Chapter 15: Rogue Factor
Summary: A surprise appearance...
Chapter 15: Rogue Factor
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Mei Hatsume was a genius. Very few people ever thought otherwise, despite her tendency toward explosions. The problem, the thing that had kept her isolated for most of her life, was the fact that she leant far more into the mad scientist sort of genius than most people were comfortable with. In point of fact, the very fact that no one could deny her genius made them more uncomfortable with her mad scientist tendencies, since people actually believed she might create some sort of doomsday weapon without stopping to consider why she shouldn't. The fact that she'd had seventeen different inventions confiscated by the JSDF during her years at UA, with said inventions having been re-classified as military hardware instead of support equipment, did absolutely nothing to help her reputation. The additional detail that she'd intentionally leaned into the persona a bit over the years, once she realized it kept the false friends that really just wanted to ride her coat tails away, didn't help anything either. All of which went a long way to explaining why no one understood something important about Mei, something that would have worried the kinder among them had they only realized it.
Mei cared about people.
She wasn't great about showing that fact. But it really, really should have been obvious if anyone bothered to consider it for more than five minutes. Mei Hatsume was, after all, a genius. She could have worked in nearly any field of engineering, or any of several different fields of science, and become a legend in it. Instead, she'd chosen to become a support engineer for heroes. Frankly, it wasn't a glamorous field. Aside from David Shield, few could name any support engineers, and even Shield's support work was only really famous to the common man because of his work on All Might's suits. Despite her eccentricities, Mei had chosen to make heroics support gear because, at the end of the day, she wanted to help people. She wanted to make cool shit, too, of course. But she really, really wanted that cool shit to help people!
Mei cared about people.
Unfortunately, she'd also lost virtually everyone she cared about the most. Her parents had died in a random villain attack when Mei was twelve, a fact that had sparked her shift to support gear in the first place. Her older sister, who had cared for Mei despite barely being an adult herself when their parents had died, had been killed in the carnage of the Meta Liberation War. And now Mei's only friend, the one hero that hadn't just come to her for cool gear, but had enthusiastically traded ideas with her, was missing. Her hero who had been there as a shoulder to cry on when Mei's sister had died. Who had forced her to take care of herself whenever he found Mei spiraling, obsessing over her babies to forget about everything else. The friend who Mei had actually pulled herself away from her workshop to help through his own trauma and nightmares. The one bright spot she had left in a world that was slowly going to hell after too many hero deaths against the MLA and Humarise. The friend no one else seemed to care about.
The friend Mei Hatsume knew was alive.
Well. Probably alive.
That Miracle 3D Printer girl in Izuku's class was really, horrifyingly, misusing her Quirk. She really should have come to Mei like Izuku had. But the girl hadn't, so Mei had needed to poke and prod the girl through Izuku to get what she'd wanted for Izuku's hero suit. Thankfully, however bad she might be at doing smart things with her Quirk, the girl was apparently the helpful sort, and had acquiesced to Mei's request. Even if she hadn't really understood what she was doing. It was almost hysterical, really, that Mei had managed to coach her through creating quantum entangled matter without the girl actually understanding the concept fully. Oh, 'Creati' was intelligent enough. But it was the type of intelligence that had basically swallowed an encyclopedia without bothering to understand most of what was in it. That girl really should have asked Mei for help in lateral thinking. But that was then, and this was now. The girl had stopped being a hero and taken over her family company a year ago, anyway, so Mei didn't have access to her at all.
More importantly, the 'now' was one in which Mei Hatsume had still been getting sporadic bits of data from the quantum entangled systems of Izuku's hero costume. She'd created the system originally out of a mix of wild paranoia after Izuku's near kidnapping, and a legitimate need to increase the processing power of his hero gear without bulking it up. Interpreting and tracking telepathic and telekinetic markers was processor intensive, to say the least. Far too much so to shrink down into something that could be carried, even with the best modern tech she could lay hands on. The quantum entangled nature of the updated gear, however, had meant she could offload a lot of the data processing to powerful servers.
Which was neither here nor there. The real issue was that it shouldn't have been possible to get sporadic updates from a quantum entangled datafeed. That wasn't possible. The nature of quantum pairs meant that they were uninterruptable, unjammable, un-anythingable. Their very nature meant that anything which happened to one pair affected the other. It was beyond unnatural for there to be only a sporadic link. For a time, it had threatened to drive Mei insane.
Then she'd figured it out.
It had taken processing and reprocessing the sensor data she'd gotten the day Izuku vanished. Then hacking into the Quirk registry to get whatever details she could about the Quirk that had hit him. But Mei had, finally, realized what was happening. Izuku had jumped dimensions. She was only getting a signal when that reality was relatively 'close' to theirs. Or, at least, so Mei supposed. It's not like anyone knew how various dimensions and realities moved in relation to one another. Even if a few of the weirder Quirks out there had at least proven such places exist.
Suddenly, Mei had possessed a purpose again, one that had driven her into her old workshop at her sister's now-deserted home, where she was working on something that definitely qualified as Mad Science. There was no way she could bring Izuku back with just that tiny connection. She didn't even know if the gear was on him, after all. But that didn't mean that she couldn't go to him by using it as a beacon.
And if she died horribly in the process? Well, there was no one here that would miss her anyway…
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A/N 1: Super short chapter, I know, sorry! But I wanted to separate this out from everything else, since it takes place back in the MHA world. I also wanted to address that fact. Originally, I had not intended for any other MHA characters to appear. Period. It was just going to be Izuku. But, while talking about that with a reader, I realized that Mei would be immensely helpful for some of what I have planned. Without her, I'd have had to create an OC to fill the same role, and we'd see a fair bit of that OC. I try to minimize that as much as possible, knowing how annoying OCs can be in fanfiction. This lead to be floating the idea of Mei showing up to my P-atrons via a poll...and her inclusion won with a staggering 91% majority in favor. Note that she will be the only other MHA character to appear in the story. Period. I hate it when authors trickle in more characters from a crossover instead of letting the 'for want of a nail' type changes cascade. So I won't be doing that. Mei was just too useful to ignore, while also being someone that won't completely derail or destabilize what I had already planned.
A/N 2: Remember, this and m other stories have a Page! Currently, there is roughly another 8,500 words of Displaced Hero already in early access over there! Support is always appreciated, as the more of it I have the more time I can afford to spend on writing!