Sugisawa Municipal, first period: April 1st, 2018
"The tablet, originally written in Latin was later read through, and translated under Neoplatonic and Christian lenses." The substitute rolled his eyes, muttering something under his breath. "We even have an English translation from—" he pulled what was clearly a lesson guide closer to his face. "Isaac Newton which goes..."
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
In the back row of seats, the teacher's words floated around the head of Itadori Yuji, but were never landing. Learning from Yuriko was tough, but at least he learned. Being talked at for an hour, with all the additional low-level chatter of a classroom, didn't really seem to do anything for him.
Especially when the substitute who hadn't introduced himself, was wearing such distracting clothing: a skin-tight body suit under what looked like robes? Really?
Instead, considering the date, he scribbled on a sheet of paper and—when the teacher turned to write on the board—hurled the scrunched-up note toward Sasaki who caught it without looking.
Why bother trying to learn, when the teacher himself wasn't trying to teach?
Sasaki unravelled the ball, and after reading it, nudged Iguchi who was sitting beside her. Itadori watched as the other boy threw up a thumbs up that was clearly meant for him. Perfect. The plan was well underway.
"Little mon—" the teacher coughed. "Gremlins in the back."
Sasaki froze mid-throw.
"I know I'm only here for an hour, but don't disrespect me where I can see you."
The man turned around, his bored eye—the one that wasn't covered by the headband he was wearing—narrowed as it took in Yuji, and Iguchi, softening only when it landed on Sasaki.
"Sorry," said the sheepish trio as the classroom roared with laughter.
Period two
"Itadori-kun, where is Suzushina?"
"Hm? Oh, she's out, why?"
"Mr Suzushina wants her home early," cried Mr Stupid. "What do you mean, out?"
"Oh, uhm," Yuji's eyes widened. In a flurry of clumsy limbs, the boy left his seat and rushed to the back of the room where the bags were stored. Textbooks plopped on the floor, zips were undone, until finally he procured a note from his bag.
Yuji stared at it for ten seconds as the stunned Mr Stupid stared his way.
Yuji cleared his throat as he read. "Not here."
Mr Stupid's face twitched, and the eraser in his hand contorted under pressure. "Itadori Yuji." He cleared his throat. "Define hydrogen bonding, or you're getting a detention."
Wait, wasn't this a literature class?
A glazed look came over Yuji's face—Mr Stupid's lips perked upward, until the boy in question answered like a puppet on a string.
"Hydrogen bonding is a special type of dipole-dipole based intermolecular force that happens because of the stark difference in electronegativity between—"
Yuji's hand snapped up, catching the eraser just before it could strike his forehead.
"You dropped this," he said.
"Get out."
***
Glare at Newton.
"Emerge from darkness what is blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure."
The curtain—which she had modified to permit only a specific infrared signal—broke over the abandoned medical centre like an egg.
Since early February, Satoru had been sending her on scheduled 'exorcism' missions. In part because it helped her train, but also because it helped him with 'their' staffing issues.
'Eighty percent of a sorcerer's talent was their technique,' but according to the white-haired imp her remaining twenty percent—physical conditioning, cursed energy control—was letting down the greater whole. He wanted her to master both, ergo no 'cursed technique' use on missions unless absolutely essential.
He'd also made her go on runs with Yuji, where the pink demon took great pleasure in 'returning' the favour of her tuition. Whoever built her, the world, or both did not build her to run, or the world to keep her running.
The more rewarding aspects of her training came in the scheduled absences she took from school. All around Sendai, and every major city in the country, were breeding grounds for the creatures that skewed the statistics of unexplained deaths in Japan.
As for her oh so important education, Yuriko had already been ahead of the curriculum before doctorate level mathematics became as easy for her as breathing was.
SCREEECH!
A sickly-sweet smell of decay and emotional detritus carried with the voices of a myriad curses, suddenly laid bare by the rules of the new space. Creatures slithered out from plastic mattress protectors; creatures howled from distant waiting rooms. Creatures scuttered away like ants around an environmental hazard.
It was so. Damn. Noisy.
Mandibles snapped at Yuriko from above, but the haymaker she threw—use less energy—sent the insectoid careening through a wall into a mass of its fellows with a solid crack.
Yuriko stared at her dainty fist, at her arm, which should have never even been able to produce so much force, and thought of Junko.
They sit under on a bench under a maple tree, shielded from the wind.
"Uwaaaah! You're really just giving it to me?"
"Better you than those kids."
Junko's face hardens. "Indeed," she says, nodding sagely. "Not a single Gahkoer among them. 'Labubu,' my foot."
"Gahkoer..." The way the word rolls off her tongue...there is a wrongness to it; like someone had missed a note on a keyboard. "Hokaze-san?"
"Hm?"
"Don't you think 'Gekota' would be a better name for the franchise?"
Junko replies without missing a beat. "No way! Oh, sorry, how rude of me." She laughs, and her voice rings without malice. "I didn't even ask why you think so."
"Oh, it's just," Yuriko buries her frown. "My friend Misaki thinks that the onomatopoeia fits better."
Junko's face contorts in contemplation, but at the premise and the premise alone. The name stirs nothing in her features. If she's acting, she's a really good actor.
A hot, bitter disappointment twists in Yuriko's gut, and being a non-sorcerer the other girl doesn't notice. It only deepens her despondence.
Yuriko cannot stand it—the sudden, decisive loneliness that overcomes her despite the presence of her friends, watching from afar—so she stands instead.
"Hey, Junko," says Yuriko. "Tell your grandfather that I'm sorry I ran."
The wind makes a mess of her, as Yuriko walks away from the befuddled girl and her lavender hair.
The memory of that interaction had been playing in her mind on repeat since it'd happened, but more so the implications. Would the girl have manifested Rampage Dress as a cursed technique the same way she had manifested Accelerator if she had been born a sorcerer? What else from 'Toaru' had made it over?
It had taken real effort on her part not to look for the existence of other names or ask Satoru to do the digging for her. Tracking down Hokaze Junko had already felt like enough of a violation, and she'd be an even bigger hypocrite for dragging other people into her spiral, when she herself mostly wanted to be left alone.
Alone. Yuriko turned the word over in her head. To not have anyone else. To be a singularity. A self. A solitary name.
Suzushina Yuriko. That was the name assigned to her on the first of April in 2003 by Suzushinas Mayuri and Hatsuko. Her given name was a recombinant of her parent's. Yuri for Lily; Ko for child. Suzushina Yuriko. Her name. But it was also a one-off joke in 'Toaru.'
When she had read it in her favourite light novel, she had laughed. Suzushina Yuriko was a fake name that the main protagonist of the series had assigned to an imagined version of Accelerator, when he was catastrophising about a transfer student joining his class. What a coincidence, she thought, and then she'd moved on because Toaru Majutsu no Index had nothing to do with the real world.
Sure, she had been teased by and laughed at by others who had also read her name in the story, but that was it. She. Moved. On. And so, she continued moving. She continued to ignore the coincidences that lined up, even after the world went anime. Her life was her own, her name—whatever she thought of it—was her own, and fiction was fiction...
A mole-thing emerged from the ground as she literally bled her frustration into a kick.
"Fuck!"
April first, Suzushina Yuriko. There was a joke somewhere in that sentence.
The creature splattered across a phlebotomy sign.
Yuriko wondered who was laughing this time as she crushed the vertebrae of another curse underfoot.
It all reeked of intention.
A Hokaze Junko that didn't know who her 'Queen' was; who didn't know what 'Gekota' were; who wasn't a stranger in a new world like she was. Similar enough to the 'character,' but different enough to be singular; to be a real, breathing person.
But Junko didn't remember.
Didn't remember the appearance of her name in what would have once been the fourth highest grossing light novel in the damn country.
Why was Yuriko the only one who remembered what was 'real'? Then again, who was to say that 'what was' had been real to begin with?
Her head was spinning.
Maybe it wasn't a logical inference, but if she couldn't even trust that her name was her own, then she had to step back and re-examine everything.
Maybe she was just finding a reason to ruin the foreign happiness that had been living in her heart for so long, but her mind collated the 'facts,' and they led her down a one-way road. To a conclusion that felt so definitive, so plausible in the story she had read, that all other answers rang like a beautiful lie:
Sic Mundus Creatus Est: and thus, the world was created.
"Fuck..."
It didn't take long for Yuriko to feel embarrassed, walking around another condemned building and executing the only witnesses to her existential crisis.
That hadn't been the first time she ran down that line of thought: that she was, relative to another frame of reference, just a character experiencing a series of contrived events. A product of narrative, rather than lived experience... Yuji made her watch an isekai once.
It was the date. The damn date had her in a pensive mood. Yuji's birthday had come and gone, and that reminded her that she had been born at some point, too. But the date had snuck up on her anyways, despite her hyper accurate, and mental atomic clock.
She'd been ambushed by memories of traditions that had persisted even after her mother died. Nevermind that the traditions themselves had been bastardised. One in particular had been the family portrait, which had gone from professional photography every April first, to a casual selfie with daddy dearest.
For obvious reasons, that probably wouldn't happen this year.
It stung more than her pride would let her admit.
"YoU're gOiing to fEel a Little pincH," a nearby curse was muttering in quasi-human.
At that, Yuriko's focus shifted back at the gaggle of crawling presences, and despite the instructions she had been given, activated her cursed technique. She had had enough of today.
Accelerator flowed unbidden, as it transformed momentum of some air molecules floating by her palm, knocking the first into the next, into the next.
After her failure at the construction site, she had been studying Brownian motion to widen her arsenal, especially at range where she lacked options for fine control.
It was hard to propagate the 'effect' of Accelerator through a structure if she wasn't directly touching it.
When she had tilted the tower construction site, it was because it was easy to understand how its vectors—weight, shear force, etc—all stacked on top of each other. A building was a planned entity—she winced at the thought.
But air? Air was soup: chaotic and unruly. Different molecules moved at different velocities depending on their weight, random collisions, convection, et cetera.
The wind formed a lower-pressure zone around her hand, spiralling inward and upward. Numbers pinged off her reflection and a window shattered. With a wave of her hand—somehow the gesture helped, noted—and an additional calculation, it changed direction.
Promising. Yuriko almost smiled. Controlling the wind meant eventually controlling the weather! Hell, in Toaru, Accelerator was once able to...Accelerator was once able to...
The wind died in her grasp.
"Screw it."
She lifted her foot. Fuck 'fine control,' fuck training and fuck Navier–Stokes equations. The building was condemned anyway.
'Cause baby now you feel like Number One!'
The sudden noise made her jump. It was coming from within her barrier. Bad. Very bad. A sonic attack? How? She was filtering—
'Shining bright for everyone!' It continued to blare.
Understanding dawned on her, and suddenly Yuriko was very glad that everything in the building but her was dying today.
Yuriko fumbled her phone from a not-deep-enough pocket.
"Damn it Sasaki," she muttered.
The girl just wouldn't stop changing her ringtone. Apparently the non-descript jingle that was there by default just wasn't good enough. And no matter how many times Yuriko set it back, and changed the passcode to her phone, Sasaki Setsuko found a way.
Yuriko would just chalk it up to the 'cursed technique' Satoru mentioned she had.
Speaking of Satoru...
"Yo." His voice spoke from the phone.
She believed the calls began as a stopgap. Weeks had passed with no further inquisition from 'Itadori Kaori,' but all the while, Satoru was checking in as frequently as he could, showering her with inane questions about schoolwork, barriers and food for some reason.
He never explicitly stated so, but Yuriko figured that Satoru thought keeping in regular contact with him would be enough of a deterrent against 'curse users', as was apparently the dumbass designation of specially enabled criminals. And while arrogant, there was little evidence suggesting that it wasn't working. As of late, all Yuriko had to deal with were creatures that couldn't think once, let alone twice about her affiliations.
And she appreciated him for that. What she couldn't appreciate were the constant jabs about coughing bombs and hydrogen babies. Something, something "special grade," something, something "grade three curses," blah blah "potential."
Worse still was when he caught her mid-cull and started jokingly lamenting that a 'Yuta' would do it faster. Whatever that was.
So, in the present moment, when he said, "Are ya done yet?" with his typical impish inflection, she responded with a flat:
"Just about—"
Before the nearby curse started shrieking. "Not...Luuupus!"
She winced instinctively, but it was probably unlikely for the sound to carry over.
"Lol," Satoru said, and she knew that all was lost. "A little slow today, are we?"
Dammit.
"Well," Yuriko deflected, hoping she could burn the meristem of the dialogue tree before the next branch had the chance to grow.
"How do you expect me to do this quickly when I'm not allowed to use my ability?"
"Technique," he corrected. "And I could. So could Yuta."
Ugh.
His laughter settled in her ears like excrement on the sole of a shoe.
"Besides, it's helping you get your rage out, isn't it? Nothing beats a little tactile therapy—"
"I'm not sure that's a thing. Is that a thing?"
"Who knows, but it is working."
She couldn't respond. After the 'Black Flash' she could maintain her passive reflection for just under two hours. Since she started running around and manhandling curses, her limit grew to about half a school day. The results spoke for themselves.
"I need to get back to school; did you call me just to brag?"
"Nah, just giving up a head's up."
"Wicked. About what?"
"Oh, just Megumi," Satoru said with a touch less disdain for the world than she was used to. "A student of mine. He's coming over to collect something at your school tomorrow."
Megumi? But wasn't that? Yuriko's mind rerolled the memory. Fifteen Megumis.
"Oh." She burned with shame. No one could ever know. "
Wait. My school?" Indignation burned hotter. "What the fuck do your bosses want at my school?"
"Nothing much," he said. "Just a finger."
***
Overcast clouds sprawled above the city, and she wondered why they thought it was a good idea.
Her eyes caught the parasol they had somehow snuck onto the school roof. Wrapped items and confectionaries lined the table it shielded from the sky. Thus far only a gentle drizzle was escaping the atmosphere, but it was clear that that the rain was about to pick up.
"Happy birthday!" They shouted—and who else could 'they' be, but Yuji, Sasaki and Iguchi?
Confetti, once again proved to be insufficiently esoteric as it failed to cross her reflection. Greens, reds and reds again spun in an ebullient series of dances all the way down. Ribbons hit the ground and sublimated in the sheet of wet that had already fallen.
There was the sound of Dancing Queen rolling from a speaker. There was the smell of petrichor, but also frosting wafting from a table, and recently opened coffee cans—black, the way she liked it, but everyone else on the roof despised.
"Well? What do you think?"
"I... thank you," she said. Because at this point, it would be sunk-cost fallacy to pretend she didn't care.
Sasaki took one arm; Yuji took the other. The pair led her to the table and sat her down on a—very motivated—plastic chair as they coronated her with a paper crown. Her face, still processing the audacity, was frozen the whole while.
Iguchi clapped. "We don't have a lot of time before lunch is over, so let's do this quickly."
The boy crouched under the table to pull out a cardboard cylinder, with a plastic cap, that had apparently been resting against the leg of the parasol.
"You wouldn't believe what we had to do to get this," he said. "Like, there was this body builder, and I—"
"Ahem."
"And Sasaki had to wrestle it out of his hands when she went to Tokyo—ow—last month..."
She elbowed Iguchi in the ribs the second he said the word "Tokyo." It wasn't quite a sore topic, but the fact that Sasaki would be changing schools was to the occasion what the clouds hanging in the sky were to the afternoon.
"Go on, open it!"
"Wait, what about the..."
But Yuriko had already popped it open. Her gratitude aside, the sooner the day was over, the better. A good night's sleep would be the only way to actually fix her mood, and—
"WOAH!" Yuriko leapt to her feet. "An ultra-HD promotion poster for the 2010 Takada-chan album, Love is a Deadly Beam? How on earth did you get this?"
Yuriko held the poster to the heavens, and she could almost see the sunshine again.
Despite its creative track list, with songs such as Only My Gauss-Rifle and Nuclear Lovebardment, LDB had been a major flop and hadn't even charted. But it was the album that made a fan of her!
Its focus on toxic love, and the persistent use of its weaponry motif had helped her recontextualise her relationship with her father. While it was a hard listen for her nowadays, not even Takada's new billboard toppers like Climax Jumping could replace a single song as her personal favourite.
"Like Iguchi was saying," Yuji continued. "There was this bodybuilder we had to fight, and—"
"We?"
"That Sasaki had to fight. She made him cry."
"Next present!" Sasaki's face flushed.
Yuriko, Yuji and Iguchi shared a look, before collectively deciding to let it go.
"Oh! This one was an idea Itadori's had for months." Iguchi pointed at a box with tentative excitement. "It's only a copy...and I did the editing, but uhm... Sorry?"
"Open it up." Yuji stepped out into the rain, which had picked up to the point where he was immediately soaked.
Why's he looking away?
Yuriko's hand landed on the box, and the wrapping paper uncreased as her power consumed its vectors. She was still riding the high of seeing the poster, but it seemed that feeling 'better' didn't impede the flow of cursed energy.
In an instant, discounting the wall of maths in her head, the wrapping became a sheet that she surrendered to the wind, and its fibrous texture became a glossy pane under her fingertips. Her hands found purchase along wooden geometry, edges and corners.
She didn't immediately process what she was looking at, couldn't. But then she blinked and blinked again until she was no longer seeing the portrait in her hand, but the moment it captured.
'Fuck, fuck!'
A younger Yuriko is staring at the camera.
Beside her, sits her spitting image, if one were to age her up, and decorate her skin and hair with pigments.
'Sweetie, you were supposed to say 'cheese.''
'But that's boooring.' The little girl kicks her legs, wriggling in the lap she sits on.
'Couldn't you at least say a kinder word? Like super? What you're saying is a no-no word.'
'Daddy says it all the time!'
A man lets out a hearty laugh as he slaps his knee like old men did in cartoons.
'That he does,' he hiccups. 'That he does.'
'Daddy does a lot of things, it doesn't mean they're okay.'
The man snorts. 'Sure, it does.'
Man and woman exchange a look, and the child pretends she cannot hear the silent conversation, but she knows. She always knew.
The moment is baptised by a flash of white as Yuriko blinks the ghosts away.
"I told you idiots it was probably a bad idea." Sasaki sighed. "Ugh, boys don't know how to give gifts at all."
Yuriko wiped her face. She was glad it was raining, even if the excuse didn't work for her.
"No," she finally said after a round of awkward silence.
What she was holding was a reproduction of the portrait she had liberated from her dad when she'd fled the apartment. While the memory had been vivid, the framed xerox she had received was both printed at a lower resolution and obviously photoshopped.
The major difference in the frame she was holding, was that the space where the younger Yuriko face rested was once again filled... with a badly cropped candid image of her older face during one of their karaoke nights.
"I love it."
She loved it a lot. In fact, she loved them. All three of them as they watched her tear-streaked face become a smile. She felt like she was floating again. In fact, she actually was.
Her shoes left the roof as she lifted her head to face the sky.
Around her right hand, numbers were blooming as she knocked one air molecule into the next, into the next. She pointed two fingers at the grey canvas above her and thought: no. You won't be raining on my parade today.
In spite of her immense calculation capacity, it was impossible for Yuriko to determine where the math ended, and her feelings began, but the world responded accordingly.
A towering column of wind erupted from her arm, made visible only by its sheer volume and forged its way to the clouds.
It was mother nature versus the force of will of a moody teenage girl, and like an overly indulgent parent, she acquiesced to her demands.
The clouds parted. The rain ended.
Yuriko looked down at Yuji and his windswept hair. At Sasaki with her glasses that had lost the fight to remain fully on her face. At Iguchi taking cover behind his smaller club leader. Every mouth was open.
A soft peal of laughter escaped her.
Was this little moment—were these little joys planned events that some higher power allowed her to have to keep its story more entertaining? To keep her from spiralling long enough to play the role of dance-monkey? Well... it was working. In that moment, watching the dumb expressions on each of their faces with a vignette of an idyllic past in her left hand, Yuriko decided that she didn't care.
She didn't care if none of it was real; if she was living in some simulated world designed by a 'Magic God.'
If this wasn't what living was, then she would rather be dead.
***
Each drop of rain could be heard, battering away at the roof of a certain detached house in the countryside.
"Tell me again why you're leaving so early?" Fumi said, as she watched her friend cram the last of her beloved clothes into her suitcase.
At first, she didn't respond, but instead cast her eyes to the mantle, on top of which two frame photographs were resting. One depicted a younger version of herself and her grandmother. The other? Well, Fumi knew who they were too. They hadn't been down to visit in years. A poop-emoji sticker covered up the face of what appeared to be a man.
Kugisaki Nobara finally shrugged as she fastened her shoelace. "Like I said, someone's pissed off the old hag."
And when the hammer fell, the nail was sure to follow.
Nobara gritted her teeth; veins popped under her skin as her fist clenched. She never liked the man. Not even once when he visited with his family. His smile was too plastic, his mood was too volatile, and his cologne was too cheap.
Most of all, she hated the way he looked at her friend when he thought she wasn't looking. The lie in his voice, whenever he spoke to his own daughter with affection, turned her stomach.
She would never understand how the grease stain had managed to woo such a nice woman like aunty Hatsuko.
"I'm going to make sure a promise was kept." Nobara's tone was Stygian, for a moment, before she remembered she was in good company.
"Besides," she said with just a pinch of forced levity. "You know I've always wanted to get out of here, right? I'm taking any chance I get to do it sooner."
"Do... do you think she remembers us?" Fumi said, twiddling her fingers. "What with all that city living..."
"Ha. I dare anyone who's ever met me, to forget me," Nobara responded. "That goes for you too, by the way."
Fumi nodded as her expression melted. "Don't be a stranger, okay?"
"Yeah, yeah. Don't forget to lock the door on yer way out."
Nobara hugged her one friend in the whole village, then hoisted her luggage off the floor. She didn't think she'd be heading to Sendai, before Tokyo. The second the door was opened, and her back was turned, she smiled a dark smile. A sorcerer's smile.
Every year, the selfies got faker and faker. The girl didn't even emote anymore. It was sad. It was infuriating.
There had better be a damn good reason why they didn't get a photo of Yuriko this year.
***
Long ahh authour's notes. Included her for formatting reasons.
And so ends what I've referred to in my notes as the 'friendship arc.' Foreshadowing is a narrative device—
Now I can finally talk about all the crap I'd been planning for this segment, as well as some of the stuff that didn't make it in.
The portrait.
Mentioned in the "Bird", briefly examined during the chapter she went to the beach.
It was then reintroduced in the chapter she first meets Gojo where Yuji sees it, which is how he got the idea.
That's how long I've been trying to get to this scene ;-;
The roof scene itself is a call back to how Yuji found her on a roof after she launched herself into the air like an idiot, and nearly died. She's come a long way.
Oh, and the bit where she says 'no,' as she's floating is a call back to the 'No' when she shatters her alarm clock, and then destroys her first curse.
Yuriko's off-brand sweater.
I had another scene planned where Yuriko would buy Sasaki a version of the jumper she loaned to her after the Hanako incident, but in 'her colour.' But you know, the longer I was writing this section, the less it felt like this particular scene would fit, so I've scrapped it entirely.
Speaking of Sasaki. Does anyone want to hazard a guess as to what her cursed technique is?
The country.
So yeah, Nobara's been the old 'friend' that was alluded to in the chapter where Yuriko was being 'bullied.' I just personally found it hilarious to have Yuriko constantly refer to how much she loved the countryside and stuff, while Nobara absolutely wanted to escape.
Like in that scene in the library where she first gets up her discount reflection and is just like, ahh, almost as 'clean' as countryside air.
Aunty Hatsuko, huh? Does it make you wonder who the 'damn Kugisaki' the Zenin were complaining about was? Or was it just a term of endearment?
Her dad and enemies.
I'm not sure if I made it clear enough, but I try to make it so that the same way Yuriko treats her 'enemies' is how other people have treated her in the past. The face grabbing from her father at the start of the story (she grabs Kenjaku by the face), calling the twins 'bestie' after she had to sit through the dialogue between the bullies where they were calling each other 'bestie,' etc.
The lifting Kenjaku up by the face was an exaggerated variant of the chin lift.
Her friends.
In the same way, I'm trying to portray that she's slowly relearning how to be kind by observing her friends.
There's something else I can't talk about because I haven't done it yet, lol.
General sentimental 'nonsense.'
This has been, thus far, the longest continuous story I've ever written before in my life. And that becomes the case again every time I write a new chapter. Naturally I will make mistakes, and I really do appreciate it whenever someone points one out.
I started writing this for fun, and to practice writing, and it wasn't exactly easy to convince myself to post any of this.
Thank you all so much for reading, you're awesome.