Damn, this cat person is kind of like the swiss army knife of people! They just show up in Meika's time of need holding a perfect tool for the job? It's almost... Suspicious! If Meika wasn't explicitly worrying about finding her very large snake, she would be staring carefully at Khepri, wondering if they're just a figment of her imagination, if she's just having a very elaborate dream right now. Either way, Meika nods with such force that her hair shakes to and fro'. "Yeah, great idea!" she agrees, and she shifts her guitar around on its strap so it's dangling on her back instead of her front so that she can hold the ladder and steady it.

Alas, no Princess Playa'! Meika can't hide her look of disappointment, which spreads across her face in the form of a pouted lip and a furrow of her brows. "What!" she exclaims, huffing. "This is impossible! She could've gone across the entire campus by this point!"

Oh, well. She might as well try spotting her now. Running her top lip beneath her snaggletooth in an uncharacteristic display of stress, Meika hands off the ladder to Khepri and then takes the time to scale it herself, eyes keen to spot her beloved snake the entire time on the way up. As for whether Princess Playa' could climb... "Uhh, I dunno!" Meika admits, running her eyes across the horizon. "Can snakes climb? I mean, she's kinda a wildcard, so maybe? Maybe I shoulda named her Hairy Houdini, for how often she's snuck out of her cage..."

Finally at the top, Meika shifts her bodyweight so she can bring her guitar to wrap around in front of her, but the adjustment of her weight also leads to an adjustment of her balance, and Meika suddenly finds herself windmilling at the top of the ladder, struggling to keep her footing at the top. "Shit, shit, shit, shit," she whisper-shouts to herself as she does her best to regain her balance, in the process rapidly shaking the ladder!

---

Wow, did Jun really think Meika was that dumb? Surprising, really, but almost flattering. Was Meika really leaning into her character that well? Most normal people would immediately try to correct Jun, to try to make her realize that they are not as dimwitted as she is unknowingly implying, but Meika isn't really like most people, and almost compulsively goes against the grain. Maybe it's a bit of defeatism, maybe it's a bit of apathy, but most of all, it's probably just that Meika doesn't really give a shit what other people think of her. While she values opinions of people she cares about, that respect will always stop at their opinion of her. She refuses to let anybody change her, and even further, she couldn't care less about people who try to. Nor can she really muster up any energy to care about people making snap judgements about her, or misinterpreting who she is! She's gonna walk to the beat of her own drum anyways, so there's really no need to make any corrections. So, Meika feigns surprise in that form of sarcasm unique to her, only barely noticeable.

"Metaphor?" she repeats, moving the word over her tongue like it's dirty, then suddenly lifting her eyebrows into what could be interpreted as recognition. "Ohh, are you talking about that skin ointment they advertise on the TV all the time?"

She pauses. "I dunno why you'd bring that up now, though. What's 80K anyways? Is that how much you bench?"

Meika takes the slightest, sneakiest glance at Jun's arms. Could be true, could not be, she can't really tell. Oh well, back the game anyways. So the third round begins, and Jun's finally taking it seriously, looking at it like a strategist instead of an ends to a means. She's playing smart now, and Meika won't lie, she likes to see it, once again feeling like a proud Mama Hen—well, for a few moments, anyways. That feeling quickly fades when Meika finally focuses on winning. The temperature around her drops a few degrees, and her focus is palpable, like she's suddenly blocked every sensation from her mind except for her thumbs on her controller and her eyes on the screen. Flow has been entered, and Meika would eat her own throat if she lost. This is the true power of a girl whose competitive beyond any normal means.

Last few rounds, Meika was mostly just relying on innate skill and experience. This time around, she's fully tuned into her superior knowledge of the game, taking advantage of her almost eidetic memory when it comes to Lethal Kombat. Jun has strategy, but she hasn't studied frame data like Meika has. She doesn't know exactly where the hitbox for each combo begins and ends, and she doesn't know exactly how many active frames is in each move—unfortunately for her, Meika does, and she's using it to her advantage. At this point in the game, she's lunging in for moves only when she knows that Jun is in recovery frames, and she's purposefully keeping Jun at the very edge of the hitboxes of her own moves, knowing Sonja could never compare in range when it comes to this. When the combo ends, then Meika backs up, respecting Sonja's superior power, and she prepares to do it all over again. She doesn't want to embarrass Jun, but...

She can't help herself. Meika loves the taste of victory more than anything else.

---

"What, a good slice? For a hundo?" Meika queries, glancing up at Farrin. A self-satisfied smile creeps up her face as she turns back to the road ahead, stuffing her hands back in her pockets. "Damn, if I lived in Farrin-Land, I'd prob die of malnutrition or sum'n. I'd be eatin pizza for breakfast, dinner, and lunch!"

They pass the gate, still on the topic of quirks. Meika revels in the feeling of the cool night air touching her skin, still a bit toasty from her fire scare. It doesn't help that it's smoking hot during the day, either. Alt girls who are dedicated to their fashion sense always have it the worse when summer comes around, all black leather and chains. Meika can't help it, she'll take some cool comfort wherever she can get it! To Farrin, though, she shoots him a snarky smirk. "Dunno," she admits, her big chunky boots stomping down the pavement. "It's different every time. Kinda just depends on what can go wrong with a quirk. Then, ya know, it makes that happen, on top of just being generally hard to control."

This is where it's Meika's turn to hold her cards close to her chest. No need to let Farrin know that her quirk can also affect Meika herself, nor that it can spread, just like a virus across an unsecured network might. Some beans. Not all the beans.

Meika doesn't mind admitting that Farrin's quirk as cool as hell, though. She's not above expressing her amazement for it, as her eyes glow with both recognition and excitement at Farrin's little demonstration. She eyes the five yen piece now hovering in an emerald temporal field with unashamed elation. "Dude, that's so dope!" she exclaims, clenching her hands into fists. "You're just like that dude in the British phone booth. Y'know who I'm talkin' about? You're just like him, but way more Irish. So... Cooler, basically."

Then, a stupid idea comes to her. Her mannerisms suddenly take on a decidedly impish quality. "Wanna see what your quirk's like when it's super fucked up?"

---

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.

---

When Meika spots a lanky boy clad in only a ragged, torn hoodie, Meika can't stifle an inward groan, immediately under the assumption that this newcomer is yet another thug that's come to make her day worse. Meika has half the mind to just get on her bike and run these punks over, but even despite her big talk, she doesn't quite want to hurt these guys beyond repair, nor kill them outright. They may be acting like nuisances, and Meika's not too soft to refuse to punish the many slights they've laid upon her, but she's not the owner of a killer's heart. She believes in consequences, but these losers don't learn anything if they're dead. Again, her morals leave her in a tough spot, and by now she's looking for anything she can scramble up to escape the situation entirely, until the messy-haired boy reveals that he's not only not on the thug's side, but he's on Meika's side. Now that's interesting. Meika turns back to the newcomer, now seeing him in a new light, and now overtly curious on the origin on the strange blank card he's pulled from his pockets.

That curiosity only lasts for a mere moment, of course. Just as Meika's trying to decipher what possible use this card could serve, the boy proves its use in sudden, flashy fashion. The explosion that emanates from the thrown card illuminates Meika's face in shades of red and orange, blowing her hair back with the force of the blast and illuminating her entire diminutive form in the middle of the alleyway. Though shocked at this sudden display, even blurting out a curse of surprise, Meika knows that this sudden display of power will only leave the man at the other end of this alleyway shocked for just a moment. She has just a few seconds of advantage on him, and she's going to take it as soon as she can.

Leaving her bike unattended in the middle of the alleyway, Meika streaks towards the last man standing. The only thing she can see on his face before he falls is wide eyes and raised eyebrows, expelling a cut-off shout of surprise as Meika's leg sweeps under his. His knee buckles and he falls to the floor, and within seconds Meika is atop him, sending her fist into his face with no care for the blood that now splashes across her knuckles. "Fuckin'!" punch. "Washed-up!" punch. "LOSER!" punch.

The teenager is so caught up in fury, having long since abandoned the morals that kept her from running over the thug entirely, that she barely recognizes the presence behind her. One of the victims of the explosion, still conscious even despite a visibly crooked nose and streaks of blood rippling down his shrapnel-covered face, grabs both of Meika's legs and effortlessly drags her from the lead thugs battered form. Though Meika struggles as hard as she can to escape her captor, releasing a loud "Shit!" in the process, it's clear that she's at a physical disadvantage here.

---

"Well, yeah, 'not great' is pretty much the whole point," Meika yaps as she dawdles along behind Farrin. "Y'ain't gettin' the queen's pizza for a few bills, and that's a-okay with me."

It's not that Meika necessarily enjoys bad food, but she's nothing if not economical, and food definitely tastes all the better when it doesn't break the bank. This is not her only trait that differs from the general populace, she finds, as she's the kind of girl that walks to beat of her own drum, as already obvious with her frayed, ripped jeans, liberal use of fishnets and piercings, and her personally cropped graphic tees. Sure, Farrin may be going out in gymwear, but he'll look comparatively normal when toe-in-toe with Meika, who seems to compulsively go against the grain even when she walks, always offbeat with her gait. Of course, she has to make up for her diminutive size by taking short, quick steps to even keep in line with Farrin, who towers almost two head-lengths over her.

As they approach the campus gate, her tail lashes as if in reaction to Farrin's prying question. "Oh, nah, just some leftover stuff from my deadbeat dad," she responds, no discernible difference to her tone even despite how her eyes momentarily harden. "The real main course is..."

Meika fishes her phone out of her pockets and briefly channels her quirk through it, then turns it around to show off the screen to Farrin. The screen scintillates with glitches of all varieties, from flickering RGB boxes to distorted webpages, rummaging around across the cracked surface. Meika allows a snaggletoothed grin to her face. "I can fuck up tech as long as I touch it. I can do it to people too, but only if you think about their 'tech' as their quirk."

Meika suddenly gets a mischievous look to her face. "Speaking of, now that we're prying..." she coos, piercing Farrin with her gaze. "What's your quirk?"

---

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.

---