In a Certain Magical Index (Toaru Majustu no Index), Espers were a rare class of supernatural beings who supplanted the shared reality with their own personal reality. All Espers emitted an involuntary field of energy—an AIM diffusion field—and would use those fields to exert their designs on the world around them. Whether they were gemstone Espers whose abilities came to them instinctively, or artificial Espers who performed rapid mental calculations to drive their personal realities, the effect remained the same. A substitution of reality. To be very clear: Espers were low level reality warpers. She let that thought sit with her as she rocked her seat backwards.
"Point-two-three electron volts," she answered.
Though — with a thought she summoned the power into her palm — nothing about this energy felt involuntary. On the contrary, it was very intentional. To use it in any meaningful way, she had to call it to the surface, had to want it into being. And it wasn't invisible. The power was burning in her hand, blue, like a flame under a plentiful supply of oxygen. But no one was reacting. Yuriko looked around at the bored faces, a few avoided eye-contact, others scowled. She commanded the flame to shroud her body, and it did so sluggishly. No oohs, and no ahhs, in light of the supernatural nonsense happening in their classroom. Not even from the teacher deadpanning in her direction. Okay. It wasn't invisible to her.
"Point-two-three, indeed," Mr Tanaka grumbled.
Perhaps he thought he'd caught her off guard with the question. Mr Tanaka ambled back to his seat and ripped a notebook off his desk. He was glaring at the open page like the words had accurately insulted his mother, leaving no room for a rebuttal. When he spoke again, it was with a half-snarl.
"Stop rocking your chair, Miss Suzushina."
It was a common occurrence. The random tests; the comments on her fidgeting. Yuriko didn't think of herself as a troublemaker, but she found that with a few exceptions, teachers rarely ever seemed to like her.
Her uniform was amongst the clothes she had packed, but maintaining her perfect attendance was only part of the reason she'd come in. See, Yuriko hadn't entirely run away from home without a plan. With a little subterfuge, some careful manipulation of security cameras — sabotage disguised as negligence — she figured she could probably live in the building until at least the winter break.
Yuriko closed her eyes and just allowed her senses to diffuse. At school, she could at least grasp at the illusion of security. She felt a reduced sense of urgency. Like the world hadn't entirely gone mad yet. The day was structured. Routine, damn near peaceful. Even the jeering as she'd walked into her homeroom hit her soft, like summer rain. But it was in this calm that it became apparent. How wrong everything felt. There was again that weight to the air, like humidity. Like the whole school had been replaced with a swamp overnight. Like it had been raining nonstop for years, and it hit her nose like mould. The anxiety, the fear, the inadequacy. Insecurity abounded. The pain. The despondence, frustration — the woe and the boredom—. She tuned everything out, but her head was spinning.
The detritus of human emotion followed her everywhere now. Though it hadn't been a miasma at the beach, nor had it been at the park when she returned off-screen. Now, sitting in a classroom flanked by two dozen students, but surrounded by the thousands that attended her school, she could pinpoint where the miasma came from. Inside every person around her was a diminished version of the energy inside her. Everyone of them was a smog factory onto themselves. They all individually contributed to the atmosphere. But it was more than that. At school there was something more. Something muted, but distinctly malevolent...
"The Tale of Genji was one of the crowning pieces of the Heian period and is considered..." blah, blah, blah—
Right. This was a literature class. Why did he even ask her about electrons? She grimaced. Last week it had been eigenvectors. If he was going to hate her, at least do it on a subject he was an expert in. Yuriko couldn't stand unprofessional haters.
Her mind wandered again to eigenvectors, and to spans and to magnitudes. She marvelled at the connections she was making in her head—at the ease of it all. Any problem she had ever misunderstood unspooled itself before her. She could follow the threads, trace the fabrics of her conceptions; build models in her mind. She visualised a dot, and with a push along an axis, it became a line. She stretched it along another, and it became a square. Then she added depth, as the square joined the third dimension and became a cube. Eight vertices, twelve edges. This was the limit of human perception. From this point on, mathematicians had to rely on approximations. As she was now, such a limit didn't apply anymore. With another push, she stretched the shape in a direction she had never been able to conceive of before. The model was no longer a simple cube. Yuriko saw — although saw wasn't the right word — a cube that wasn't a cube. Sixteen vertices and thirty-two edges. The not-cube had a cube as each one of its eight faces. It was a ridiculous construct that the human brain hadn't even evolved to witness, and it had forced itself to make sense to her. No one's mind should ever be so efficient. No one's ideation could ever be so organised. Yet, there she was, reverse calculating the world like it was easy. Something was wrong with her—more so than usual.
Yuriko must have made a face, because Mr Tanaka was staring at her again. This time, impatiently. Minus one. A simple operation. She thought back to Saturday. A vector was a concept. A catch all term used to denote any quantity that had both a direction, and a magnitude. Velocity was just one of many examples. Vectors could be transformed through multiplication and addition; that was part of their eight axioms.
"Miss Suzushina, focus."
In the final moments of the fight, when the creature had lunged at her, for some reason, she had been thinking of minus one. You could enlarge or shrink a vector by multiplying it with a positive number, but a negative number would have a more interesting effect. It would change its direction.
Mr Tanaka grabbed an eraser from his desk. The class held their breaths.
"It's happening," someone whispered.
More specifically, in the case of minus one, the exact opposite direction. The new vector, relative to the old one could be described as a reflect—Something pinged against her energy cloak. A number; a small object. It didn't really bounce. It was more like it had a vendetta against the teacher and wanted him to feel it, too. The eraser reoriented itself, and shot back towards Mr Tanaka, smacking right him in his stupid face.
"Ha! Always knew her skull was thick!"
"Bunker ass forehead."
"Did it even hit her...?"
"The spirit did it!" someone shouted to a chorus of groans.
"Like...Jesus?"
"Please," said Mr Stupid, as he rubbed his face. "Pay attention in class."
The bell rang.
"Sorry, sir."
Yuriko fired herself out of her seat and into the hallway. She had done that, and now there were witnesses. This wasn't like the park or the beach, where she could dismiss it as a delusion. People had seen and vocally confirmed the phenomenon. She had reflected an eraser with fucking maths like she was a Toaru Esper. Like she was Accelerator.
***
"What do mean, weirdo? It's always been pink."
The girl beside her spoke in the same tone you would normally reserve for someone if they told you the Earth was flat. Yuriko let the irony run off her back. How could anyone who ran an occult club talk to anyone else with that level of scepticism?
PE was the last class of the day, and despite the chill of the season, they were doing it outside. Something about scouts visiting the school. On the field, they were playing an eleven a side game of we-kick-ball-around-and-eventually-in-net. Girls and boys. On account of her lacking athletic ability, Yuriko had been benched with no chance of parole. So, she focused on one boy as if anyone else could hold her attention in that moment. A splash of pink among the mix.
"Always...?"
Yuriko watched as he ran, trying to keep her jaw attached to her skull. Usain Bolt, who? He had cleared a hundred metres in sharp zigzags quicker than the supposed world's best could do in a straight line. This wasn't athleticism; this was absurd, and it felt like she was the only one who noticed. He feinted left, then dribbled right; leapt over a slide tackle. A rainbow flick into another before the ball could even touch the ground. The keeper dived out the way as the boy got closer. She watched the ball explode with force when his foot connected. Too fast. That would break bones, shear off skin. The football hit the goal post — which dented — and ricocheted into the net. The crowd went mild: it was Monday, after all.
"But coach said it our turn to get Itadori!"
His team hoisted him into the air, and by the stupid look on his stupid face, it was clear to Yuriko that this was a daily occurrence for him too. Not worth bragging about; not worthy of celebration. He probably wouldn't remember what he had for breakfast, either. How many world records had he shattered with that kick alone? How many sit ups would it take? What kind of juice did he drink?
"That's Itadori for ya."
"Him?"
The girl, Sasaki Setsuko, was getting irritated.
"How many pink-haired dudes have you met?"
"It was black last week." Yuriko said with certainty.
"This again?" Sasaki sighed. "It. Has. Always. Been. Pink." She said, before strutting off before Yuriko could get another word in.
***
At home time, Yuriko had to remind herself that she didn't have one of those anymore. Instead, she made her way toward the radio club's room, finding it where she had left it in her memory.
Yuriko was a naturally curious girl. Before she'd taken ill, her mother had called that both her most endearing, and most frustrating quality. Whenever they had played a new board game, Yuriko had made it a point to investigate the rules ahead of time. She'd ruthlessly exploited its loopholes, until in the end, she was the only one having fun. It took one game of monopoly for her loving mother to consider disowning her. Can't believe I gave birth to a lawyer, she had said.
Yuriko liked to think that she kept her mother alive with her curiosity. It was one of the only things that made the loss, not easier to cope with, but harder to think about. Like a funeral bell ringing in the next town over, instead of on her shoulder...Besides; there were tangible benefits. A person could learn useful details that other people overlook out of habit. From the best locations to hide in hide-and-seek (they never put any real effort into finding her) to learning which frequency the school's security cameras communicated on and the password to review their feed. You know, things the average person could learn if they cared enough.
"Radio killed the video cams," she hummed as she turned on all the walkie talkies and set them to 2.4 gigahertz. There were a lot of them, and the CCTV system at their public school used was hardly state-of-the-art. In theory the 'noise' she was generating should be enough to jam the receivers.
Still, she made sure she wasn't on camera as much as she could on her way to the server room. This wouldn't have been possible last week, but last week there hadn't been a supercomputer where her brain used to be. She calculated blind spots in the cameras just by observing the angles they were facing. It helped that she could now move fast enough to only register —she hoped— as a blur. Hopefully the cameras were as blind to that bizarre energy as other people seemed to be. To her, though, she was practically glowing.
With a flurry of keys and the admin password—pump3p-up-k1cks—she was in. Another thing that hadn't changed. The IT department and their sick sense of humour. It didn't take long to find the footage. Every screen besides the cameras overlooking the western courtyard was filled with static now. She almost kicked herself for not checking first. With how low the budget was this year, they might have already been down.
She didn't relax until she sat crouched in a locked stall in the girl's bathroom. In thirty minutes, the cleaning staff would be done. In thirty minutes, she'd have unrestricted access to food, water and shelter. The school had a laundry room, spare uniforms, showers and a kitchen. Everything she'd need before her dad got tired of preparing his own meals or started worrying about the legality of his missing child.
How long had it taken him last summer? The last time she had run away. A week at most. A neighbour had asked a question; the man had panicked. That was what it took for him to care. Consequences.
She sits under a bridge by a canal. She sits under the glare of flashlights. She sits under the scrutiny of officers.
You know, they say. We're very busy people. They look at her with practised compassion. With methodical composure. This could have been us finding a criminal. This could have been us bringing a lost child home.
I don't want to go back.
They sigh. You need to learn to appreciate what you have. Warm food in your stomach, a roof over your head — he was crying, you know? He cares. Some children aren't that lucky.
So, they scoop her to her feet, ignoring the scars, ignoring the bruises. Better these than the foster system. Besides, from what they were told, she did this to herself. Poor child, they say. You were too young to lose her, but she loves you. She'll always love you.
They take her by the hand and lead her back to loneliness, back to pain, back to expectations. They lead her back to four walls steeped in memory. Back to the absence. Back to him.
Yuriko made herself smaller in the stall. A week. Hopefully that was enough time. Maybe in a week she would know what she was and — failing that — where.