Chapter 25: Downtime
Summary: Dinner and Bikini Armor, what's not to like here?
Chapter 25: Downtime
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2B let out an oof of surprise two steps into the Midoryia penthouse apartment, as her teenage body was ambushed and hugged with far more power than Inko should be capable of producing. As always, she instinctively ran a calculation, before once again determining that the hug merely felt more powerful than it should be, rather than actually producing more force. It was a minor mystery of the universe 2B had long since give up completely understanding.
"2B, sweetie! I've got a new recipe for you to try! I think you'll like this one!"
2B smiled, a somewhat rare expression for her, as she leaned into her pseudo-mother's embrace. Inko was a singular individual, one whom she owed much of her understanding of humans to. Unlike the many Quirk specialists, but very like her daughter, Inko had immediately seen 2B as a person, not a Quirk. It had bewildered 2B for a long time, her previous experiences completely at odds with the green-haired woman's decision to simply adopt her as a 'sister' of sorts to Izumi. At first, it had seemed ludicrous. 2B was a war veteran with all of YorHa's knowledge stuffed in her head. Yet, in the end, Inko had been the one that was right. For all of 2B's knowledge, she had to acknowledge, in retrospect at least, that she'd been emotionally stunted.
Having been told by her superiors that emotion was 'prohibited,' and with virtually all her actual experiences in her previous three years of activation being back-to-back combat operations, 2B had been a mess and hadn't even known it. Patient, ever patient and understanding Inko, had recognized the problem long before 2B had. She'd never treated 2B like a child, but she had treated 2B like she was a confused young adult. With so much knowledge about how the world should work, but very little experienced with how it actually did. She'd become something hovering between an older sister, a mentor, and a mother figure to 2B, who hadn't even known she needed any of those things. It had been Inko who had ultimately taught 2B how to be human, how to have hobbies, how to look after not just Izumi but herself as well.
Maybe that's why her hugs always felt more powerful than they should? Some people say emotions have weight. And 2B could even say she'd felt that herself, she was pretty sure. When a comrade died she'd felt heavy, when Izumi found happiness and joy with Momo after 2Bs own prodding, she'd felt lighter than air. Though she somehow didn't think her logic processors would ever stop trying to figure out a more scientific reason for it, 2B suspected they would fail. It was, she was pretty sure, something that had to do more with the soul than the mind. An area that had baffled humans and androids alike for eons. For now, she just accepted the hug from her second favorite human, and hummed a happy noise.
"Your food is always delicious, but I do enjoy trying new things."
Inko giggled and let her go, moving off to sweep her biological daughter into a hug as well.
"Of course, even if Izumi would prefer I always just make Katsudon. Still, I think she'll like this one too. It's Italian! I've been waiting to try it out until you were done with the upgrades!"
Both Izumi and 2B perked up at that. They'd discovered a mutual love for Italian food after Inko had found out 2B could actually eat, yet hadn't ever had much of a chance to actually do so. Certainly not properly cooked human food, since much had died off or been changed in the thousands of years of war on her Earth. Trying new foods had become one of 2B's favorite things, with Inko going farther and farther afield to give her pseudo-daughter new flavor experiences. It was a family bonding experience they'd all come to enjoy greatly, even when it didn't work out. Though 2B was such a glutton for any vaguely positive new experience that she personally never thought 'it didn't work out.' It was mostly Izumi and Inko that occasionally found recipes that didn't work well for them. Which wasn't to say 2B didn't have favorites…like Italian food.
Of course, originally, trying to summon a full-blown body for 2B to experience the joys of food had been almost impossible. Even now, summoning a duplicate of her original physical form was only technically possible for a minute or two, at most. Which is exactly what the 'upgrades' Inko had mentioned were about. 2B's child-sized form had been the first partial solution to the issue. Its smaller and far less powerful design had been less intense than summoning a full Android body. Though it had taken Izumi and 2B quite years of work to create it, since it wasn't a pre-existing android design.
More and better solutions had been worked out over the years as Izumi and 2B tinkered with trying to make YorHa tech a reality…something which got a major boost when that research and development began to include Momo. By now, 2B had multiple physical bodies she could inhabit, including a single older version that normally stayed at 'home.' Inhabiting those bodies meant that Izumi only had to spend a fraction of the energy, making up the small differences between 2B's needs and what they'd managed to produce so far. The single older body was the one she was currently inhabiting, looking like a roughly fourteen-year-old version of herself. While it normally stayed at the Penthouse, it had been absent for a while as she, Izumi, and Momo had been working on upgrades. Both for it…and for another project that would remain secret from everyone until the day it was needed.
Of course, while she could 'inhabit' these bodies. They weren't really her. Much like her old bodies back in her original life, they were just shells for her programming. Where before that programming rested inside either her Black Box or the YorHa servers, it now resided inside Izumi's Quirk Factor instead. Izumi was, for all intents and purposes, 2B's Black Box. She couldn't separate from Izumi's Quirk, since she was Izumi's Quirk. But it also meant that no one could destroy her, no matter what they did to her bodies or pods, without killing Izumi first.
Putting aside that morbid thought, she smiled again as Inko grabbed both her and Izumi, dragging them to the dinner table for a 'celebratory meal.' It was a good thing both she and Izumi were effectively bottomless pits for food, given how much both of them had eaten at the Group A Afterparty. As she smelled the delicious aroma from the noodle dish, 2B decided that, even if it had been possible for her to get 'full,' she'd have eaten this anyway. Mamadoryia's food was better than the Blue Nova's, no matter how good the restaurants chefs supposedly were. And 2B would happily correct, violently if need be, anyone that tried to claim otherwise…
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Izumi perked up at the sound of Momo's 'mad science cackle.' That was a fairly new thing, apparently the consequence of her working with that crazy inventor classmate of hers. But Izumi had already come to associate the new cackling with old behaviors. Momo seemed to have adopted it as a suitable way of expressing herself when one of their odder, more 'out there' projects actually worked. Curious, she closed the file regarding their latest improvements to the HSN and went to check on her girlfriend.
What she saw made her blink, then get distracted for long moments. Which she felt was completely reasonable, given that Momo was mostly naked. Izumi was fairly certain that at least 50% of asexuals would, upon seeing her girlfriend in this state, immediately develop a sex drive. That was completely bullshit, of course, and not at all how anything worked. But she was convinced of it anyway. She thus forgave herself entirely for not immediately processing that the very small amounts of her girlfriend that were currently covered up, including her groin but not her amazingly bouncy and hypnotizing breasts, were adorned with what looked like crude bits of Momo's armor. It was only when her girlfriend fiddled with something at her wrist, causing even the minimal bits of covering to withdraw toward the bracer on her arm, that Izumi snapped out of Momo Appreciation Daze. Given that Momo was now completely nude, save for that bracer, she kind of didn't want to snap out of it. But actively seeing the 'armor' retreat had drawn her attention to said bracer as the 'armor' retracted into it. The implications were enough to distract her even from a naked Momo. Mostly.
"Wait! You got it to work? How?"
Her grinning and distractingly nude girlfriend turned to her, eyes sparkling with enough delight that they actually managed to drag Izumi's eyes away from Momo's boobs. She couldn't help the smile that tugged at her own lips in response to Momo's obvious happiness, even if she was genuinely baffled at the moment. There was one piece of YorHa tech that they'd been utterly unable to replicate, even with Momo's Creation Quirk. That piece of tech had, at least until now, been the 'digitalization' of matter into information form. Even YorHa had, apparently, not fully understood how that process worked, with some obscure Maso tech being involved somehow. By the time YorHa was founded, a lot of information on how Maso worked was known…but not everything. Some of its more esoteric uses had been replicable, but the how of how they worked had not been fully understood. Up until now, even with both Izumi's ability to utilize the process and Momo's Creation to contrast it with, they'd failed to crack reproducing the method with their Earth's Quirk Energy in place of true Maso.
"We were thinking about it wrong! All this time, we thought that either a digital blueprint of the object was being created, like I do with my Quirk. Or else that matter was somehow being literally turned into information. Your ability to digitize real objects into your inventory pointed to the second, while your ability to 'summon' copies of YorHa tech pointed to the first."
Izumi nodded along. That was, indeed, the crux of it. They literally hadn't understand what the process was doing. For a while they'd even thought those features might even be two different abilities. But all the testing they could do had just confirmed and reconfirmed that it was a singular feature that they simply didn't understand properly.
"We forgot that Maso/QE is interdimensional energy, Izu! When you make something, it's not creating anything, it's borrowing the matter from elsewhere. From the interdimensional ether, from other dimensions, I'm not sure which. But all you're doing when you summon something is temporarily borrowing matter from another reality, possibly even another place in the space-time entirely, then rearranging it. You have to keep feeding it energy to prevent it from 'snapping back' to its proper place in reality!"
Izumi frowned, trying to reorder her mind around that thought.
"But the materials I digitize?"
"Already belong to this reality. Because you converted them from real objects that are already anchored here by their very existence, you're actually consuming a tiny amount of energy to disperse them to somewhere else. Hence the small energy draw you use to maintain your inventory. But when you stop…"
Realization dawned.
"Oh! They just pop back into our reality, because this is where they were anchored to in the first place."
"Exactly! I still haven't cracked exactly how you're doing that so energy-efficiently, of course, or how it's following you around. But it occurred to me that if I duplicated the pattern we've isolated before, but only had it disperse 99% of the material, leaving a tiny bit anchored to our reality…"
Izumi followed her logic easily, eyes shining as she stared at the bracer that had apparently 'stored' bits of Momo's armor.
"You can get it to release back to our reality in a controlled pattern by simply reversing the process. Plus, the anchored bit would have stayed anchored in position relative to you. It would take a constant supply of QE though…"
Momo nodded.
"Unless we manage to miniaturize those QE absorbers we made to block teleportation, it would drain most people dry too quickly to be useful. However, I just happen to have an effectively inexhaustible stockpile of QE in One for All. So the only real limitation is on getting it to rebuild in the right pattern. That's hard, and doing an entire suit might be impossible for now…"
Izumi grinned, eyes twinkling.
"But you can make useful bikini-armor!"
Momo snorted at Izumi jumping immediately to that idea, but couldn't help but grin back. The prototype probably would be pretty stripperific.
"I can at least use it to disguise One of All by deploying something like that in emergencies, yes. Though I might run afoul of a few laws if I can't get enough coverage…"
Izumi's eyes dipped down, allowing herself to be distracted by her girlfriend's nudity again.
"I'm okay with that!"
Momo snorted again…but sauntered forward a moment later with a certain look in her eyes. Successfully completing major projects always did put Momo in a certain mood. A mood Izumi was more than happy to oblige! After all, the four-day weekend following the Tournament meant they had plenty of time to enjoy themselves…
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A/N 1: If anyone wants an idea what Momo's 'bikini armor' version from her new gear will end up looking like. Look up the Witchblade Anime (the non-censored versions). It won't be something she uses often, but it will make an appearance at least once in a future arc. This is a good fanart example. As is this one.