Chapter 88: Research and Fluff

Summary:Progress toward infinite Jirou Headpats! Via Migraines and Fluff! Wait, what?

Warning! Chapters 86-89 were uploaded back-to-back! Make sure you don't miss any!

Chapter 88: Research and Fluff

Izumi had only been able to justify staying long enough to equip a flight unit and utterly bombard the ever living shit out of the enemy still assaulting the breach team. She'd known she would likely be chewed out for even that much, so she'd prepared beforehand a loadout that likely would have seen her in a war crimes trial if she'd used it during regular Hero work.

Missiles that had deployed cluster munitions, incendiary weapons that made napalm look positively humane, scatter-burst ordinance loaded with the nastiest acids that Mina could make for her. She's emptied a good 80 percent of her ordinance stockpile in under ten minutes…and in doing so reduced the remaining enemy forces trying to fight the breaching force by almost forty percent. All while 2B had used a fully summoned copy of her original body to utterly wreck another 25% in a way that would likely never have anyone who saw it completely comfortable in Izumi's presence again.

With their combined rage properly expressed in a way she probably needed to talk to her therapist about, Izumi had returned back through the Gate…though only after leaving a gift of a bunch of HSN comms and a portable HSN Hub at the now-virtually-theirs enemy rally point. Not to mention a gift of more proper support gear for some of the Heroes like Jirou that were making do with less than usual until now. There were only a few hundred basic comm sets and other basics, but Izumi's utter cheat of being able to take them across the Gates would only be added on to by Momo once she wasn't needed for the direct fighting. Their people, including the hundreds of stealth ops troops that would be scattering in every direction while they still had control of the Gate, would now have fully modern comm gear and other surveillance hardware. All of it encrypted to HSN standards.

As for Izumi herself, however, she'd been forced to retreat back through the Gate with the Harvest Stone. Not just because of her orders, either. The bloody thing was emitting so much QE that her inventory was slowly starting to glitch from containing it. Something neither she nor 2B had even been aware was possible. Suffice it to say, the very moment they got to the secure, armored truck intended to carry the thing to a lab, Izumi had unloaded it. Then breathed a huge sigh of relief as her inventory started to stabilize. Given it had burned her hand getting it back out of her inventory, she'd very pointedly gotten a ride in a different truck, thank you very much, on the way to the lab.

Now, she stared at the Harvest Stone as the unbelievable readings displayed on dozens of screens, experts all around her. David Shield had even come personally from I-Island, being one of the few individuals worldwide nearly as well versed in Quirk Energy Theory as she was. It was Dr. Shield that spoke now, expressing the disbelief all of them were feeling.

"That's not some sort of containment stone. It's, literally, crystallized Quirk Energy. Distilled down to its most concentrated form, then shielded in some fashion so that it's only leaking a fraction of what it should. Izumi, how in the hell did you survive touching it?"

Izumi huffed. She was in just as much shock as the rest of them. More, really. This wasn't really even QE anymore. It was properly MASO as 2B's original world had known it, rather than the diluted version that was QE. A solidified chunk of MASO energy that could probably have supplied an entire army of YoRHa grade androids. Assuming even YoRHa would have known how to make use of solidified Maso. Was this the sort of concentrations that had existed in those two beings whose destruction had set everything off in 2B's home dimension?

"I only touched it for a brief moment. Remember, my Quirk absorbs QE to fuel itself. So, at least for contact that brief, my own absorption cut it down to something survivable. I had QE burns on my palm afterward, which healed extremely slowly by my standards. In fact, they haven't fully faded yet."

Izumi turned her right palm up, showing Dr. Shield that, indeed, her palm was the sort of faint red you see from a mild sunburn.

"It was a fair bit worse right after I touched it for the second time. Like someone fair skinned who completely forgot sun lotion at the beach and fell asleep for a few hours."

Shield grimaced at that. An understandable reaction, given that it meant anyone but Izumi was going to need to go to a lot more effort to steal one of these things. It was entirely possible this was the only one they'd get to study for quite a while.

Dr. Eritz Van Listeberg, a German genius who had been studying natural Quirk Energy Fields before the invasion, was the next to speak up.

"However she got it, the question is what the scheiße we do with it. Did you at least get scans of everything around the pocket dimension they were using before it collapsed?"

Izumi nodded, not taking the slightly rude, biting tone in his voice personally. That was really just his personality. Instead of responding with her own rudeness, she waved her hand towards one set of screens, drawing attention to them as she transmitted the footage she'd been taking of the entire area. Over a few seconds, she edited them in near real-time, taking snap shots of individual parts of the various apparatuses that she'd seen, thankful she'd summoned her visor to make clear recordings of everything she saw.

All of the scientists quickly crowded around that set of monitors, murmuring over them. One of them, whose name Izumi had yet to learn but who she knew had been involved in disassembling the Greater Gate from Laos-Columbia, pointed to a single screen and spoke up.

"There! That's one of the main sequences we found on the Greater Gate. This one is more complex, but it's undeniably the same sequence, just with added bits and repetition. A control cluster of some sort, maybe?"

Several heads nodded, and a Scottish scientist, Alastair Allardice, pointed at another set of carved runes.

"An' that! That looks a lot like the sequence we've seen on aw' the Ritual artifacts the Lizards use tae turn Rifts intae Gates. Not quite the same, but it's bloody close."

His accent made Izumi's mind twitch just a bit, but she'd already worked with him quite a bit on the Gajajima island disaster, so she'd learned to parse it well enough. He was also, she noted, right. There were differences, but if she was right about those…

"Probably meant for forcing Rifts open instead of Gates. I learned a bit more when I was using our little interdimensional lockpick. I think that symbol second from the bottom indicates some sort of power throughput, and the one above it a modulation frequency. It makes sense that it would need more power throughput to open a raw Rift instead of a Gate, so the difference…"

And with that, they were off to the races, as a room full of geniuses argued and tried to sort out just what it all meant and how they might make use of the Harvest Stone. Assuming they could figure it out well enough to try anything at all…or could agree on anything more complicated than what to have for lunch, for that matter.

... ...

Izumi blinked in surprise as the door of her hotel suite opened. A tiny bit of adrenaline spiked through her veins from where she was sprawled on the bed staring at the ceiling. She knew Momo wasn't supposed to be back yet. Momo was one of the front-line powerhouses of the team holding their beachhead into Kurrick. Even with reinforcements pouring in after their initial success, the fact that Momo was effectively inexhaustible meant they wouldn't pull her from the action for more than a few hours at a time until she mentally couldn't take the strain any longer.

No one was really happy about that, as it wasn't healthy at all. But Momo was rapidly coming to be regarded as a new All Might, a man who had the reputation of having once gone two straight weeks without any rest at all, jumping from crisis to crisis. Give just how heavy of a hitter Momo was, just how many powers she had, and just how technically inexhaustible she was? They were leaning on her support for as long as they could get away with, healthy or not.

Izumi hated it. Momo hated it. Nedzu hated it. All Might hated it. Yet all of them knew that, for as long as Momo could hold up under the strain, it needed to happen anyway. Honestly, the only upside was that the frequent use of One for All had jumped Momo's use up radically. She could now access nearly 90 percent of it, had gained access to more of the Quirks stored within it, and had managed to establish semi-reliable contact with the past holders in her mindscape. Enough so, in fact, that she could allow them to 'pilot' her body for brief periods in much the same way 2B and Izumi could switch out. That fact alone was helping shore up Momo's mental stability, but it wouldn't be enough long-term.

More germane at the moment, that meant that Izumi's suite door shouldn't be opening. Using her surge of adrenaline to cut through the mental fog from an exhausting thirty-three hour work session frantically hammering away with the other scientists, Izumi accessed just enough of her hyper cognition to both give herself a throbbing migraine…and hack the hotel security to see who had unlocked her suite before they got a chance to step inside. She instinctively breathed a sigh of relief as she realized it was Jirou. Though she doubled checked with her own systems to make sure she wasn't a fake. Last she'd known Jirou was also still on the other side of the Gate. When her own sensors confirmed Jirou's biometrics, she dropped hyper cognition and whimpered at the new backlash. She'd used the ability far too much in the last day and a half to get an extra edge, and was now suffering the consequences of her still-mortal mind telling her to knock it the fuck off.

There was a haze for a bit, as Izumi embraced mental blankness in an attempt to ignore the pain of the migraine. She wasn't honestly sure how long it lasted, but it must have been at least twenty minutes or so, as she came back to awareness as a freshly-showered Jirou padded into the room wearing nothing but panties and a long t-shirt. Even still in a bit of pain, Izumi could appreciate the sight. Though the frown as Jirou saw her own state marred the view just a little. The punk girl sighed. A sigh almost identical to Momo Sigh Number 7. The one that told Izumi her girlfriend was exasperated with Izumi being reckless with her health. Abruptly, Izumi was slightly less certain that Jirou and Momo spending time together without her was a great idea. Only slightly, though. It was still the best route to Infinite Jirou Head Pat Acquisition, after all.

"Momo predicted I was going to find you like this, and 2B warned me when I got pulled back from the front, too. Pushed too hard on using that big brain of yours, huh?"

Izumi's answer was more of a whimper than a yes. At least Jirou's voice had been quiet…though her dry, droll, tone had carried worry along with exasperation. Something that would have made Izumi wince, if she wasn't half sure wincing would result in her mind blanking out again.

"Lucky for you, Momo told me what to do about this."

Jirou padded over to the room's ensuite, the luxury rooms they were staying in being nice enough they had individual bathrooms. The locals had at least spared no expense in putting all the Heroes and scientists up. Given that the last reports Izumi had seen said virtually all enemy raids on the entire region had stopped as the Kurrick Empire focused on crushing the Ziltmach beachhead? Well, it was probably something the locals now considered as having been entirely worth every effort they'd made. Not that Izumi was focused on that, at the moment, her still half-blank mind instead appreciating the view of Jirou's ass as she turned on the sink, let it heat until the water was literally steaming, and dipped a wash cloth in it.

It was only as Jirou returned to her with said cloth that Izumi's sluggish mind finally realized what was happening and she smiled gratefully as Jirou laid the cloth over her eyes, the warmth sinking in and ever-so-slightly ameliorating her throbbing migraine. She was a bit surprised, but hardly of a mind to protest, as Jirou continued with an old ritual Momo used when her girlfriend was 'foolish' and pushed her hyper cognition to the point that this happened. Momo never failed to lecture her harshly, but she always waited until after Izumi recovered. Until then, she always did whatever she could to help.

Just as Jirou was doing now, slowly and gently stripping Izumi out of the clothes she'd been too utterly wiped out to remove before falling onto the bed. Izumi let out little whimpers and moans through the process. A moan of pain when Jirou had to move her head to get her shirt off, a moan of near sensual relief as her sizable assets fell free from their support. Izumi might have the improved musculature not to have back pain from large breasts…but if there was a chance she'd have to fight, she still needed support for them. And it was bliss to be released from her support-bra.

Jirou slowly stripped Izumi down to nothing but her panties. Momo would have removed those too, but Izumi was idly pleased Jirou had felt comfortable enough to go even this far. She was even more pleased when the ritual continued to the next, more intimate stage. Jirou slipped behind her, supporting herself on the bed's pillows and headboard, and let Izumi lay back on her own body, angled in such a way that her head came to rest on Jirou's chest. The punk girl didn't have the massive and delightfully soft pillows Momo did, but she wasn't flat either. She was a solid high C-cup, and her overall body was less steel-covered-in-thin-velvet than Momo too. She was certainly in great shape, but not the stupidly great shape Momo had developed to handle One for All. Even with the lack of Izumi's absolute favorite pillows, the experience was a pleasant one.

One made all the more pleasant moments later as slightly hesitant hands came up and began to work the muscles of Izumi's neck, shoulders, and head. Despite how much Izumi's body differed from the standard issue human baseline by this point, the feeling was still utter bliss. A cute girl, working on the muscles that were instinctively tensing from the migraine pain, combined with the heat of the cloth over her eyes seeping into still other muscles to loosen their tenseness. Slowly, ever-so-slowly-but-surely, the pain began to fade.

Izumi wasn't quite sure when the bliss of reality shifted to an even better dream, but she was grateful for both all the same…