Chapter Text
Ping.
The world around me was laid bare.
For most espers, psychic powers were difficult to use. Barely existent, really. Within the grounds of Academy City, we were classified into five ranks, with a sixth 'Level 0' for those whose powers are barely noticeable. This distribution of power affecting our training, our prestige- even for something as simple as income, those with weaker powers were afforded less.
Sixty percent- the majority- were within that Level 0 ranking. Another twenty-five percent were Level 1, and ten percent were Level 2- each of their abilities being mostly for show, with few practical uses. Put simply, most psychic powers were barely relevant, despite the ungodly level of importance put upon them here.
Get working directory- local, animal, human, awake, auditory.
Collect internal monologues.
Refer internal monologues to working memory.
The fragile, squishy things that made up 'consciousness' opened to my will. A cacophony of voices roared like an ocean in the back of my mind. It didn't deafen me- how could it?- but only fragments of meaning made it through to me like this.
If ninety-five percent of psychics were barely useful (as psychics, at least), where did that leave the remaining five percent? The majority of those were Level 3s. If your powers were something that would be convenient for a well-paid job, then Level 3 was a reasonable label- producing enough fire to use as a campfire, being able to reliably read a card you couldn't see, that sort of thing. While this meant some of them were specialist skills with particular scientific or economic value, Level 3 with a less esoteric power application was basically impossible for your average police officer to control without specialist weaponry- which Academy City's cops had, of course.
Then there were the Level 4s. If you were a Level 4, your abilities were beyond that of anything but the most cutting-edge technology (read: things made in Academy City, generally using espers' casual physics-breaking as reference). The average Level 4 was getting to a degree of power where an armoured vehicle would be needed just to stand up to them.
Filter working memory, criteria: personal interest.
I narrowed down the voices enough that I could start picking through them- mere tens of thought-warped voices at once.
There were only seven Level 5s. They were the best of the best, frighteningly powerful creatures that were said to have the strength to defeat a modern army in nothing but their birthday suit. In my humble opinion, no human deserved strength like that, especially not a bunch of random teenagers- perhaps their lack of ambition and the difficulty in controlling them made it easier to find countermeasures, but teenagers grew up, and growing up with godlike power was probably not a recipe for mental wellbeing (see: Caligula, Nero, etc).
The current roster reasonably justified my stance on who should have such powers. Of the Level 5s, five out of seven were apparently eccentric enough that any attempt to get them overseas for advertisement purposes were simply veto'd. I mean, seriously? How did that even happen?
(Well, based on my own personal experiences, and the bad habits they made me develop, I could make a few guesses.)
And of the two remaining… Well. One of them, Misaka Mikoto, the Railgun, had apparently electrocuted an entire alleyway full of her fellow delinquents after illegally interfering with the local justice system this morning. And the other one knew this because they'd just read the minds of everyone in an ungodly radius looking for anything that was either deeply concerning or vaguely entertaining.
I am the Fifth-Rank Level 5, Shokuhou Misaki. I, and my power, are both known as Mental Out. And I am the only member of the top 5 whose power isn't based on the large-scale manipulation of fundamental universal forces.
I only mess with the brains of everyone within my range- which, for the record, is usually 'multiple buildings'. Instead of being able to cause a nuclear disaster or turn everything in the local vicinity into plasma, I can merely command every living thing with a brain in the local area to stop thinking and die. Positively cuddly, in comparison!
With a sigh, I pushed myself off the balcony railing, having gotten my fill of fresh air while doing my usual snooping. It was my daily routine- I tended to do an intense activation of my mind-reading early in the morning, and then leave it running on low for the rest of the day.
True, it was paranoid. But-
My eyes moved to a picture of a younger me, being dragged into a hug with a purple-haired girl and a sickly, scarred, cheerful brunette with Railgun's face.
-in a city like Academy City, it was worth being paranoid.
Though I made sure to keep it to a healthy background level; as much of a person of interest as I was, I still had a life to live for myself, after all. I set up my laptop to time my morning exercises and yoga, and after that, headed to the fridge. "What to have for breakfast…?" I muttered to myself.
My thoughts went back to how I'd found myself here in the first place- they often did, on test days like this. I vaguely recalled an incident of some kind. I must've not had my past-life memories or whatever they were beforehand, because I'd gone from behaving like a normal (if bratty) child to behaving like a mature adult. Years after the fact, I learned it was some sort of dimensional reader that had gone wrong; one part of many in a project for creating artificial geniuses. Though apparently my role in it had been a case of poor communication that had gotten some people fired.
But what did that mean for me? Was I the person I remembered, and the body I inhabited some poor girl who'd been overwritten? Or was I a delusional teenage girl, as crazy as the rest of the Level 5s, if not more so?
My answer to these intense existential questions was this: I was me. More specifically, I was a person who could go for some waffles right about now (because someone else had been thinking of them and now I wanted some too), and I could definitely make some if I abused my incredible psychic powers to raid people's minds for recipes.
And so I did indeed abuse my powers, using a search algorithm and overlaying one of my fellow students' waffle-making neural patterns on top of my own so that I could both make waffles and copy the knowledge for prosperity. Fun fact: Everything is easier when you can just copy someone else's skill instead of learning it for yourself!
I ate them with yoghurt and blueberries. They were a little undercooked- I made a mental note to fix that next time. 'Easier' and 'ideal' are not the same, unfortunately.
By the time I was out of the door, the exercise and good food had shaken off my morose thoughts. I had my complaints, and I could never quite let my guard down, but life was good- and there were certainly worse people than me who could be given a power like mine.
__________
My first duty upon getting to school was to attend the faction meeting.
I arrived in the latter part of opening times. "Morning," I said in response to the gaggle of greetings that responded to me as I arrived. The faction room was pretty spacious- there was seating for a good forty people, though we were closer in number to thirty, of which a majority had arrived before me.
Technically-speaking, I was the leader of this group. Practically-speaking, I was mostly the group's flagship rather than its leader. That right went to a much more competent, extroverted individual than me.
I took my assigned seat next to my friend Hokaze. "Morning, Queen Regent," I said.
She turned to me with a warm but polite smile, her violet drills hanging down beside her head- honestly, I didn't know how she coped with doing those things every morning, and still arriving before I did. "Good morning, my Queen," she replied, because she was…
Okay, I would've said she was the only person who actually thought I should be in charge, since the difference in effort between my basic ponytail and fringe versus her fancy drills, bangs, well-managed fringe, headband and other such attention to her hairdo was fairly representative of our personalities.
However, I was a literal mind-reader with a bad habit of snooping, so I knew that most people thought I should be Queen. I was just a bit of a grump about it.
Factions, to put it simply, were social clubs. And by all rights I shouldn't have been the Queen of Tokiwadai- read, official leader of Tokiwadai Middle School's largest social club. I wasn't really the sort of person to lead a social club, because that required things like organisation, and planning, and other such things I really didn't want to dedicate my time to. I was always more of a follower or a middle-manager than a leader.
But there were two factors that made sure I would always be Queen.
First, I was a Level 5. This was the main reason my name was at the top- as an advertising ploy for Hokaze's club, and it was likely the biggest club because of this (since Railgun didn't have a club herself). While I'd hoped people would see it as the blatant advertising ploy it was once they signed up, the general consensus was that I was the obvious choice for Queen anyway, purely due to being a Level 5.
Second, despite her extroversion, proactivity and love of busywork, Hokaze somehow thought herself even more of a follower than I was. The whole club was basically her baby, and I only showed up because we were long-term friends, but she basically saw this as my rightful place. It was somewhat more legitimate than the general consensus- she'd first been able to break the pain barriers of her supercharged frame after I used my own powers to help her manage it, and she didn't want to reach Level 5 after deciding that breaking her last pain barrier would be an exercise in self-harm- but it was still rather ironic that neither leader of the Clique actually wanted to lead it.
Overall, the system was sort of like an old-fashioned constitutional monarchy; we both shared power, and we were both first among equals for legitimacy and competency respectively. I performed a lot of the figurehead tasks and used Mental Out to support the function of the club, while she performed the rote ritual, organisation and planning of the club. We had no right to be as successful as we were, but it was a club led by two of the strongest espers in the school and my only competitor wasn't even in the faction system, so our attendance remained excellent.
Such was the nature of the Shokuhou Clique, unofficially known as the Constitutionals, because having my name on the front of the group felt tacky even if it was both expected of me and excellent for our advertisements.
A ripple went through the group as the time ticked towards the meeting start- they wanted to start the meeting if we were ready. Taking note, I started up a search with Mental Out.
Ping.
Get working directory- local, animal, human, awake, faction, constitutionals, prefrontal.
Collect search patterns for members.
Refer search patterns for members to working memory.
Filter working memory, criteria: absent members.
Refer absent members to list of absences.
Get working directory- local, animal, human, awake, faction, constitutionals, social subregions.
Collect relevant information on list of absences.
I hummed as I checked the list. Everyone who was going to be here had arrived, it seemed. "It looks like everyone's here," I said out loud, and the girls of the faction quickly desisted their conversations in favour of turning their attention to the head of the table.
Ping.
Get working directory- path: Hokaze-chan.
Compiling list: 'present vs absent'.
Appending data to list: 'known absences'.
Sending data.
Hokaze nodded in thanks as I sent the data- appropriately edited for privacy, of course, as while I only really bothered with the privacy of close friends directly, I certainly wasn't going to go spreading around things I heard rattling around in people's skulls.
"Thank you, my Queen," said Hokaze. "Let's begin the meeting. As you all know, today is the day we'll be taking our System Scans." Those were the tests that assigned our Levels. "These will be performed throughout the day, as is usual, so please be sure…"
I'd gone over where I needed to be earlier, and given my status as a Level 5- at least an order of magnitude stronger than anyone else in the room, probably more- I didn't really have much to worry about. So instead, I poured myself a cup of iced tea from my flask.
The tea was perfectly brewed, as always. Though that was mostly because of my powers. My control over brains was focused on control over concentration gradients, chemicals and fluids within them, rather than electrical impulses- but while brains and nerves were easiest due to practice and the properties of my Personal Reality, what meagre control I had over other fluids was still plenty to dissolve sugar in cold water and un-brew tea that had gotten too strong.
I was perfectly content to be left to my drink while Hokaze led the meeting- my only real role was in occasionally suggesting something or assisting the discussion from the background (pointing out people who wanted to speak, preventing silent majorities, and so on), so I could afford to sip my tea while I waited.
As she finished up, I ran a mental program to check the mental list of which girls I'd be helping with their powers today.
Most of my powers ran on programs like that. While originally it had been so they could try and copy it- the giant brain I'd destroyed made that fairly clear even without mind-reading- the system was still something I used, simply because it was nigh-impossible to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time without it. Even with them, I still used my powers at a glacial speed compared to the other Level 5s, but brains were a lot more complicated and a lot less standardised than the electromagnetic force so it was something I'd just have to keep practising.
"Okay, so…Mibuki, Saito, Kando, Kuraka, Sanada," I said, reading from my mental list as the meeting closed. "You're consulting with me today. Everyone else, be sure to go over your fundamentals and your mathematical principles- don't push yourselves too far, you'll need your energy!"
My little group for this meeting had two hydrokinetics, a phytokinetic, a telekinetic and a precognicist- a fairly good mix, if a bit biassed towards the physical. It was also biassed towards fluid manipulation, which was good for overlap. "Sanada," I said, and the pyrokinetic girl stood to attention with a 'Yes, Queen!'. "Would you like to go first?" Yes she would, I was reading her mind and she was about to explode from nervous energy. "If you could go through making a candle flame…"
Psychic powers were based on a 'Personal Reality', so you couldn't copy and paste their usage and expect to get results. The powers were manifested in a deep layer of the consciousness, one that I couldn't pick out from the rest of the brain's real activity- not yet, anyway. I'd learned to copy other parts of the psyche by copying the rough area I needed and narrowing it down, but for an entire brain, that just didn't work. And while a smaller brain- say, a younger brain- would probably be easier to copy, there weren't enough examples of very young espers who I could locate and copy without being a total stalker or getting the scientists involved.
But on a higher level, powers were fundamentally mathematical and secondarily emotional in nature, and so you could learn a lot from knowing how other people used their powers. Realising a limit was actually a barrier to be pushed past, or seeing your calculations from a new perspective, could massively help.
I could also mimic the effects of the esper program's complex regimen of drugs, hypnosis and other such procedures directly, since I could view and copy the effects of the program on others' brains as it happened, and ransack knowledge from the heads of Academy City's scientists to use its own theories and procedures (which I did regularly, for my own peace of mind on the programs me and my friends were going through). But since we were all getting high-level versions of the procedures anyway, I never really needed to do that with anyone inside the school.
Replacing limits with barriers was the most important factor, I found. While we hadn't broken any limits in today's session, it had happened before. Hokaze's pain barrier was one. I'd actually experienced one myself, though nowhere near as dramatic as Hokaze's- initially I'd thought that psychometry (using psychic residues to learn memories from objects) was outside of my limits, despite having being told otherwise, but when I'd run through a psychometric power it had all suddenly clicked. That had also given me a noticeable boost in my general psychic strength, which was very impressive given I'd already been a Level 5 at the time; the key realisation was that my power was reacting to AIM fields themselves, in addition to fluid media within and beyond the brain, and a lot of my maths had been streamlined significantly.
I was still very certain that I could break through more of my own barriers than just psychometry, if I could just find the signals that determined how your Personal Reality manifested. After all, my power seemed to be manipulating two psychic categories at once, at least by my standards (I disagreed with the scientists even after assimilating their research), and someone like the famed Accelerator was even less limited. But it was a hard limit on me, for now- all I could do was try and memorise more mathematical insights, more perspectives, more theories, and hope something eventually clicked. And help other people with more easily-solved problems, too.
By the end of the session, I'd provided an outside look at everyone's powers, which was always good for picking up weak points in the maths- hopefully it would help them in their System Scans today. My group was feeling a lot more positive about the test than they had previously, which would do them a world of good on top of that. Other people were starting to file out for the first lesson. "Alright," I said, "that's it for today- I've got my own System Scan coming up, so I need to get ready. Good luck!"
__________
The monitor rattled off my scores, as the volunteer for the mind-control made his way back. My ears perked up at the range score- "I've broken a kilometre?" I said, surprised. "Huh. Nice." It wasn't like I could use my powers very effectively on the limits of my range, but those limits were apparently still getting bigger.
Other parts of my power had grown in strength since the last test, too. My mind control speed hadn't really improved, probably due to lack of having much to practise on, but my mind-reading and memory-copying were faster. I'd grown from having four to five people under full control, just barely- it was hilariously inefficient to control an entire brain manually like that, of course but we didn't really have enough volunteers available to see how high I could go when I was using it to its full potential. And my work with animals, brainless organisms and inanimate fluids was still weak, but I'd been thoroughly enjoying that sort of practice, so I'd improved a lot in that direction.
I told as much to Hokaze, who- as usual- hadn't really improved beyond skill and efficiency. "Mind control is your strongest and most powerful ability, my Queen," she commented with a frown. "But it's always improving so much more slowly than any other part of your power."
"When do I really use mind control, though?" I questioned, as we walked back from the field. "I'm getting faster at giving commands, but-"
There was a massive explosion, a pillar of water shooting up in the background. We both ignored it.
"-but there's a lot more to it than that, y'know?" She did know; her own power worked in a vaguely similar way to my own mind control, so we'd shared a lot of data between ourselves, giving her a pretty good idea of what it was like to mind control someone. "Most of what I'm practising is breadth; endurance, range, adjusting for multiple targets at once, that sort of thing." I pulled my flask of tea out of my bag. "Honestly, unbrewing tea is the closest thing to mind control I really do on a regular basis- it's large-scale fluid control on a single target over a period of time, and I don't really do anything else that's concentrated into such a small area."
"You have been improving faster recently," she agreed. "But you put so much more effort into everything else, without beng able to push your upper limits… You can't hold your control for much longer than you could at the start of the year, either."
"Yeah, but what can I do about that, really?" I said. Another explosion- closer this time, though only because we'd been walking- interspersed my reflection. "I don't really have any acceptable targets."
"Perhaps you could join Judgement?" asked Hokaze in response. She was thinking about Railgun's escapedes this morning.
The thought made me grimace- my thoughts on the matter, rather than hers, to be specific.
Judgement was basically a militia group. They were volunteers, and their prerogative was simple- act as the disciplinary committee of Academy City's students, enforcing order among the masses (since students were most of the city). While the actual police force, Anti-Skill, was needed to take anyone into custody, Judgement could do basically any other part of the arrest process, and I definitely wasn't enthusiastic about the idea of putting super-powered teenagers in charge of a significant part of law enforcement.
"That's a very sour face to be making about Judgement," said Shirai Kuroko ahead of us.
Shirai was Railgun's best friend and/or stalker, and she had been approaching from the opposite direction to meet with her beloved Onee-sama. I knew this because my general area mind-reading was still on. Even if my focus tended to shy away from anyone thinking anything irrelevant (among others), Shirai tended to think about her Onee-sama really loudly, and thus required extra effort to ignore. Sometimes I just excluded her from my mind-reading for the sake of not having those mental images.
She also alternated between consummate professional and complete gremlin. Given all this, I really didn't know what to make of her, which was made worse by the fact her beloved Onee-sama was one of the only people I couldn't read whatsoever.
"Oh, hello, Miss Shirai," Hokaze said, as friendly as she would be with literally everyone, because my best friend basically had the mind of a labrador when it came to 'who should I be friends with?'. (In other words: 'There's people who aren't friends?') "Miss Shokuhou and I were discussing places she could use her powers, and I suggested that Judgement could be such a place."
Shirai flipped to gremlin mode. "Oi, oi!" she said. "What's so bad about Judgement?!"
I grinned sheepishly, rubbing the back of my head. "It's not that Judgement's so bad-" Unless you had problems with thirteen-year-olds like Shirai being able to beat criminals up through the power of teleportation and subsequently being praised for it- "-but having someone with powers like mine in Judgement seems a little totalitarian, doesn't it?"
"Hey!" she growled. "Judgement's not totalitarian! We try real hard to keep people in line, and-" Then her mood flipped like a lightbulb. "Oh, Onee-sama!" she cried, swooning with a radiant grin, and popped out of existence.
I heard a thud over to our right.
"Hey, get off of me, Kuroko!" A moment later, there was a yelp and the crackle of an electrical outburst.
The Railgun was finished with her testing, apparently. Those explosions I mentioned? Those were her doing. The pillars of water from using her titular railgun technique in the pool had been visible beyond the nearby treeline, and the shock and noise were audible through the whole school. That was the power of the other Level 5 of Tokiwadai Middle School, and she was both a delinquent, far more powerful than I, linked by her genetics to some incredibly shady experiments, and completely impossible for me to know the intentions of.
She approached us, lugging her freshly-electrocuted favourite stalker on one shoulder. I straightened up nervously as she turned her gaze towards us. "Miss Misaka!" greeted Hokaze, hoping this would finally be the occasion we finally got along. "We were just having a conversation with Miss Shirai. How did your testing go?"
Railgun's expression changed from 'Oh, it's you' to 'Yup, time to brag humbly', a smug grin filling her face. "Well, I don't have to worry about my place as Number Three," she said, doing a little hair flick despite how short it was, and she pulled a little piece of metal- an arcade coin, according to Shirai's brain- from her pocket with a spark of electricity. "My railgun shots are more powerful than ever. One of these-" She flipped it casually with her thumb, before catching it with on the tip of one finger- "-can officially travel over a thousand metres per second, eight times a minute, all hitting within two centimetres of each other."
"Oh, wow!" said Hokaze cheerfully. "My Queen did similarly well. She reached a kilometre range for her mind control, and can completely control the movements of five people instead of four, without any outside assistance! Truly, Level 5s are amazing, are they not?"
Misaka's face twitched, her smug expression going stiff at the mention that I'd also done well. She didn't get the chance to respond, however- Shirai Kuroko sprung miraculously to life to defend the honour of her most beloved. "Hey hey, Twinkle Eyes is nowhere near as strong as Onee-sama!" she announced, and I took a step back as she teleported into our personal space with a burst of air. She declared, "The powers of an old hag like you could never invoke the love I feel for the Electric Princess of Tokiwadai!"
"W-we're the same age!" I complained.
"Oh yeah, is that right?" countered Railgun, seething as Hokaze's bamboozled expression stared at the sudden argument. "Then what's going on here, huh?!" she shouted, and pointed at my chest.
My brain took a moment to restart, leaving me to stutter in confusion. While usually I'd get some warning for such a ridiculous statement, I had literally zero idea what was going on in the Railgun's head when she said that, or why the hell she thought it was a reasonable to comment to make, and so I did not actually have a reply to what she said. There was a non-zero chance of being electrocuted because of this.
Fortunately, I had my loyal buddy to rescue me while I gaped wordlessly at the nonsense I'd just heard. "Oh, Miss Shirai. That might be a fun game!" said Hokaze, pushing us all apart with an electrically-augmented movement, before she clapped her hands together. "We were just discussing how my Queen could better practise her powers. Maybe she would able to switch our personalities, so someone else can see how you feel about Miss Misaka?"
"Eh?! Losing my love for Onee-sama?! And have competition for Onee-sama's affection?! Having two people that love Onee-sama as much as I do would be-"
She stopped her outraged rant, and I watched the gears in her brain click as her train of thought switched tracks from 'someone else stealing my love' to 'two people showing Onee-sama how valued and precious she is for a while'.
"-a brilliant idea!" she finished, her tone of voice completely different to when she started. "Just don't mess with my feelings while you do it, got it?!"
The Railgun suddenly looked extremely nervous... for a moment, before rolling her eyes. "Whatever you do can't be as annoying as Kuroko already is," she deadpanned. "Sure."
"My Queen?" said Hokaze, turning to me with sparks in her eyes- metaphorically, not the little stars that show up in people's eyes when I'm using my power on them. "Would you mind?"
"...I feel I'm outvoted," I grumbled, but turned my power towards Shirai regardless, raising a hand each towards the two of them so they'd know I was using it.
The list of mental commands was not a short one, so it'd be easier to do while Hokaze was in a trance. "Pause," I said. She straightened up, staring into space, perfectly still; her eyes were clearly marked with the same stars that were visibly over my own pupils. I wasn't making any edits for Shirai, so the same stars didn't show up for her eyes.
Then I needed to figure out what neural patterns I needed to replicate in Hokaze to make her a Shirai Kuroko clone. "Hmm… Let's get the mannerisms down first," I said, for the benefit of my two viewers. "Posture, accent, word choice, that sort of thing." I uploaded the changelog to my friend's brain. "Unpause."
Rather than returning to her usual neat, upright posture, Hokaze put a hand on one hip as she returned to a less neutral posture. "Huh, this is pretty weird, isn't it?" she said, her voice deeper and more boyish than her standard maidenly tone. Non-gremlin mode Shirai was definitely sassier and less reserved than Hokaze, but she was still quite a formal person. "Hmm, Miss Shirai. How close is it to being like you?"
"...Yeah, you're right, it is weird," said Shirai, putting a hand on her hip and tilting her head in a perfect mirror. "It's much like when you hear a recording of your own voice, but you're speaking in your own voice still, y'know?"
"It seems to be working, then," said Hokaze, and the confident nod combined with her downturned eyes was exactly the same as Shirai bragging about Railgun. "As expected from the Queen of Tokiwadai. Hmm, Onee-sama," she said, turning to me. "Let's keep going, okay?"
"Pause," I said. "Let's overlay the emotional responses…" It took me a few seconds to do that- I'd used it before, but only really for singular responses on a single topic. "Neurotransmitter balance… Aaand recombine the social networks. Timer: minimum of thirty seconds," I finished, which was the shortest part. "Unpause."
An unholy grin appeared on her face. "Onee-samas!" Hokaze cried at the top of her lungs, and I realised that I had made a terrible mistake the moment I was dragged into a hug with Railgun.
"Ah, to see my affection can overpower even the most ojou of ojou-samas," swooned Shirai from the sidelines, as the two of us were basically throttled by Hokaze- Hokaze's electrical amplification of her own strength made it nigh-impossible to get out of her grip the normal way, and it was extremely hard to concentrate enough to pick the mental locks I'd placed while the timer ticked down. "Onee-sama! Feel the strength of my undiluted love!"
"Will- you- two-" said Railgun, and my hair began to float into the air with the static charge around us. "QUIT IT?!"
Fun fact: Being electrocuted is very painful.
Another fun fact: Being electrocuted did nothing to help our situation, as Hokaze was literally electrocuting herself with her electrical enhancement powers this very moment to aid in glomping us, and any bolt of lightning strong enough to even inconvenience her would probably turn me into a rotisserie esper.
In the end, we had to wait for the timer I'd left on the change to time out, leaving me somewhat fried, Railgun fuming, and Hokaze blushing embarrassedly like a tomato over her unladylike behaviour while she simultaneously tried to apologise and say that everything had gone exactly as planned and so there was nothing to worry about.
Shirai found the whole fiasco hilarious, so Railgun electrocuted her for good measure. Hokaze ended up hauling both of us back on Railgun's behalf.
__________
Most of my interactions with the Third ended up like that, really. Shirai and the Railgun both had a competitive streak a mile long, and while it was unfortunate that either of them had anything even resembling a position of authority, I had no real reason to think that they were bad people.
The part of me that had to destroy a clone of my own brain, though? That said I was putting myself in danger if I thought that.
A few years ago, I'd been introduced to a girl- "...the Prototype, but we just call her 'Dolly'," as a part of the Clone Dolly project. She'd had massive lumps of scarred tissue over her chest and back, and she was sickly, but at first I'd taken it at face value when they told me she needed a friend.
Except, they didn't say she needed a friend- I'd taken it as an unspoken statement when they asked me to help her recover from the loss of Michan, a friend that had apparently abandoned her. When a few days hadn't shown any sign of her condition changing, they'd spoken to me again, and said that if I used my ability to rearrange responses to stimuli, I could make her believe that I had been Michan all along and restore her mood.
I'd accepted. Then I used Mental Out on the researcher I was told to practise on (a glorified intern, really), making him believe that the correct way to maintain the mental protection helmets was by removing the batteries- and with the only barrier against Mental Out gone, I took the opportunity to quietly reorganise the project to my satisfaction. As much as I could with the limited tools I had, anyway.
As my powers grew… Well, no stone went unturned. Dolly lived longer than she would've if I'd done nothing, and I was able to reunite her with the real Michan (who I was still occasionally in contact with), but ultimately her death warrant had been signed long before I got there.
They'd thought of me as more than a tool, though- they'd thought of me as one of the experiments, to be deconstructed when I was replaced. It was why they were mad when I focused on freehand psychics instead of using physical aides or external tools; they'd been trying to make me easier to manage, and the only reason I avoided the trap was because my last life had carried an irrational disdain for mnemonics. That had been a close shave.
They'd taken a sample of my brain to use as a telepathic booster, even, and the artificial, telepathically-active brain had grown to monstrous proportions when I finally discovered it. They hadn't been planning to use it for anything good. There was a reason why I didn't think Level 5s should have been created... What they would've done with that artificial Level 5 was one of them. They'd wanted to use it to rewrite people, replace the useless with the useful- and so I'd destroyed the amplifier brain. My powers had grown prodigious enough that I could shut the whole place down by then, so after realising the lengths they'd tried to go to, I did that as well.
It might have sounded like these feats were impressive, but honestly, most of those years had been drudgery interspersed with the occasional horrified rush to break something before anyone noticed. I didn't really talk much about it. Michan had gone her own way after Dolly died, and Hokaze and I had only crossed paths occasionally due to working in different parts of the project, so a lot of my time had just been spent reaching Level 5.
That, I'd hoped, would be the end of it. As long as I kept my guard up, at least.
But Railgun raised my hackles in every way.
First, there was her story of reaching Level 5 purely through hard work. That… didn't really make sense. While there was a lot of variation, my view into the back rooms of Academy City told me that high levels were generally determined ahead of time and trained intensely. Railgun might've been a perfectly ordinary exception, that was true, but a single data point conflicted with that.
Dolly had been a clone of Railgun, long before she'd ever earned the name. What were the odds of just happening to clone the only Level 5 who hadn't been specifically trained for the role?
Second was that I couldn't read her mind. Yes, I know, absence of evidence and all, but I knew her genetics were involved in shady experiments. What were the odds that Dolly had been made from a Level 5, that the Level 5 would be immune to Mental Out, and that the Level 5 would be in the same school in the same grade as the other Level 5, when most other Level 5s didn't even go to school?
Third was her social connections. Most people had lots of friends, especially people with high Levels. There were other such clubs and whatnot too- even an introvert like me found the various side-benefits of the factions to be handy. But her sole major friend was Shirai, a Judgement officer, even when their main interaction seemed to be Shirai getting electrocuted for her excessive clinginess.
And Shirai Kuroko was singleminded enough that she rarely thought about the past or future, so I got surprisingly little information other than 'Shirai loves Onee-sama' and 'Shirai believes strongly in her duties as part of Judgement'. Combined with the fact that Railgun seemed to escape all consequences for her abuses of her power…
Well, I'd never been given any indication from the minds of other people that Railgun was anything suspicious. But if I looked at her from just the right angle, every step she took raised a red flag.
"Are you still mad about your run-in with Miss Misaka?" asked Wannai, as she worked to fix my electrocuted hair. Her friend Awatsuki was sitting to one side of us, using her power of Buoyancy to play with the ice cubes in her glass; on the other side of me was Hokaze, and opposite sat Sakibasu Yuri, who was one of my closer friends after assisting me in figuring out how to unbrew tea.
Sakibasu's power- which she used to measure carbon isotope ratios and date things- had let her help me with identifying particles less complex and unique than neurotransmitters, and though I hadn't had much advice to give her in return, we got along well enough for her to be a staple of any little friendship gatherings I had. She was also a fixture of Hokaze's larger socials, being another extrovert.
Wannai sat behind me. While she and her best friend Awatsuki weren't as close as Sakibasu or Hokaze, I knew them both fairly well; they'd both joined our faction as Constitutionals due to having very compatible powers with mine. Buoyancy wasn't too far from diffusion, and Wannai was a hydrokinetic, though she worked on a conventional scale rather than my microscopic alterations. It was lunchtime, and when we'd decided to head out for lunch, Wannai had offered to help flatten it down with her water powers. Awatsuki was a free extra, though given I was basically rich due to a combination of merchandising, pushiness about getting a decent cut of that merchandising, and being Level 5, I had no issues with offering her a free lunch as well as Wannai in return for making me look less like a hedgehog.
Despite also having been electrocuted, Hokaze's violet drills were each as primly perfect as ever. They even stayed perfect when they'd been under a hat. I could only conclude that she was a cheating cheater who cheated, using her own electrical powers to have as fancy a hairstyle as she wanted without any need to spend time on upkeep. The others had been jealous when we'd told them the backstory of my bad hair day and they'd realised the implications of Hokaze's completely untouched styling.
"Honestly, Misaka isn't all that bad," I replied. "So I'm not really mad at her. It's just a personality clash, y'know?"
"Mhh," responded Wannai, and pulled another length of water from a plastic bottle to try and start soaking my hair back into place. I was using my power to assist her, after checking it would actually be helpful; she'd do the large-scale work and make sure I wasn't dripping water everywhere, and I'd keep the remaining water from evaporating. We'd be done soon enough, and it was good practice besides.
Awatsuki, to the right of me, was still making her ice cubes bob up and down in her glass. She clearly wanted to ask something, though since she was a friend I was only getting that from mindreading her emotional state rather than from snooping on her internal monologue. (Also she was fidgeting and looking for eye contact, because I was entirely capable of holding a conversation without incredible psychic powers, I just usually didn't.)
I met her eyes, and Awatsuki took it as the invitation it was. "Ah, Miss Shokuhou?" she asked. "There was something I've been meaning to ask you."
"Sure, fire away," I responded.
"I was wondering about those Level Upper rumours," she said. "Do you think they might make the Constitutionals less popular?"
Level Upper? I hummed. "Well, I've heard something like that, I think…? I admit I'm nosy, but rumours aren't something I really look into. They'd just make me paranoid." More paranoid, anyway. "Why? Do you think there's something to it?"
"Some of our friends from another school were talking about it," said Wannai, behind me. "I heard that a Level 4 esper used it, and got much stronger… Do you think it's real?"
"We thought people might look for it instead of going to you for help," Awatsuki explained. "And if it's real, then we might have less members join, or have members leave to join Factions that do have it..."
"Well, I'm not really attached to the whole Queen title- it's the whole reason we're the Constitutionals after all- so if someone else steals our members then all power to them," I said with a two-handed shrug. "But the idea of something boosting your power levels like that… No. I don't think it's real, at least not in the way you're talking about it."
"Not in that way?" mimicked Sakibasu, confused, as she swished a glass of some weird Academy City soft drink in its glass. "If it doesn't boost your power, what does it do?"
"If it's real," I said, thinking it through, "then- well, there's people who'll say anything to make a quick buck, right? You've probably seen supplements or special foods that help you lose weight, for example. Or foods that you should stop eating for the sake of your health."
"Like those 'juice cleanses'?" asked Hokaze. "Where you don't eat anything, and you only drink juice for a week."
"Right," I agreed. "Or people who say you shouldn't eat carbohydrates. And people do it, and then they lose weight, or they feel healthier, or whatever. So then people say it works, and then they convince more people to do it, and then there's so many people saying these little tricks that you're convinced they're better than doing it the way that isn't weird. But!"
I pointed a finger dramatically.
"Those stupid things work because you're looking at what you're eating, or because you're drinking juice at a massive calorie deficit, or because you're eating a placebo, whatever, and then you feel better. And then some people keep buying it, or swear by the technique, when there's something entirely that's having the effect and it just happens to also be doing that- but you'd be a lot better off if you just did the real thing. Like with the juice cleanses- if you lose weight too fast or too hard, you'll lose muscle and organ mass instead of fat. And most people would be better off gaining weight-" I was interrupted by multiple gasps, given I'd just said the highest of heresies on a table full of ojou-samas, with all the insecurities expected of such a group. "No, no, hear me out. If you do exercise and make sure you're not losing weight, then you'll have the same amount of fat to keep your skin and stuff healthy, but you'll have more muscle to spread it out. And stuff like belly and organ fat is meant to be cycled through when you burn a lot of calories at once, so it builds up if you don't- which means if you do exercise, then even if you eat all those calories again later, you'll still look and feel healthier. Right?"
I took in the opinions of the people around me. There were a few thoughtful looks, and most of them seemed to get the gist of what I was saying... even if Sakibasu was looking at me and drawing her own conclusions on exactly what that last point meant, rather than thinking anything to do with Level Upper. I continued regardless.
"On the other hand, you've got things that work, and that actually work for the reasons they say on the box. Like caffeine pills," I suggested. "If you're tired because you've been cramming, and it's giving you trouble with your school work, then taking a caffeine pill will make you less tired. Right? But it won't actually solve the problem, not really. You'll get more tired because you haven't actually been able to get some rest, and now you want caffeine. You would've been better off getting some sleep, and there's a decent chance your score would've been better if you weren't so stressed, spent enough time being bored that revising sounded like a good idea, and revised a normal amount over a longer period instead. So I think it's either fake, working but for bad reasons, or not actually very helpful."
"What if really is real, though?" asked Awatsuki. "And not just a fake, or any of those other things you said?"
"Then Level Upper would be in our esper classes, wouldn't it?" I pointed out. "I'm a Level 5, right? And even if I had a specialised program to get me there, I never had anything that would just boost me up. It was steady from Level 0 to 5, with a few breakthroughs when I learned something important. Hokaze's the closest to having managed that," I added, "but as fast as it was compared to her previous improvement rates, it still took her months to get from 2 to 4. And that was because I used my powers like a painkiller, which let her try harder, not because there was anything boosting her power itself."
"Oh, okay," said Sakibasu. "But I know how much you complain about Misaka not behaving the way a Level 5 should, so... maybe they just don't want to deal with lots of powerful psychics?"
"Level 5s are supposed to be able to fight an army," I pointed out. "So there's approximately seven armies' worth of power in the hands of seven teenagers, and only two armies' worth who are considered friendly enough to stick on an interview. And one of those two people regularly interrupts Judgement to electrocute people, regularly ends conversations with her best friend by electrocuting her, and kicks vending machines to steal their products. That's deliberately painting her in a bad light," I admitted, "but I really don't think that Academy City cares all that much about how easy to control its psychics are."
"I don't think you could fight an army," Wannai said. "Maybe Miss Misaka could, but I haven't seen you do anything that strong before."
"I agree with Wannai- you don't sound that strong," said Awatsuki. "I heard your record for mind control was five people, right? And you don't really do things like that very much. Making Hokaze act like Shirai is the most impressive thing I've heard you do."
I frowned, and decided to immediately prove them wrong. "There are…"
Ping.
Get working directory- local, animal, human.
"...precisely five-thousand, one-hundred and eighty-three people within my radius, and I could get a stupid song stuck in the head of every single one of them," I pointed out, quite sensibly. "I think that's more impressive."
"Could you, though?" asked Wannai doubtfully. "It doesn't seem like something you'd be able to test…"
I sighed. "It's a lot easier to upload than download, and I can certainly get the audio from everyone- even if I can't really make much sense of it without trimming it down," I said. "I don't need to process what the information is if I'm only sending it over."
"Huh," said Sakibasu, pondering it.
The rest of them also pondered it for a moment- before Awatsuki gasped. "Oh!" she announced. "I just had an idea! What if we asked the Faction if Shokuhou could use Mental Out on them?"
I blinked. "Eh?"
"That does sound like a very good idea," said Hokaze approvingly. "Our Queen does need more practice using her powers actively, and it would make us much more prestigious if it were more obvious that she really is Miss Misaka's equal in power."
"And if people know how strong Shokuhou is, then they'll come to her instead of snooping around for this Level Upper thing!" Sakibasu declared. "Plus, it'll look super-cool!"
"...Wouldn't that just be really intimidating?" I pointed out. "I mean…"
Awatsuki put a comforting hand on my shoulder, that side of my hair mostly dry by now, and smiled at me. "You worry too much for someone so strong, Shokuhou," she told me. "Misaka shows off her powers all the time, and you're the only person who thinks she's scary!"
There was a chorus of affirmative noises. "Oh, fine," I said. "I'll try it."
"That's all we ask, my Queen," said Hokaze, putting a similar hand on my other shoulder. "You've done a lot to make us all stronger. Let us do this for you."
I picked up my drink, and the conversation moved to its next topic. "Did you hear that Misaka plays the violin too?" Sakibasu asked us. "Do you think she's any good at it?"
As we moved on from the talk of this Level Upper stuff, the thought of it lingered. I wasn't too sure what to think of it, but… well, if my friends were worried about the rumour, it couldn't do any harm to keep an eye out for it. Even if I did think it was all rubbish.