[Rui Matsui]

Rui was something of a late night villain. She loved the night, it was her favorite time of day. A time when the city really came alive and when committing crimes like pickpocketing, robbery or extortion was a lot easier. However, that meant she was often bored out of her mind during the day. Just wasting away, waiting for night to come. One of her favorite spots to waste away in was ironically a local junkyard. For most people, a place to throw away old stuff, but for her and other delinquents it was a gathering spot. Somewhere to get away from the world, surrounded by things that could be vandalized without a fuss from the authorities.

Sitting atop a scrapped car she played idly with her knife as she thought about what to do next. Rob someone? Fight a hero? She didn't really have the energy to fight today, but maybe... Her glowing eyes honed in on a young woman as they walked by. She quickly put her knife away and stood up on the car. ''Hey, you!!'' Suddenly her head was full of ideas! ''Come with me, I'll show you something really cool!'' She hopped down from the car, fudging her landing as she fell on her face, but quickly recovered paying no mind to her embarrassing fall. ''Come on! You won't regret it!'' She motioned for the woman to follow her. Was she going to listen to a horned stranger?

Meika Hijiri

[Meika Hijiri]

What nobody really tells you about what it means to be a bastard is that, sometimes, people don't really like you for it. Meika's no stranger to that, for sure—she's been quite disliked from the very moment she was born. What's really unfortunate is that, when one gets into the real world where adults start imagining that teenagers should have had their frontal lobes developed by now, Meika is, tragically, frontal lobeless. This fact is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that, right now, she is sprinting past a junkyard with at least three big jugs full of movie theater popcorn bouncing around in her arms, eyes wide with adrenaline and heart pounding a mile a minute in her chest. You must be wondering how she got into this situation, right? Luckily, the story is a short one. Are you ready? I'm not sure you are. Are you really ready?

Okay, well, here goes. For the past few hours, Meika has been scrounging around the floors of movie theaters and filling those big cups to the brim with discarded, crushed kernels of popcorn as soon as the audience vacates, making a bet with herself that it would only take an hour or so until the staff noticed. As for why she made this bet with herself, it's anybody's guess. Unfortunately, it took three hours for minimum wage worker to notice. Even worse, when one of the minimum wage workers did notice, they told Meika to leave. When Meika continued collecting popcorn, the staff member let out a long, beleaguered sigh, and promptly dialed the police on her smartphone. APPARENTLY loitering is a crime. Who knew! Regardless, getting arrested again would look pretty bad on Meika's record, so of course she ran, and right around now she's pounding past a junkyard and getting accosted by a suspicious lady who seems like the type to scam people. Something cool? Yeah, right! Meika knows better. Cool things only come in shades of video games, and everybody knows that shady ladies who fall on their faces off of abandoned cars don't sell cool video games.

Well, Meika knows better, but that doesn't mean she's gotta act on that knowledge. So, skidding to a stop, she turns and swiftly enters the junkyard, dawdling forward like a baby's whose just seen its first neon light. "Well, like, depends on how cool it is, horn sis," Meika intones, tapping one of her uneven horns with a snarky, snaggletoothed smile. "Cuz I don't really fuck with stuff that isn't cool. Being cool is, like, kinda my whole thing, so I'm really trusting you to not let me down here."

She extends one arm full of popcorn bucket. "Want some?"

---

Rui Matsui

[Rui Matsui]

When the other girl called her horn sis she immediately felt a surge of self-confidence well up inside her. Could it be that this stranger was already a bestie in the making? ''No way!! You too?'' She was planning to walk ahead of her and be all mysterious, but Meika drew her attention like a moth to a flame. ''Being cool is my whole deal too!'' She blinked and then pointed at Meika's horns. ''Horn sis! All cool people have horns, that's like, just how it is.'' She took a little handful of popcorn. ''Thanks!''

She turned and motioned for her to follow her again. ''This way bestie!'' Then she abruptly stopped and turned back around, putting her hand up to try and measure their height difference. ''Am I taller than you?'' She squinted her eyes. ''That doesn't happen often!'' She smiled as she kicked a soda can out of the way. ''It's right this way!'' Turning a corner around a mountain of junk the two stopped in front of a pile of surprisingly pristine things. Almost like they had been dumped here recently, but whoever threw away all their old stuff had placed it here with great care. A TV, couch, shelves, everything. Like the interior of someone's apartment had fallen into the junkyard completely unscathed.

But that wasn't the best part!

''I just found this place.'' She handed Meika an old bat. ''Wanna break all of this stuff together?'' She sported a devilish grin, brandishing a golf club in her other hand. Had her horn sis been boring she had considered attacking and robbing her, but she turned out to be a super cool and fun person so there would probably be no need to attack her. First impressions were important to someone as unhinged as Rui!

''I'm Rui, Rui Matsui.''

Meika Hijiri

[Meika Hijiri]

This girl is, like, so right! All the time! Just never misses. From horns to being cool to eating floor popcorn without even one thought of where it had been before it wound up in Meika's arms, Meika can hardly believe that she relates to this girl so much. Sisters from another mister, you know? She's already feeling it. "Yeah, it's pretty much a law of the universe," Meika agrees with an affirming nod, leaning down mid sentence to chomp into the mound of floor popcorn from the tub in her arm, then throwing it over her shoulder, done with the gimmick now that she's found something cooler to partake in. "Everybody knows that if you're born with horns, you automatically have an exponentially higher cool factor than all the normies do."

Now, Meika's mom always emphasized that following strange people through junkyards was almost universally a bad idea, but hey, there's always exceptions to rules. This seems like a pretty good exception, because this lady is pretty cool, and most strange people who hang around in junkyards aren't very cool. Hey, if Satan was cool enough, Meika would probably follow him straight into the underworld—so, yeah, this horn sis pretty easily passes the cut. She even seems a bit surprised that Meika is shorter than her—but, then again, Meika's pretty used to that reaction. "Means I'm closer to hell," is all she quips, following blindly after Rui like a lost puppy with this stupid smile on her face.

And, when Rui leads her to a bunch of very breakable stuff and hands the younger girl a bat, Meika's eyes almost immediately fill with tears of happiness. "Omigod," she sniffs, looking up at Rui like she was just handed the keys to the city. "You don't even have to ask. I was thinking about it the second I saw that TV."

Like clockwork, Meika then immediately turns to the TV in question and, like she's done this countless times before, swings like a star hitter, shattering the black, reflective glass of the screen into a billion tiny pieces with a howl of excitement. In the afterglow of destruction, huffing and puffing with adrenaline, pupils dilated like she's hopped up on some illicit drug, Meika wastes no time in shoving a small flowerpot in front of Rui. "I'm Meika Hijiri," the student simmers, incapable of hiding her wide, toothy grin. "And I'm counting on you getting a birdie."

Is that a golf term? Meika can't remember. She could never bring herself to care about it.

---

Rui Matsui

[Rui Matsui]

''That's right! No one believes you when you tell 'em that, they think being hornless is all great, but that's because they don't know how cool it is to have horns. The world is just full of normies.'' They spoke the same language, to the point that Rui almost thought that this girl was a Matsui too. Her quip of being closer to hell made Rui giggle. She was definitely stealing that line for her own use in the future! ''That's metal, bestie!'' She grinned her sharp teeth exposed. ''I take it you don't fear death?'' Perfectly normal questions to ask a stranger!

She blinked her eyes, confused when Meika started tearing up, but then immediately got it. Well, sorta. Rui herself never cried, but she understood that this meant Meika was either sad, or touched in some way and she couldn't imagine she was crying out of sadness. ''We're on the same wavelength, bestie!'' She swung her club around casually as she looked for the first thing she was going to break. Watching Meika break things was a joy too. Usually people never took Rui seriously, either laughing at her or trying to intimidate her due to her size, so having someone being so onboard with her silly idea was a welcome change of pace. ''Meika Hijiri, that sounds like a bestie name all right!!'' She eyed the flowerpot and pointed her golf club at it. ''A birdie? I'm a birdie champion!'' She lied through her teeth, she hadn't watched a single minute of golf, but that didn't stop her from wrecking the flowerpot with a violent golf swing. Just like Meika, she felt a rush, eager to destroy more, or watch her bestie wreck some things, or someone. ''You can use your quirk if you want! Is it destructive? I won't tell on you.'' She winked, holding an index finger up to her own lips to indicate she would keep quiet.

Meika Hijiri

[Meika Hijiri]

Not fearing death? Yeah, that's a totally normal question to ask a stranger!

And, truthfully, Meika does fear death just a little bit. Not enough to stop her from doing dumb shit just for the hell of it, but just enough to keep her from really going crazy when it gets to be pretty obvious that she can die from aforementioned dumb shit. Though, at risk of sounding like a poser or normie, Meika definitely decides to lie about that part, flashing Rui the biggest grin she can muster. "Nah, bestie,"—Meika almost glows, using that word. She's never had a 'bestie' before!—"Death fears me!"

Yeah, that's metal as fuck. Too bad she's lying about it. Really, who can completely not fear death? Isn't it a super human thing to be just a little bit wary of the great unknown that comes after the final breath? Oh, then... Rui must not be human, right? Yeah, the horns and stuff. Okay, that makes sense. Too bad Meika's hand-me-down horns didn't come with an innate embrace of the concept of death. Complete rip-off!

Oh well, Rui's a pretty cool gal, what with her winning golf club swing. Meika can't stifle her yell of excitement when the flowerpot gets shattered into oblivion, shading her eyes from horizon light with her hand so she can see the remnants of the pot go flying across the junkyard. "Yeah!!!! Touchdown!!" she shouts, a little too loud, counting on her vague idea of sports to conflate touchdown with the art of golf. She extends a hand to high-five Rui with. "That's my bestie!!!"

She really can't get over that. Besties!!! She's besties with someone!!!

...Does Rui call everyone 'bestie'? Meika tries to ignore that thought.

She's sheepish at the next question. "Not really destructive, unfortunately," Meika sighs, kicking her combat boot into the trash-laden junkyard floor. Her eyes slowly lift towards Rui, gauging her reaction closely. "But, it can make your quirk more destructive..."

If Rui seems open to the idea, Meika reaches an arm out, ready and eager to infect Rui with her quirk.

---

Rui Matsui

[Rui Matsui]

Meika's response made her grin in turn. That was a new one! Usually people either boldly claimed they didn't, or they pleaded with her that they did indeed fear death. Granted the context in which she asked my skewer the responses she got since she usually asked her victims that at knifepoint and not when making small talk. Still, the fact that she wasn't actively threatening Meika made it clear that she was improving her social skills! ''Totes bestie, I believe it!!''

With the pot successfully demolished she stood there with her hands on her hips and a smug grin like she had just effortlessly won a championship. ''That's right!! Touchdown!'' She repeated loudly, pointing the golf club at the sky, before dropping it to high five Meika with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm. She had never met someone who so willingly called her bestie. It was always Rui out here making besties, but rarely if ever did anyone say it back to her.

''That's okay, bestie! My quirk isn't either.'' She tried to casually handwave it. It didn't matter if your quirk was destructive or not so long as you knew how to have a good time. ''Really? Now I'm curious! Show me, show me!'' She extended a hand towards Meika's arm, assuming from how her bestie was acting that it was going to be something touch-based. With how things were turning out she was totes gonna show Meika her quirk too!! ''What's it do?'' She asked, innocent smile on her face, completely unphased by the unknown fate she was walking into. She could be getting disintegrated for all she knew, but would her bestie really do that?

Meika Hijiri