33 – Babies
The explosion came from the end of the first-floor corridor.
I was walking to homeroom with my bag over one shoulder and a vending machine coffee in my hand when the wall to my left shook and a door blew open and smoke poured into the hallway in a thick gray column. The fire suppression system didn't activate. This happened often enough that U.A. had apparently calibrated it to ignore anything below a certain threshold.
A girl stumbled out of the smoke, coughing.
Pink hair in thick dreadlock-like locks swept to one side. Red goggles pushed up on her forehead. A tank top under a stained lab coat, both covered in oil smudges and what looked like solder burns. She was grinning. Full teeth. Smoke was pouring out of the room behind her and she was grinning.
"THAT'S THREE BABIES LOST IN ONE MORNING!" She pumped her fist. "A NEW RECORD!"
A voice from inside the smoke yelled something about fire extinguishers and liability waivers. She ignored it.
She turned toward me. Her eyes locked on and the cross-shaped irises telescoped. The pupils contracted and expanded in concentric rings, like a camera lens focusing. She was scanning me from ten meters away with the intensity of a targeting system.
"You." She pointed. "Sports Festival. First place. Pure physical enhancement, no ranged capability, no elemental tricks, no defensive tools, closed distance on every opponent manually." She was talking fast. Each word ran into the next. "You NEED my babies."
"I need your what."
She grabbed my wrist and pulled.
The grip was strong for a girl who looked like she weighed fifty kilos with the goggles on. She dragged me toward the smoking doorway and I let her because I was too confused to resist and because my coffee had already spilled on the floor and the morning was clearly going in a direction I hadn't planned for.
Inside the Development Studio, the smoke was clearing. The room was chaos. Workbenches covered in half-built gadgets. Blueprints pinned to corkboards at overlapping angles, older drawings buried under newer ones. A beaker on a burner was bubbling green. A mechanical arm on the far bench was twitching by itself, opening and closing a fist at regular intervals. Something in the corner was making a whirring sound that went up in pitch every few seconds, approaching a frequency that was going to be a problem soon.
A man in a construction helmet with oversized metal claws for fingertips was standing near the back wall holding a fire extinguisher. He looked at me. He looked at the girl. He set the extinguisher down on a bench that was already holding three other extinguishers, all used, and sighed.
"Hatsume. That's a hero course student. You can't just drag people in here."
"He needs support items, sensei! Look at him! Pure physical, no gear, no ranged tools, he fought the entire Sports Festival bare-handed. It's a CRIME."
"The crime is the fire code violations." He looked at me. "You don't have to stay."
"Arms up," Mei said.
I put my arms up. Power Loader walked out. The door to his office closed and the lock clicked and I was alone with a girl who had a measuring tape and no concept of personal space.
A measuring tape appeared. I didn't see where it came from. She looped it around my right bicep and pulled it tight and read the number and muttered it to herself and moved to the left bicep. Then shoulders. She stood behind me and stretched the tape across my back and her fingers pressed against my shoulder blades and her breath was warm on the back of my neck and she was six inches away and completely unaware that this was a situation.
"Chest." She came around front and wrapped the tape around my ribcage and her hands passed under my arms and across my pectorals and the tape pulled taut against my nipples and she was staring at the number with her scope-eyes focused to pinpoint and her face was directly in front of my chest. Close enough that her hair brushed my shirt.
She smelled like machine oil and burned copper and flux paste.
"Waist." The tape dropped. Her hands were at my sides, thumbs on my hip bones, pulling the tape flat against my stomach. Her knuckles pressed into the muscle above my belt. "Thirty-one inches. Good ratio."
"Are you going to ask my name?"
She blinked. The scope-eyes unfocused for a half-second, the cross-pupils dilating back to normal size. "Oh." She straightened up. "Mei Hatsume. Support Course. Class 1-H." She held out her hand. I shook it. Her palm was calloused and her grip was firm and she pumped my hand once and let go. "What's your Quirk factor concentration?"
"My name is Ryo Hayami."
"Great! What's your Quirk factor concentration?"
I laughed. She tilted her head. The scope-eyes telescoped again, studying my face. She genuinely didn't understand why that was funny.
"I don't know my Quirk factor concentration."
"Hm." She pulled a notebook from somewhere inside the lab coat. The pages were dense with tiny handwriting and mechanical sketches, diagrams packed so tight they overlapped at the margins. She flipped to a blank page, wrote RYO HAYAMI - ENHANCEMENT (PURE) at the top, and underlined it three times. "I'll estimate from mass output. Stand up."
"I'm already late for-"
"STAND UP."
I stood up. She measured my thighs. Each one. Her hands wrapped the tape around the muscle above my knee and she pulled it snug and her fingers were on the inside of my thigh and she was kneeling in front of me reading the number with clinical focus and this was the least sexual situation that had ever looked incredibly sexual from the outside.
"Flex," she said.
"What."
"Flex your quad. I need the measurement under load. The plating has to account for muscle expansion during exertion." She looked up at me from her knees with her scope-eyes fully telescoped and her face level with my belt and zero awareness of anything except the number on the tape. "FLEX."
I flexed. She read the number. She wrote it in the notebook. She stood up and walked away without saying thank you because gratitude was not in the operating system.
Power Loader's office door was still closed. A small sign on it read: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR HATSUME.
"Done." She pocketed the tape and pulled three sheets of paper from a drawer that shouldn't have been able to hold paper given the amount of scrap metal in it. She spread them on the nearest workbench, shoving aside a half-assembled drone and a jar of bolts.
"Three concepts." She pointed at the first sheet. The sketches were rough but precise, mechanical drawings with measurements and material specs scribbled in the margins. "One: reinforced knuckle plating. Not gauntlets, too heavy for your style. Articulated plates over the first and second knuckles that channel impact force downward through the metacarpal bridge. Doubles your punch output without changing your form." She tapped a cross-section diagram. "Titanium-nickel alloy core. Polymer shock layer underneath so you don't shatter your own hand. It's not about armor, it's about force direction."
The sketches were messy and precise at the same time, like someone had done the math perfectly and then let a caffeinated hand do the drawing.
"Two: shock-absorbing boot soles. Polymer-gel inserts with kinetic return. You land from height, the gel absorbs the force and releases it on the next step. Turns a hard landing into a launching pad." She flipped to another diagram. The sole was drawn in cross-section with layers labeled in handwriting so small I couldn't read it from the stool. "Your legs are your strongest asset. Your boots are trash. Fix the boots, fix the approach."
"My boots are fine."
"Your boots are TRASH." Factual. Beyond argument.
"Three: grappling wire. Carbon-fiber cable with a magnetic anchor point, wrist-mounted launcher, twelve-meter range. You close distance on every opponent manually. This cuts the gap in half a second." She held up the third sheet. The design was elegant. A slim bracer with the launcher recessed along the forearm and the cable spool hidden inside. "Bakugo uses explosions to close distance. Todoroki uses ice to control the field. You just run at people. Running is fine. Running with a cable is better."
All three designs had material specs and stress-tolerance numbers in the margins. She'd drawn these while measuring my arms.
"When did you draw these?"
She looked at me like the question didn't make sense. "Just now. While I was measuring you."
The whirring thing in the corner reached its peak frequency and a spring popped and the whirring stopped. Mei didn't look at it. Another baby lost.
"I'll have prototypes by Wednesday."
It was Monday.
"That's two days."
"I know how days work." She was already turning back to the workbench, pulling a soldering iron from a hook and a sheet of carbon fiber from a roll mounted on the wall. Her back was to me. The conversation was over because the building had started.
I stood at the workshop door. The smoke had cleared. The studio smelled like solder and machine oil and burned copper and the girl at the workbench was already cutting carbon fiber to a measurement she'd taken off my wrist thirty seconds ago.
I didn't have her number. She hadn't asked for mine. She had my body measurements in a notebook and three invention concepts in her head and the prototypes would be done by Wednesday because she said they would be and I believed her.
A shadow passed the open door. I turned.
Jiro was walking down the corridor. Earphone jacks swaying at her sides, school bag on one shoulder, heading toward the 1-A classroom. She glanced through the open door as she passed. Her eyes found me. Then they moved past me to the pink-haired girl at the workbench who was cutting carbon fiber and humming.
Jiro's earphone jacks went rigid. Both of them. The cables stiffened like they'd been electrified, standing straight out from her earlobes for a full second before slowly coiling back. Her jaw tightened. Her eyes came back to me.
She kept walking. She didn't say anything. Her footsteps were fast and even and she turned the corner and was gone.
I looked back at the workshop. Mei was soldering. She hadn't noticed Jiro. She hadn't noticed me still standing in the doorway.
My coffee was a puddle in the hallway. I was late for homeroom. I had a measuring tape's worth of physical contact with a girl I'd met four minutes ago and Jiro's earphone jacks were going to be a problem.
Wednesday. She'd said Wednesday. The prototypes would be ready and I'd have support items and Mei Hatsume would be in my life and the workshop had a lock on the door and that last thought wasn't mine, it was the Quirk's, and I walked to class.