress was any indication, Mineta had absolutely no experience with figuring out women were dropping hints. With how valiantly he'd managed to keep his eyes above her neckline, Gentle would have assumed he had no interest in women at all. The villains had checked out her chest. The wait staff, male and female, in the mansion had checked out her chest. Gentle had given it a glance, moreso as a force of gravity than anything else.

And finally, perhaps the most egregious piece of evidence in the whole case he'd been constructing in his head… Mineta wasn't actually dead at all. No, he'd just framed the mafia group that he himself killed with his murder.

Flicking out the handkerchief he'd folded into his collar, Gentle carefully cleaned off the wheel, before folding the cloth and placing it carefully in his breast pocket. With that done, he caught Twice's eyes in the mirror, offering the other man a somewhat sardonic smile.

"Perhaps. What's your point?"

"Dude, think about it!" The ceiling took another blow from Twice's hands, holding up under the pain and pressure through nothing but herculean effort and engineering grit. "He appears out of nowhere, shakes up the whole country, yanks Quirks left and right. And now he has a chick almost a decade older immediately recognising and hunting his ass through the woods?"

His raised hands windmilled randomly, gesturing in every direction and at nothing simultaneously. "He sends us off in a way that just so happens to mean we can't even watch to see what's happening?"

Gentle pursed his lips slightly. With his eyes on the road, the images behind his eyes were of earlier. Vitaceae climbing out of the car after a few moments of indecision. His instruction to leave him behind and drive as far as their escape route granted them. It made sense that they'd need to go underground. If they were about to get arrested, then the roads out of the area would be monitored.

Though oddly, Vitaceae hadn't been angry or annoyed. If anything, he'd been… concerned. It was almost as strange as Mirko's reaction upon seeing him. What kind of hero would be happy to see a murderer in a remote area?

"The circumstances are… suspicious."

Twice barked out his signature laugh as the tunnel began to incline slightly. There was a turn ahead, a bit sharper than the rest, and Gentle slowed the car to a crawl as they approached.

"No shi- oh hell yeah, sunlight!"

Indeed, after the turn, light that wasn't reflecting from the headlights was flooding into the tunnel. Cautiously, rather than just assuming that nobody would be gathering around a hole that had presumably randomly opened somewhere, the car meandered up the ramp of stone and soil.

A roof of indistinct granite turned into a canopy of bright leaves. Wherever they'd emerged, it was onto a dirt road, ringed with trees on either side and the brief glimpse of distant buildings between their trunks.

The ground rumbled, lightly enough that it was barely noticeable. Adjusting the outwards mirrors, Gentle managed to catch the movement just as the last of the hole they'd driven out of closed up, the road sealed perfectly on either side and giving absolutely no indication that anything else had ever been there.

Had that been timed somehow, or did the influence of that Overhaul quirk allow that sort of precision over that amount of distance? Either option was vaguely terrifying.

Sighing, Gentle tapped the car's inbuilt GPS to life. With his usual sense of direction, he would have preferred a paper map, but that wasn't an option when he had no clue where he actually was.

The name of the dealership they'd rented the car from popped up after only three taps of the screen. Surprisingly, they were only about a minute's drive away. Once the thicket of trees cleared somewhat, there would be a right turn onto a service road that would open out into the shop's back parking lot.

Had that also been planned? In the random event they would need to go underground and drive, for whatever eclectic reason?

The instinctual dread rose again, much more difficult to ignore. If that boy were as sadistic as even the common villains that rampaged throughout Japan on occasion…

"No damn chance he's an actual teenager." Twice's voice knocked Gentle out of his spiralling thoughts, inadvertently saving them from missing the turn. "We know he knows his way around computers, that whole ID is bullshit. He's had other identities before, and I'd bet my left nut the bunny girl was part of one!"

Gentle nodded absently, having already deduced something similar. Making sure all the lights on and in the car were shut off, he drifted slowly into the parking lot, doing his best to keep the volume of the engine down. It would be slightly difficult to explain why a luxury car had just emerged from a dirt road. At least any grime on the car itself could be explained away with an unfortunate parking spot elsewhere.

"I think I'll save my testicles for another wager. But if that is so, just what are these lies supposed to accomplish, I wonder…?"

Pretending to be a teenager? Less overall freedom, but also less questions asked of him. Pretending to be a sexual deviant? Perhaps if he needed an unfavourable reputation for something, though what that something could have been was escaping him. Pretending to be about three feet tall? A hard look to pull off, unless you had the thighs for it like Manami did.

"Every time I think I have this asshole figured out, he throws another curveball at me. I bet they're banging in that forest right now." Twice buried his face into his hands, groaning at the floor of the car as they rolled to a stop. "Oh my god, we're glorified wingmen."

Gentle didn't bother to question it as Twice pulled out his phone, the gleam of retribution in his visible eye. The engine cut off as the owner of the dealership walked through the back door of his shop, his eyebrows raised at the sheer level of dirt that was probably covering the outside of the car.

Ah well. They were rich, they could cover it.