Suzushina Yuriko looked the part. She wore a face mask, a pair of sunglasses — even though it was winter — a thick hoodie, which she stuffed her hair into, and some fresh, bloodless, snow boots. She had been aiming for 'innocent bystander', perfectly aware that her irregular features would attract attention. A sick fashionably challenged teenager, though? As common as the cold. Black jumper, white stripes; black thermal tracksuit bottoms, simple. So, after dousing her old clothes in ammonia, and leaving them in the tub, she slung her go bag over her shoulders and climbed through her bedroom window.
Her boots hit the pavement with a faint crunch. Yuriko didn't even want to think about how frigid the cram classroom would be. Cheapskates never turned on the heaters, even though she was paying them out of her own pocket. Not that she planned on going anymore. Instead, she would spend the rest of her Saturday going to all the places a domestic terrorist (in her humble opinion) wouldn't. If today would be her last day before she was hounded by the police, then they would have to earn her custody.
Birds sang. Sunlight caught dewdrops that hung languidly from leaves. She could hear movement in the flats around her. The world — Japan was waking up to a fresh wound on one of its greenspaces. Yuriko let her mind slip into autopilot, and her legs began moving.
Soon, she found herself at the second closest local library. The first, after all, was only a stone's throw from the park, which she suspected had already become an active crime scene. One volume wouldn't be enough anymore. Yuriko didn't think she could calm down until she'd reread New Testament in its entirety. The light novel, not the Bible.
Toaru Majutsu no Index and its spin-offs had been losing global significance in recent years, but in Japan? It was a monolith. Boasting a total of thirty-one million approximate sales, even with its sub-par anime adaptation, only three other light novels performed better on the market. So, imagine Yuriko's surprise when—
"Sorry, a certain magical what? Are you looking for books on the occult?"
The lady at the reception was young, couldn't be older than twenty-five. She was dressed casually and sported circular rimmed glasses. Her jaw was working the leftover flavour out of her chewing gum. She would have been in the target demographic when the story was kicking off. Even if she hadn't read or watched the story, she would have heard of it. It was everywhere. She had an incredible poker face, if she was joking. Yuriko tried again.
"A Certain Magical Index. You know, Railgun. Imagine Breaker?"
Yuriko had seen the expression the librarian made. A long time ago. It was the same kind of look her mother had given her when Yuriko had caught her putting presents under the tree. The face an adult made when they were about to shatter a beautiful illusion.
Keys clacked across the keyboard. She typed like a maestro with practised poise. The light from her computer reflected off glasses as the web page changed. With flick of her wrist, the screen was now facing Yuriko. Nothing. There were no relevant search results. No Touma. No Misaka Mikoto. No Accelerator.
"Sorry kid," she said, though not unkindly "I'm not sure that story exists. Also, sunglasses in doors? Sweetie, you're scaring the Ho's."
She gestured to a pair — a boy and a girl — with similar features. Siblings, most likely; employees for certain. Yuriko squinted at one of their name tags. Ho Yamanaka. Oh. They shuddered when her head spun to meet them.
"Are they okay?"
"Yeah, they had a run-in with someone last week. Covered his eyes too. He was here for a rare Digimon manga, or something."
***
Arahama beach crunched underfoot. Yuriko let the dying sun prickle heat into her bare face. Her lack of pigmentation meant she burned easily, but today she didn't care. She had walked the whole journey since her second outing. Had needed to. Now, her thoughts were more populated than the city she lived in. Numbers. Where would she sleep tonight? Numbers. Her favourite story didn't exist? What? The stint with the library computer hadn't been enough to convince her. The numbers. She had spent most of the day being a menace to the general public: spouting references at random to strangers hoping to catch one of them out on this elaborate prank they'd all decided to play on her. At this point, it was clear to her that the police weren't looking for anyone matching her description. So many people had seen her face today, but none of them reacted like they recognised it — THE FUCKING NUMBERS!
Fluid anger whipped around her and the air exploded. She felt a little bit of that power leave her. Sand blasted towards the shore with the momentum of a railgun. Sea water performed a stunning reverse dive, as it doused a nearby family. That considerable display of force caused just enough of a splash that it knocked an ice cream cone out of the child's hand. Yuriko dove behind a boulder while the little bit- boy began to tear up. Who goes to the beach in the cold, anyways? Oh.
The numbers. Breathe. Count to ten. One, two... by twenty, her anger was back under control. She focused on them now. The little equations of possibility. Sand shifting under her weight. Her weight itself. She zeroed in on the wind cresting along the waves, then dancing across the sediment. In her outburst, she reflected, she had somehow pushed numbers into the sand. Then it reacted. She allowed her mind to sit on the implications.
Maths. It wasn't just numbers, she was instinctively completing formulas, tabulating, defining the world around her as a series of stores and flows. That...shouldn't be possible. She recognised some of the operations as more complicated versions of problems she had learned in a classroom. Problems she would have needed a calculator, or at least pen and paper to parse. Now they split open and revealed their secrets to her like an etherised patient under a scalpel.
Y values gossiped about their Xs; Zs greeted her like they were colleagues. She knew pi. All its digits came to her on demand. She let out a chuckle despite herself. It was all so absurd; it was almost as though she was an—
"Wait!" she shouted, startling a sea gull. The bird squawked its indignance before flying off to hell, where it belonged.
In a flurry, Yuriko began dumping the contents of her bag onto the ground. Clothes free fell, money too, as did a Walkman (it had been her mother's) but within the clutter two rectangular objects were also dropping. Without looking, she snatched the heavier — judging by the arrow of its weight — object with her freehand. The portrait, liberated from its spot on the table for the first time in years. That too without his explicit consent. Her mother, sickly but bright. The body language of the girl expressed happiness in absentia of her face. Feet dangling, hands blurred from excitement. Even her father was smiling. In a far-flung future, when they did archaeology on the fossil that was now her family, this would be the curio. The gestalt of their once harmony. Ah, the palaeontologists would say, they were happy once.
She set the frame aside almost reverently, but it wasn't the subject of her interest. Instead, she lifted the light novel she hadn't had the chance to read because purple gym bro Baymax had decided she was a workable sacrifice for his gains. Unless she was going mad; unless she had been hit in the head a little harder than usual and this was all some coma induced flight of fancy. This would be irrefutable proof of something she was sure existed.
"Screw you, Mandela," she muttered, and for a second, she was allowed to believe the effect it would have on her would be clarity. "What the fuck?"
Volume three, or what used to be, laid in front of her like a prank. The cover was wrong. The name was wrong. There was no ISBN number. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Gone was the cover art of Misaka Mikoto and her clone. All the colours were still the same, but the line work collapsed, leaving behind a non-descript Rorschach; an image only recognisable if you had seen the original. Her fingers flew, leafing through pages like a student through a textbook seconds before entering the exam hall. Blank. Blank. Blank. Blan—words. She stopped. Muscle memory told her what was — or rather should — be happening in this part. Her favourite character should have been getting his face rearranged, and his illusions shattered, instead—
"Do you desire another world?"
Kamisato Kakeru struck the Quickster with all the gender equality in his right hand. She disappeared on the spot, ensuring that the Brothers would be safe for the foreseeable future.
What? She read it again, and again, and again, until she was sure that this badly written paragraph was all that remained of what had once been her favourite story. What? Who the hell was the Quickster? Who were the Brothers? She realised that was easy enough to answer. The Quickster must have been some kind of stand in for Accelerator, and the Brothers for the Sisters (clones of Misaka Mikoto).
Kamisato Kakeru was an actual character in the A Certain series. He was a wielder of one of the three special right hands. The World Rejecter, which functioned as a sort of counterpart to the Imagine Breaker. Instead of nullifying supernatural phenomena, it banished anyone with conflicting desires (and their creations) into a world where those desires could be fulfilled. From a narrative standpoint, this was the same as killing them, because they would have no method of returning to the story proper. It was how a good portion of the Magic Gods had been scrubbed from the series. Not even their universe-bending power had saved them from the temptation of another world.
In this bizarre version of the novel, the Accelerator stand in, who was now unambiguously a girl had been sent to another world? That was ridiculous.
"Who the hell wrote this knockoff?" she grumbled, slamming the book shut. There...were probably more important concerns.
Yuriko picked up a pebble and tossed it across the ocean's surface. It bounced ten times before sinking into the drink. Despite everything else that was wrong with her day, a sense of wonder took her closer to the water's edge. She had never been great at skipping stones before. Yet somehow, she knew the perfect angle, and the perfect amount of force to throw it with to maximise its skips, given her lacklustre physicality. She stared down at her image in the water, visible despite the setting sun. Red eyes, white hair.
"A female stand-in for Accelerator, huh?" she reflected, placing a fist under her chin. Suzushina Yuriko probably looked the part.