A Certain Scientific Silly Ability - To Aru Kagaku no Orokana Nōryoku

<<Satan>>

"Have you heard?"

Kamo snapped out of his day-dreaming, as he realized his friend Hashi asked him something. It was very rude of him to stare out of the window when he was with her at their favourite cafe, but he couldn't help it: he didn't sleep well and his already shortened attention span was basically depleted by the morning lessons.

"What?" He asked, facing her while lazily drinking his milkshake.

"People are going CRAZY about this mysterious esper these days!" Hashi was visibly excited.

He shaked his head, his eyes closed: "No, wait, slow down Hashi. I think I lost a paragraph there, who are you talking about?"

"They call her <<Satan>>, or something like that."

Kamo jumped in his chair: "Satan?! Are you serious?! Why would they call someone like that?"

"I'm not sure, but it must be linked to her power." Hashi, noticing she finally caught her friend's attention, was willing to keep it. She narrowed her eyes, her glare zipping from left to right as to check if anyone was listening. She whispered fairly loudly: "Apparently she is a natural multi-skill!"

Of all the ridiculous stories Kamo had heard from his friend, that was the most absurd. He knew a total of two people managed to achieve multi-skill, but both of them were possible only due to very specific, definitely artificial conditions. "What do you mean she's a <<natural>> multi-skill?"

"I mean she's supposedly the first Esper who has multiple abilities without requiring the level-upper."

He raised a hand, as if he was throwing away the discussion itself like a piece of paper. "Nah, there's no such thing. I bet those are just different applications of the same skill."

"Impossible! Let me describe what she can do, you'll see!"

As Kamo rolled his eyes, Hashi produced her phone out of her pocket and opened the usual site where she could find all kinds of rumours.

"Here, look!" She handed the phone to the boy, the screen was displaying a list of skills this so-called <<Satan>> had. It was clearly the kind of page anyone could modify, as revealed by the <<edit>> button next to the title.

Kamo started reading, with a skeptical tone: "...ability to smell money... hiding her presence... perfect memory..." he paused to glare at Hashi, raising an eyebrow. "...signal shielding... look, Hashi, this is the only one that might be an actual ability, and it definitely isn't so flashy."

"But-"

"No, seriously, read the description for her supposed ability to hide her presence: <<nobody notices her until she shouts in public>>. That's not an ability, it's just some regular person who randomly shouts in public to attract attention."

Hashi pouted, unable to answer.

"And perfect memory is a condition any normal human can be born with."

"But she knows every single Academy City rumour!"

"...just like you. That doesn't even make <<Satan>> an Esper, let alone a multi-skill."

"W-well then, how do you explain smelling money?"

"That's a weird one, but to be rational maybe she's just lucky, but puts on the act of sniffing the money just to make a scene. <<Money noses>> are a common trait in rich comic characters, maybe she wants to emulate that."

"And-"

"About the signal shielding... this simply says that she is immune to the ability interferer, that disrupts the capacity of Espers to use their ability. That's literally any level 0 and regular human! How can I be the only one who gets all this? This is clearly a normal girl."

Hashi sighed. There was no discussing Kamo's logic.

"Plus, even if all this was true, why call her <<Satan>>? These aren't evil deeds or anything."

"I really don't know about that one, I assumed she is so powerful that she's scary like the devil..." explained Hashi.

"Whatever. Are you now convinced that she's just a normal human?"

"...yeah."

At that point, Kamo suddenly dropped on the table, snoring like a bear in winter. He had used his last energies to prove that rumour fake, and now all the adrenaline that was keeping him up lost effect.

Hashi smiled at him, he was always so determined in keeping people focused on reality. That was probably the reason he never developed an ability... anyway, she was still wondering what kind of regular person could be so scary to receive the nickname <<Satan>> and an entire page about herself. Little did she know that this so called <<Satan>> was just a few meters away, in the street, shouting: "U-i-ha-ru!" While cheerfully flipping her skirt.

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Author's note:
I realise this chapter is a bit duller than usual, but I didn't want to fall in a clichè of "creating tension for a silly thing". It would become boring pretty soon if I did that in too many chapters.
I'm sorry if this was less interesting than other chapters, but as I'm writing this I am going through a tough time, romantically speaking, and my desire for affection got to a point that watching shows/reading/writing about romantic relationships isn't enough to delude myself anymore. I spent a night crying hugging my pillow.
If anyone else is going through such a thing, please rest assured that it's gonna pass. We're stronger than this and all is required to solve the problem is developing our social skills. Once we do that, we'll find a person who sincerely loves us, and whom we love back.

The idea came out when I realized that in Academy City there appears to be rumours about Misaka, Kuroko and Uiharu (for her hacking skills), but none about Saten. At first I thought I'd make her protagonist of a rumour because of her vast knowledge of rumours (the original title of the chapter was "The Rumour-er", referring to Saten), but I couldn't find many ways to develop around that. So I decided to take her peculiat feats, and let people evolve those into a fairly big rumour.

Sniffing money comes from the episode where she's looking for bank cards and is literally trying to find those with her nose. That kinda thing would become a rumour for sure.
Perfect memory comes from her memorisation of all rumours.
Hiding her presence comes from how she is completely unnoticed until she flips Uiharu's skirt, attracting everyone's attention. People would believe she has such a power because they didn't notice her until she shouted.
Last, being immune to the ability interferer doesn't really require an explanation: she has no ability, but people might assume that's special if they think all of the above are her powers.