Chapter Text
A Certain & Fluctuated World
Version_Orthos
Volume 1 — Dedicatus545
1. Bad Luck Charm
"-and interestingly, further studies showed that the risk was not inherent to blood transfusions between espers but rather a factor of time and compatibility of Personal Reality-"
In a certain high school, in a certain classroom, a certain teacher rambled on, taking advantage of Academy City's sometimes free-form approach to education and the impending end of the school week to lecture all of her long-suffering students on her latest subject of study.
Suzushina Yuriko, her head propped up by her fist at the back of the classroom, turned her attention away from the teacher that resembled nothing more than a child happily telling her parents about her newest interest.
Squinting out of the window she was sitting by, paying no mind to the tennis club starting practice early, she instead tried to determine whether or not it was going to suddenly rain on the way home, or if she could get away with leaving the spare uniform in her bag in her locker over the weekend.
On the one hand, if she didn't bring it with her, she'd be out of luck if anything happened on the way home. On the other, if she left it at school she'd have guaranteed clean clothes when she arrived at school on Monday, which she hadn't needed in a while, which meant she was due. She hadn't come to a decision on the matter before she was rudely interrupted.
"Sensei, Suzushina is watching the tennis club play instead of listening!" A blue-haired boy she usually called Aogami called out from a few seats down and to her right, meeting her deadly glare with poorly suppressed mirth.
"Oh fucking kill yourself," she spat, her hand coming up in a familiar gesture, "Really, just, take a long walk off the nearest harbour pier and save us all the hassle, would you?"
Aogami clasped his hands to his breast, swooning over his desk in mock agony to the oohs and aahs of the suddenly interested and alert classroom.
"Ah, how cruelly you treat me, Yuriko, it contrasts so well with your delicate, albino appearance… it just makes me-"
"Finish that sentence and I'll cut your dick off in your sleep, I know where you live." She snapped, his mouth clicking shut as he paled. She'd been stuck in the same class as this guy all through middle school, to get into not just the same school, but the same class as him in high school? Just her luck.
"Not to interrupt your flirting-" The blond boy who sat in front of her, Tsuchimikado Motoharu, interjected, the pen Yuriko hurled at him clattering on his desk and then to the floor as he easily dodged, "-but Sensei is crying."
Tsukuyomi Komoe, their teacher. Reportedly, the most senior teacher at their high school, if their gym teacher was to be believed. Author of research papers dating back at least twenty years. Labelled one of the Seven Wonders of Academy City by various infranet blogs. Physically indistinguishable from a ten year old child.
Yuriko would have thought it a hoax if she hadn't seen her driving to school.
"Uuuu… why can't you get along…" True to his words, a teary-eyed child was standing at the head of the classroom.
Didn't this make her look like the clear villain?
Sure enough, her classmates were already whispering to each other, dirty looks beginning to be cast her way. Yuriko put her head in her hands and sighed, white hair falling to her shoulders to hide her from the accusatory glares.
Just her luck.
__________
The Power Curriculum Programme, the heart of Academy City. Over 2.3 million students called it home, and every last one of them went through it in some way, shape or form in order to become espers and develop powers. Countless children across the world begged their parents to either apply for citizenship on their behalf or front the immense fees required to study there as a 'foreign student' without it, all dreaming of their own personal superpowers.
Of course, not all dreams can come true. Nearly eighty percent of the student body failed to register as anything other than Level 1 or Level 0 on the scale the City measured by.
In short, they were minor, useless or uncontrollable powers, often only detectable in the System Scan by the involuntary effects around the esper in question, such as slight increases in temperature or air pressure that could only be measured with laboratory precision. The science behind espers referred to this as the AIM (An Involuntary Movement) field, the 'signature' of an esper.
And of those 2.3 million esper students, there was exactly one who had no AIM field at all.
"It's not like it's going to do anything for me," Yuriko said to her teacher bluntly, moments after the last of the class shuffled out, having been held behind to talk about supplementary classes.
Classes which would do nothing for her, and she was rather interested in avoiding, having been in and out of labs during her first two years of middle school, no small number of which were determined to prove the others wrong and successfully record her power on their instruments.
One of the more memorable ideas had put her on four times the Curriculum-standard dose of phenycyclidine once, wiring her up so badly she didn't notice she had broken her hands on the punching bag until the comedown began to kick in.
All as she'd come to expect.
Komoe held up a hand, a patient expression on her face, the visible maturity a stark contrast to the teary child from minutes before.
"Sensei is well aware, don't worry," she said, patting the chair next to the desk she was perched on, gesturing for Yuriko to take a seat. "What I wanted to talk to you about is how to avoid putting a student who the Power Curriculum Programme doesn't benefit into its makeup classes. Your academic grades are excellent by our school's standards."
Standards which weren't much higher than schools in the outside world, in contrast to Academy City's more successful schools for higher level espers, which were worlds beyond, she carefully wasn't saying.
"Unfortunately, Sensei doesn't have the freedom of syllabus that some schools do to waive requirements entirely, unless you've reconsidered her letter of recommendation to Kirigaoka…?"
"Nah." Yuriko said succinctly, shaking her head and pushing her chair back on its hind legs. Kirigaoka Girls' Academy was a specialised boarding school for specialised espers that only admitted those with a particularly unique power, for advanced research and education. She might qualify, but she might as well go back into the labs for all the independence she'd get.
"...Well, then you should have been paying attention to Sensei earlier!" Komoe pouted furiously, jabbing a finger at her student, "If you contribute even a short paper to an active research topic, I can use that to justify getting an exemption to the usual Power Development requirements for a Level 0 for you."
"Huh?!" Yuriko fell off her chair as it went out from under her, catching herself on her feet by slamming her hands onto the surrounding desks as the chair tumbled to the ground with a clang and a crash. "Fuck! ...That's an option?" She shot a menacing look at the fallen chair, the foot on one of the back legs had snapped off. Just her luck. Komoe tutted at the foul language, but otherwise paid no mind to this fairly typical display and carried on.
"Mmhmm! Well, you'd have to list Sensei as a co-author to be eligible, and you'd need to keep making submissions at regular intervals, but there's precedent for it!" Her teacher preens smugly, "If Yuriko's grades weren't so good, it wouldn't work, but they are, so it will!"
"Well shit, if something that convenient exists, sign me up," The albino girl shrugged. It couldn't be that hard, collate some data on some niche theoretical topic no one could prove anything about, plot a few graphs, write a nice bit of bullshit about how it totally meant something that could be super meaningful if you just gave her more funding. All as she'd come to expect.
"Ah-ah-ah!" Komoe wagged a finger reprovingly, "Don't go thinking this'll be a free ride." The guilty student standing in front of her hiccuped. "Sensei only chooses sensible research topics, and it's got to be one of mine to be authorised!"
"The… blood transfusion and Personal Reality topic you were talking about earlier?" Yuriko frowned, folding her arms tightly at the knowledge that this had, in fact, been useful information for her rather than the useless drivel on the PDP that she usually tuned out from her teachers.
"Mm, there's some useful research data on early attempts at Dual Skill that recently got declassified, which I think might link to the supersymmetry research I have access to from… ah, but I'm getting ahead of myself!"
Nearly an hour later, sun hanging ever lower in the sky, Yuriko was shaking the numbness out of her wrist as she exited the classroom, making her way down the hall in the orange light of the late afternoon sun. That was a lot of papers to read through, annotate, and sign. She wasn't blind to how her teacher was clearly going out on a limb for her, so she'd have to be doubly sure she got to the library tomorrow to begin checking out the research access Komoe had wrangled for her and make a start on the essay she suggested.
It'd have been easier if she'd left well enough alone.
Still, she mused as she collected her gym bag from her locker and stuffed her schoolbag into it, winning the fight against the sometimes-faulty combination lock for the second time that day and deciding against leaving her spare uniform in the locker, she wasn't going to turn down a chance to miss out on fresh forms of untested 'augmented hypnotherapy' or whatever else remedial Power Development had cooked up recently.
"Oi, Suzushina!" A casual voice called out to her as she left the school building, and she turned to see her sunglasses-wearing classmate, Tsuchimikado Motoharu, waving to her from where he'd been loitering over his phone at the entrance. "What'd you get kept back so long for? Me and Aogami were playing games out here, what with Seiri out sick, and figured you'd show up soon enough. He ditched like ten minutes ago, Sensei madder than usual, or…?"
"Eh? Nah, it was some different bullshit, actually going to be a real help, annoyingly," Yuriko explained, dismissing the sunglasses-wearing boy's quizzical noise with a rude one and a raised middle finger, "I'll tell you about it once it's done, maybe, haven't you heard of 'don't count chickens before they're hatched', idiot?"
"You know, I don't think that's going to help with your particular brand of bad luck, but if it helps how you feel about it…" Tsuchimikado said thoughtfully, trotting down the start of the not-inconsiderable walk back to the dormitory area they both lived in.
Bad luck was one way to put it. It was so bad it couldn't even be considered a joke. Yuriko had once taken her entire weekly budget to a tombola lottery, and she pulled every single non-winning ticket out without getting a thing. Food would go off the day after its sell-by date, packages would be delivered late, traffic lights would fail as she crossed roads and she habitually carried a spare change of clothes with her out of hard-earned experience.
Fortune had long since turned its back on her.
"It'd help how I feel about it if you were the third verified case of spontaneous human combustion in an esper below Level 2," She said peevishly, ducking out of the way of a beeping Academy City cleaning robot on a mission, catching her toe on a crack in the pavement and stumbling in the process. "Oh for- just my luck." She cursed as she caught herself, nearly dropping her bag to make a rude gesture at the elementary schoolers on the other side of the road snickering at her, to their scandalised delight.
"No way would it, my sister would cry herself to sleep, and you actually don't hate her." The blond boy said confidently, ignoring her trip and near-fall with the ease of practice. "Besides, my ability might mean I'd survive, and that'd just mean I'd have more time to spend bugging you while healing up."
Tsuchimikado Motoharu. Level 0. Ability: Auto-Rebirth. An unreliable regenerative power. Useful in a pinch.
"Auto-Rebirth being a metabolic ability means it was the most likely cause of the combustion, idiot, and it's Level 0 because it's fully autonomic and unreliable: you can't control it at all, and it doesn't always work." She swiftly retorted, words coming easily on well-trod conversational ground for them. "You got cancer everywhere it's possible to get if your ability went that out of control and still healed you through that. And your sister will get over it."
"Ack!" Tsuchimikado clutched his heart in faux-pain, "You put real thought into that, why are you so harsh today, Suzushina? Even by Suzushina standards!" He scratched his chin in the appearance of thought as his other hand pulled out his buzzing phone, which distracted him enough for him to fit his entire foot into his mouth. "Is it, you know, that time of the month for you-"
"Oh fuck off," Yuriko bit out, her fist clenched, ever-simmering irritation transmuted into genuine fury by the jab. A tall, blond-haired man dismissing her, this was so familiar-
You're weak, brat, so fucking remember all of this.
The weakest structural point of an upright human skeleton is-
She blinked the memory out of her eyes to the sight of Tsuchimikado hurriedly backing away, waving his phone at her like a protective talisman warding away a demon.
"-and oh look speaking of my sister looks like she wants me to pick her up see you later bye!" He fled down the street, not quite breaking into a run but moving significantly faster than anyone would reasonably consider a 'walk'.
"...the back of the knee." The albino esper muttered to herself, turning down the intersection to continue down her most frequently used path, around the outskirts of School Garden — the fancy, all-girls' schools district-within-a-district that outsiders needed special permission to enter — towards her dormitory. It took a little longer, but on average she ran into Skill-Out or other idiot delinquents looking to hassle her less often.
Contrary to what her classmates in elementary school might have thought, she didn't hate her relatively unique colouring, but white hair and red eyes stood out just enough from the average in Academy City to draw the wrong kind of attention. Even with the kind of futuristic hair dyes, contact lenses and other treatments you had available in the heart of technological progress, enough schools banned them and enough students worried about standing out that uptake was low enough to have her unwillingly draw notice in any given line-up.
All as she'd come to expect.
Yuriko was fifteen minutes into her brisk walk, nearly halfway to her apartment and amusing herself by guessing which of the wind turbines she passed were secretly disconnected from the grid when she froze, turning her head every which way in search of something. With a bit of effort, she saw her through a gap in the post-school bustle. Chestnut hair and eyes, the iconic uniform of one of the richest and most successful schools in the city, and the primary reason she didn't always take this route.
Without a moment of hesitation, Yuriko turned and started walking in the opposite direction, trying her best to blend into the crowd and not move too quickly or visibly. The heavy gym bag she had foolishly decided to bring home to wash its contents over the weekend was her enemy in this endeavour.
Giving it up as a fool's errand after some struggle against the current of the foot traffic, she turned a hard left into the nearest alleyway, looking behind her for signs of pursuit.
Naturally, she slammed headfirst into one of the group of older students out of uniform lounging in its entrance. Stumbling back with a hissed obscenity, Yuriko looked up at her unwilling obstacle course, hoping this could be easily smoothed over.
The much taller girl didn't look happy, fire crackling in her hand and casting shadows over her dyed, bright red hair as she loomed over Yuriko, the two boys with her already having started on cracking their knuckles behind her.
Just her luck.
She couldn't expect any help from elsewhere, either, there was already a gap forming in the crowd passing by the mouth of the alleyway entrance.
The bystander effect was a very simple, if at first counter-intuitive, thing. The more people are around, the less likely someone is to offer help. They see something personally uncomfortable or inconvenient for them to deal with and, given the opportunity to diffuse responsibility onto those around them, will do so, declining to help at a rate far greater than if they found themselves the only person available to offer assistance.
It was perfectly understandable, especially in this specific case. Given the rise of Skill-Out and other street gangs of lower level espers — and the odd higher level — furious and resentful at being 'given up on' by Academy City, scenes like this had become all too common a sight in the last couple of years, and who could afford to care about every single one of them? All as she'd come to expect.
After considering her options, Yuriko opened her mouth to try and de-escalate, "Hey, get the fuck out of my way if you don't want to get flattened?"
"What did you just say?!" Dyed-red scowled at her, the fireball floating in her palm growing larger, swelling up to a flickering globe the size of Yuriko's head. "I'm Level 3, get it? I recognise that uniform, you should be bowing and apologising and hope I don't decide to take this any further, little missy!"
Level 3. Ability: Pyrokinesis. Irrelevant.
The 'little missy' in question scowled. So much for playing nice. "Fine, stay here and get flattened for all I care, just let me through," She said, blithely unconcerned with the implicit threat.
"I- I don't think you understand your situation here! Geoff, Jun, grab her bag." The older girl shouted, pointing furiously at the bulky gym bag and bringing the fire closer to Yuriko in an attempt to intimidate her.
That was serious. She didn't have a spare set of gym clothes at the moment, she couldn't afford to lose these ones, to say nothing of the uniform she still had in there.
The still-uniformed girl risked a glance back at the sole turbine still visible from where she stood in the alley's mouth, dancing back from a clumsy grab at her bag. There wasn't that much time.
As long as you remain within the realm of normal brawling, three on one is the absolute limit. Even then, it's important to reduce the numbers against you when you can.
"Pay attention to me!" Dyed-red roared, the fire spilling forward from her hand and rushing towards Yuriko in a stream of flame, hot enough to melt skin and char bone. Judging by the aghast look on her face Yuriko saw before it vanished behind the fire's scorching light, she may not even have fully meant it.
It must have made it all the more shocking for her when Yuriko tossed her gym bag to the side, charged directly through the oncoming flames and slammed her elbow into that small section of the pyrokinetic's torso found directly underneath her sternum, causing her to collapse with a gagging, wheezing yelp.
Suzushina Yuriko. Level 0. Ability: Pure Border. Ability provides a body that is proof against all supernatural influence, including the generation of AIM. Just my luck.
Yuriko coughed and took a deep, heavy breath while Dyed-red's two friends reeled in shock. The fire may not have been able to even singe her uniform, let alone hurt her, but a lack of the oxygen it burnt away certainly could, and her ability wasn't capable of anything as convenient as dispelling an effect.
Once recovered, she feinted as if to rush at them and they stepped back and brought up their fists, one of them manifesting a sparkling, grainy texture over his skin and the other twitching his fingers in the habit common to point-blank telekinetics.
Presumed Level 2. Presumed Level 3. Presumed Ability: Crystalline Flesh. Presumed Ability: Telekinesis. Both irrelevant.
Of course, she hadn't taken her eyes off her actual objective, and instead of rushing them, dashed to grab her gym bag and then darted through the gap they'd made larger when they stepped back.
"Seriously, get the fuck out of here!" She hollered behind her as she ran down the alley, all delusions of subtlety gone.
Yuriko wasn't particularly surprised to hear the sizzling crackle of electricity cutting two cries short two corners later, but she did take a second to mourn the headstart she could have had.
It was another two turns before she felt comfortable enough to stop and catch her breath, her arm and shoulders burning from carrying the heavy bag through the less trafficked alleys of Academy City's District 7 at a near-sprint, her calves adding their voice to the protest as she leaned back against the wall, panting.
Perhaps she'd lost her?
The air stilled, the world's breath catching in its throat as if transfixed by the gaze of some fearful predator.
"Hey, what the heck was that? You fancying yourself some kind of Good Samaritan now? Those punks deserved what they got. Do you get a gold star from your teacher if you tell her about it or something?" The middle school girl called out to her from the corner she'd just turned, electric arcs bleeding from each individual strand of her chestnut hair with every step she took, sparks fleeing from every footfall.
A plastic shopping bag blew from behind the girl, threatening to wrap around the back of her head. In an instant, as it crossed some invisible barrier, it was annihilated in a furious display of blue-white sparks.
Misaka Mikoto. Third-ranked Level 5. Ability: Railgun. The most powerful and versatile electromaster ever recorded. Dangerous and, worse than that, irritating.
Academy City's Level scale for ranking espers ran from 0 to 5, with Level 6 as the ostensible goal of the programme. While nearly eighty percent of the population fell within the first, nearly negligible, Levels of 0 and 1, and Level 2 was not much of an improvement, the scale was logarithmic. In combat capability, a combat-applicable Level 3 esper ability could be compared to a handgun, or perhaps crew-served weapons for the strongest of them. Convenient and useful, but hardly a paradigm shift.
A Level 4 ability, then, was heavy weaponry, ranging from vehicle weapons to cruise missiles. In a fight between a tank and a Level 4 esper, you'd usually bet on the esper. It would be a much greater concern of many foreign powers if Level 4 espers numbered more than a few thousand in total.
Finally, Level 5s were the nuclear weapons of the small world of espers, and there were only seven of them, each ranked by their value to the city. Academy City rumours liked to claim that each one was equivalent to an entire army.
While she had her doubts for some of them, in the case of Misaka Mikoto, Yuriko could believe it. It was enough to intimidate or outright force most people to earn the electromaster's ire to back down and comply with her demands. At the very least, most people who knew who she was would take pains to be courteous and polite.
"...Just my luck. How did you even notice me in the first place, not like you could see over the crowd, shorty." Yuriko said rudely between deep breaths.
It'd been over a month since she'd first encountered Mikoto taking this route and she was already tired of it by the end of that first meeting.
"Why you…" The affronted Level 5 seemed torn between taking umbrage and proudly elaborating on how she'd unerringly hunted the ability-immune esper down, eventually settling on letting lightning ominously snap along her arms as she lectured, hands on hips . "Everyone you meet is basically a unique electromagnetic field, right? Normally it's too much of a pain to interpret, let alone memorise, but it's not like it's hard for a Level 5, just tedious." She raised a hand to flick hair from in front of her face, smugly. "You're a weird blank void in comparison, but interfere with other fields with your presence, just like anyone else. All I had to do was encode that behaviour into my usual background EM scans, which takes up more processing power than I'd prefer, but if it works!"
"So, what, you rushed here and zapped some poor bastards minding their own business so you could get your ass kicked, again?" Yuriko spat, annoyed at the news that she'd never be able to dodge her again, and doubly frustrated at the electromaster's persistence at picking a fight that she'd never win.
That was the problem, of course. In over a month of repeated encounters, the third-ranked Level 5, a crown jewel of Academy City's much-vaunted Power Development Programme, had failed to achieve even a single victory against a Level 0 who had no hope of ever moving past that.
It simply wasn't something she could accept, regardless of the reasoning behind it.
"Hey, I left the one who was already down alone, and they tried to attack me!" Mikoto protested, "Besides, they looked like they were nearly ready to graduate, had abilities at only that level and were acting tough? They're better off getting a reality check now, so they know to try harder in their career."
The greatest lie the Power Development Curriculum ever told its students was that their own effort was what mattered most, with no blame saved for compatibility, resources assigned or differing perceptions of capability.
It's intentional, of course.
Assured that their strength is deserved solely by their own efforts, higher levels look down on lower levels and strive to overcome those above them. The strong deserve what they've earned while the weak must settle for their scraps. That was the philosophy that drove the upper echelons of Academy City's espers.
That was why Misaka Mikoto simply couldn't accept the loss, and continued to hold an ironclad certainty in her own eventual victory in the face of nearly overwhelming evidence. It was simply how the world worked, and would continue to work, once she corrected this error. All as she'd come to expect.
"Besides," the third-most powerful esper in Academy City continued as electric potential built up in the air of the isolated alleyway, ever-thicker, ever-heavier with violent promise, "I was holding back before, because I didn't want to kill you. But since nothing else I've done has left a mark, I figure it's safe enough to use… this!" She flicked a single silver coin up, the metal gleaming confidently as it spun through the air, reflecting the Level 5's own self-assurance that this time, it would be enough. The same look as every time before.
It pissed her off. She'd spent enough time catching her breath.
__________
Yuriko stumbled through the front door of the Ninety-Third District 7 Girls Dormitory, Room 418, arriving home to a cold, dark apartment less than an hour after she'd set out from school. The power outage had missed this part of the district, at least, so she could put the lights on. She quickly put her things away and went to change out of her uniform, adding a cardigan and leggings to the t-shirt and skirt she grabbed from the pile of clothing she'd washed the day before. Even this late into spring, it was chillier than she'd prefer in here.
Despite her encounter with the Railgun, she'd had a remarkably decent day since she left in the morning, all told, not having to make any use of her emergency change of clothes, attending all her classes on time, hanging onto her lunch and not having any other run-ins or incidents worthy of note.
So she wasn't really surprised to see the latch on the window over her bed had broken open at some point during a midday downpour, the rain and wind then conspiring together to soak the top half of her mattress. She just sighed and pulled out the futon, stripping the sheets from the bed and preparing to put the mattress out on the balcony to dry over the weekend. No rain was forecast for the next few days, at least, and Academy City's meteorological tools were decades ahead of the rest of the globe.
She wasn't even surprised to find her fridge had died, and the repair number listed had an automated answer telling her to call back during standard business hours, making her curse and start picking out everything perishable in it, deciding to figure out what to cook with it after she took the mattress out, picking out the least room temperature of her precious remaining few in-date cans of coffee and quickly chugging it down.
The small, silver-haired nun lying flat on her stomach on the balcony and groaning, though? That was a surprise.
"Actually, nah, not today." She told the pile of white robes and silver hair, and began shuffling herself and the mattress back through the balcony door, hoping to close it before the nun realised what she was doing.
"Are you really turning your back on a dutiful servant of the Lord? Giving alms to the hungry is holy."
Just her luck.