Delinquent Duo Dodge Deluge, Develop Delectable Dishes

The march back to the academy grounds was short, but delightful. Sigga enjoyed the downpour like the aquatic creature she was, spinning the leek she carried like a batton while humming to herself all the way back to the dorms. Hyousuke had parted ways with her, promising to rejoin at the 1-B building, once he collected his mismatched ingredients for his stew and whatever else he needed.

Sigga swung open the front door to the building, reluctantly retreating from the rain. A wave of warm air blasted her from within the lobby as she crossed the threshold. Unlike the stark blackness of the outdoors, only illuminated by sparse lamps dotting the campus paths, 1-B’s main floor was very well lit. And heated.

It took a moment for her amber eyes to adjust to the contrasting lighting as the girl made her way across the floor. 1-B was packed. Unsurprising considering it was around dinner time. Nearly everyone from her class was somewhere on the first floor. A group of students worked diligently on their homework in one corner, empty takeout containers taking up as much space at their table as the pens and papers they were busily using. Elsewhere she could hear the echoes of a loud conversation carry through the halls, boisterous tones of teenagers talking about the day’s events. This… was not uncommon. Every day at dinnertime similar cacophonies rang throughout just about every dorm on campus. It’s what made the time of Hyou’ and Sigga’s previous cooking expedition that much more convenient.

Most of her classmates didn’t notice the soaked fish crossing the length of the lobby. Those that did were greeted with a knowing grin as Sigga passed them, leaving a trail of water in her wake. The puddles didn’t last long, though. No mopping was necessary either. The warmth of the building’s sophisticated temperature and humidity control system seemed to do relatively quick work in evaporating the slippery trail she left behind.

Sigga summoned the elevator. While waiting for the magical box to descend, she stole a quick glance in the direction of the kitchen. There were already four other students making use of it. Two of them seemed to be conversing by the microwaves. She could see each of the two microwaves in use. Not a problem. Over by the stove were two more students, however, bickering over a recipe or something. She could make out dual lights on the stovetop suggesting half the heating elements were already in use. Perfect. That meant there would still be two left for Suzuki-san’s and her own cooking expedition. That was assuming nobody else showed up in the interim.

Shaking water off her leek, Sigga stepped into the elevator. After a brief ride the doors parted open allowing the still dripping student off on the fourth floor. She was already unbuttoning her blouse as she neared her private retreat: room four-oh-four. Inside, she was quick to drop her backpack, kick off her skirt and find a suitable substitute.

The bald fish had been wearing her swimsuit underneath for most of the day. A convenient coincidence considering today’s weather. Sigga hadn’t planned for that, no. Her intent had merely been to see if any chaffing occurred when it was worn for an extended period of time. The perfectly reasonable explanation for this was the student’s desire to find out if the hero suit she had ordered, manufactured by the same company that developed the UA swimwear, would remain comfortable during her internship. The hero-suit being almost identical in make, save for an added collar for some additional modesty, would arrive too late for a proper stress-test so today’s specific wardrobe selection seemed like the next best thing.

“Hmm...” the girl mused. Nobody in her class would give her a second look if she spent dinnertime cooking in nothing but her UA swimsuit. One of the secret benefits of having fins for ears. But even Sigga would feel a little self-conscious if she was to wear only that in front of all her classmates while they were all dressed in… well, normal attire. In the end the girl put on a pair of grey sweatpants, two legs at a time, to better blend in with the social horde downstairs. She left her wet blouse draped haphazardly over a chair, electing to go without a replacement top so the lobby’s warm air could dry her and the swimsuit faster. Good enough.

There was probably plenty of time for her to gather all her cooking ingredients without having to rush. Her blond-haired colleague had to prep just like her. No reason to tarry, though. 1-B wasn’t filled with crooks (besides her, she assumed) but Sigga didn’t hold her peers in such high regard as to presume they wouldn’t start questioning the arrival of a rivaling classmate in their kitchen in the midst of such a busy time. Better head off that complication before it occurred.

Lesseehere… Sigga tugged the cardboard box she kept her larger pieces of cookware in out of her closet, pulling out a pan and various other items from the container she wouldn’t require for her salad. The extra contents were tossed onto her desk or floor. Then she gathered up the remaining supplies necessary for her expedition, spoon, knife, dicer, and so on, before getting the ingredients themselves and tossing them into her box. She didn’t have as many potatoes as she thought. There would only be two extra that she could offer Suzuki-san. But Sigga still had a ton of carrots which she could provide as a replacement sacrifice for his stew. Hopefully the offer would be reciprocated with a bowl of whatever mixture he’d end up cooking. Then she could save most of her salad for when it was properly chilled in the fridge without having to go hungry.

After reviewing her inventory for the umpteenth time, Sigga hoisted up her box of necessities with a grunt. “Urff.” The cardboard walls were beginning to bulge, but it didn’t look like it was in danger of tearing. Yet…

After a bit of a struggle getting her room’s door open, Sigga made her way back to the elevator with her goods. There were a lot of ingredients required for her meal. As far as salads went, hers was of a variety with heightened ambitions worthy of a student enrolled at the best heroics school in Japan. In fact, she was quite confident that culinary academies would find her cooking skills just as praiseworthy.

Moments later Sigga found herself placing her boxed goods on the kitchen’s island counter. “Phew~” That had felt like quite a workout. Probably not a good thing. A lack of physical fitness wasn’t exactly conducive to graduating a heroics high school with high marks. A problem to be solved some other time. Priority one was making dinner.

Sigga looked around while unpacking her wealth of supplies and ingredients. The two students at the stove were still bickering over what smelled like pasta. Or just something with a lot of salt in it. A new student had replaced the other two by the microwaves, but they too went off to eat once their meal’s heating unit gave off a series of beeps indicating success. It didn’t look like Suzuki-san was here yet.

The adroit chef quickly sprawled out most of the items in her box across the kitchen’s island counter, so as to call dibs on the space on Suzuki-san’s behalf. Not one to waste any time, she quickly grabbed a small pot and waltzed over to the sink to fill it up, occasionally stealing a glance to see what her classmates were cooking up. It didn’t take long for the blond hero to make his appearance however. A familiar voice spoke up from behind just as Sigga turned the tap off.

“Oh. Hey!” She probably shouldn’t have been so surprised to see Suzuki-san considering she was expecting him. “Uh...” Sigga began, her head pivoting every which way in search of a perch for his jacket. “Uh... here!” she said, spotting a stool adjacent to the island counter, shoving it over to the blond with a swift kick. It may not have been built with this purpose in mind, but it should suffice in lieu of a coat rack well enough.

She didn’t waste any time moving her items off one side of the kitchen island so her compatriot had room for his own culinary crusade. Sigga’s hunger meter was already at eleven. That fact, coupled with her innate desire to not waste any more time than she had already in such a packed week, made for a particularly nimble piscine-chef. She had already set her pot of water on one of two remaining heating elements on the stove before returning to her box for her ingredients. The other two students in the kitchen seemed to be far too focused on their own cooking to give Sigga or the 1-A student so much as a second glance.

“Hm?” Her eyes darted between Suzuki-san and her box as she fished out her own bag of carrots, a handful of potatoes, and two eggs. “Oh. Uh. Heh. It’s, uh… I’m sort of just testing it out, as it were.” she began, before momentarily shifting the direction of conversation. “-you can have these-” Sigga said, offering two of her meekuin potatoes. The other two, as well as as the eggs, and four carrots she grabbed from the bag, were quickly carried over to the stove.

It was difficult to say how many salads had boil these ingredients as one of the primary steps in their construction. Sigga’s cooking expertise may have been well honed, but it was still limited to only a select few recipes. Whether the steps in these recipes might seem odd from an observer's standpoint didn’t even cross her mind. She carefully lowered the unpeeled potatoes, carrots, and eggs into the pot of water, and let the heating element do it’s thing. Even if more of the stove had been free, Sigga would have thought it incredibly inefficient to boil her items in separate pieces of cookware.

“You’re welcome to take as many carrots as you want as well,” she gestured at her still-mostly-full bag of carrots, “-if you need them.” The flaying of the poor orange umbelliferae in the young man’s hands did not escape Sigga’s notice, though she did not remark on it. Such was the inescapable horror awaiting consumer-grade vegetables.

Sigga was already in the process of moving on to the next step of her recipe. Pulling out a sieve and can opener from her box, she pivoted the conversation back to the blond’s initial question. “-so… this whole internship thing I mentioned earlier...” the girl continued, gesturing vaguely with the sieve before setting it down on the counter. “-it kind of crept up on me-”

“You got an internship??” said one incredulous voice by the stove.

“How does an internship creep up on someone?” said the other.

Sigga threw a carrot at them.

One of the students dodged and it beaned the other one in the head before bouncing into one of their pots with a splash. This elicited a panicked reaction from one of the students, who tried to quickly find something with which to fish the carrot out of his dinner. The other, conveniently enough, took that moment to notice his own pot was beginning to boil over. With the rude interruption properly neutered, Sigga turned back to the blond.

“-so with the internship being right around the corner-” she continued her explanation, “-I realized I needed to get a hero suit A-S-A-P. I didn’t have enough time to design one and have it made in time, what with having my enrolment at UA accepted part-way into the year, so I looked up wet-suit designs made by the same company that made this-” Sigga thumbed the shoulder strap of her swimsuit which snapped back against her skin, “-and ordered something similar, but more robust. In black.” Because everyone knows black is cool. Her face seemed to flush at the mention of her choice of color for her rush-ordered hero suit. The lack of imagination for her choice of color had not escaped her, but she managed to keep the rest of her expression from contorting in embarrassment.

“Anyway, I didn’t want to find out too late that wearing it for too long is gonna have it chafe all over so I’m giving this version-” she gestured at her swimsuit again, “a test run while I wait for the real thing to arrive.” The color in her cheeks slowly returning to normal, one could tell she seemed rather proud of her clever solution.

“We just had our first swimming class of the year the other day.” Sigga remarked off-handed at the young man's comment, her 'we' referring to 1-B. She left out the little detail where she ended up skipping the class. With permission of course! A convenient leg sprain had occurred the morning of, but she left that detail, and the detail of her own hesitation when it came to entering a swimming pool out of the conversation.

Quickly changing the topic, Sigga spoke again. “So-” her free hand grabbed a can of corn from her box and the fish began to work on it with her manual can opener. “This… Lockon... You mentioned him being sort of a hardass.” She was paraphrasing Suzuki-san’s earlier words. “What’s he really like?” Her interest in the leader of the Bloodhounds seemed curiously genuine. Which it was, but that didn’t mean Sigga didn’t have an ulterior motive for her topical question. But that was no surprise to anyone that knew her well enough. It never hurt for a lady to have a plan-B on hand.

Sigga’s eyes would frequently bounce between the stove, Suzuki-san, and the items her hands were busy with. Despite her attention being split, she carried on without making any mistakes or slip-ups. At least with her cooking. One head-fin raised, still listening to the blond’s review of Lockon, she carried her now-open can of corn over to the sink and dumped its contents into a sieve. It seemed a little wasteful to let the maize juice go down the drain like that. But the fish was clearly only interested in the kernels themselves.

As she worked, her mind mulled over the facts she was being given on the Bloodhound’s leader. It did not sound like it would make for a particularly decent back-up if her stint at Flame-On somehow fell through. Unlike her previous fears of getting stuck behind a desk for her internship, the thought of being forced to run ragged seemed infinitely worse. Though she couldn’t draw a direct comparison between the two agency leaders having never seen her peer’s former mentor, Firebrand at least didn’t seem to be particularly buff so maybe her newfound concerns would be for naught. Hopefully.

She tapped the metal sieve against the side of the sink, compelling the remaining liquid to quickly vacate. The empty can was simply tossed aside onto the counter as she turned back towards the kitchen island, pulled out a giant glass bowl from her box, and dumped the strained corn into it. Then the hungry fish repeated the entire process with the can of peas.

“Hrm, yeah...” Sigga mumbled at Suzuki-san’s closing remark. Her mind was ruminating on several things at once so it took an extra second for her to realize what she had just replied to. “Oh! Uh, ah- Pffffft!” The bald girl couldn’t quite stop herself from hissing out a laugh at her own unintentionally crude reply. “That- that’s not-” she continued inbetween embarrassed chuckles, waving one hand as if to erase her misspoken words. “What I mean to say is, I kind of get where you’re coming from.” Sigga’s grin persisted as she continued, reitterrating her remark to the blond from earlier in the day. “My interview for my internship was really short. It was weird, ya know? Like I had just stopped by to drop off my application-” she left out the part about actually trying to avoid being seen doing so, “-and next thing I know I’m being sat down for an interview, given a sucker, and told I start on Wedesday! Weird! Right?!”

Her hands seemed to mimic the girl’s spoken words, with one holding onto the can opener which was, in turn, holding onto a partially opened can of peas. “Makes me wonder why they’re so eager to take on new interns. Maybe their agencies get some sort of grant or rent subsidy from the government or something, and as a part of that deal they’re required to teach UA students for a bit? I donno. Maybe it’s easier to just grab whatever fool walks in through their door first than to do any sort of vetting?” It wasn’t that outlandish of a theory, though bringing the subject up made her wonder if perhaps her own hiring was on account of Firebrand having read about her Quirk and intending to exploit it to his agency's benefit. That... actually made some sense, though she kept this thought secret from the blond. Since arriving at UA Sigga had made it a point not to bring up the subject of her Quirk, certain that knowledge of it’s full nature would bring about her ruin. She had been ostracized at school before for that very reason.

Her hidden thoughts did bring out another idea to the fore. If the theory about her hiring was true, the same could be true for Suzuki-san. Sigga’s amber orbs briefly pointed at the young man before returning to focus on the can opener. She hadn’t yet been privy to his Quirk. Her mouth briefly opened to speak before her sharp teeth caught the act and bit her bottom lip. She knew better than to bring up a subject that was likely to, at some point, be turned back her way.

Wordlessly, Sigga hovered back over to the sink to strain the pivotal peas.

By this point the other two students occupying the kitchen had finished cooking their meals and gone off to join the others spread out throughout 1-B’s main floor leaving behind only the carrot that Sigga had previously flung at them, lying on the counter. The cacophony of discordant dinnertime voices persisted throughout the building, with Hyou’ and Sigga’s contributing to the chorus with their own discussions.

It felt oddly encouraging to have her thoughts on her peculiar interview verbally supported. She still had her concerns, of course, but at this point it would do little to dwel on them.

Sigga dumped her strained peas on top of the corn in her large glass bowl, her watchful eye constantly glancing in the direction of the stove. The eggs and vegetables on the stove were slowly starting to simmer. It wouldn’t be long before the first of them would be ready for removal. In the meantime the student tossed the can opener back into the box and pulled out a cutting board and paring knife.

Even with her attention still divided, she couldn’t help but notice Suzuki-san’s discontented demeaner. It seemed that just about every time her head turned his way she’d be catching him brooding over something. Leaving the cutting board and knife on the counter, she pulled out a head of celery and took the fibrous plant over to the sink to rinse.

“So...” Sigga began slowly, speaking more clearly now that there wasn’t anyone else in the kitchen to overhear them. “-what exactly did you get up to at your internship?”

Hyousuke’s paranoia had an almost farcical symmetry to Sigga’s own from back during their first cooking expedition when the blond had correctly identified the fish’s ankle monitor for what it was. While both teenagers kept much of their personal lives private, and for good reason, in this instance the bald girl’s sleuth-like prodding came from genuine ignorance of the events that occurred during the stew-maker’s internship. Sigga’s queries were far more self-absorbed than the blond suspected. It was probably quite favorable for their ongoing interactions that he remained clueless as to the young woman’s Quirk, lest knowledge of it further encouraged distrust resulting in the two breaking off their casual rendezvous.

“Hmm.”

The crispy crunch of a vegetable’s stalks being horrifically torn off could be heard from the sink as Sigga pondered on Suzuki-san’s reply. She really should allow for her mind to stop worrying about her upcoming internship so much. It’s not like any additional insight would help alleviate her unfounded fears.

The sea creature continued washing the celery until enough stalks had been cleaned for her purpose. She set aside the remainder and brought the allotment for her salad over to her cutting board. There Sigga began cutting the stalks lengthwise, turning each green twig into a thin rod before dicing the entire stack into tiny, crispy cubes. The paring knife seemed rather small in her hands, though she wielded it quite expertly. It was as if the vegetable had gone through some sort of precision wood chipper, so quickly did the girl finish her task.

Too absorbed in working on her meal to pick up on any of Suzuki-san’s tells or mannerisms that might suggest he was hiding something, Sigga scraped the bits of celery in the bowl and made a beeline for her box. Her meal prep was taking far too long and the fish needed to snack on something. Now.

The pickles were meant to come in later, but go any longer without eating and the fish felt certain her stomach would fold in on itself into a micro-singularity and drag all the surrounding matter in. Sigga pulled out a large glass jar from her box. Her snappy movements left the jar’s contents spinning in a self-contained maelstrom. You could make out a platoon of pickles swirling about amongst dill, dill seeds, and garlic in the muddy brine.

Out of all the ingredient for her salad, the pickles were the only ones whose formulation Sigga could take some credit for. Her grandfather had technically been responsible for the cucumbers’ cultivation, but the pickling was all thanks to her. Not that there was any actual difficulty in the process. Still, the fish was proud as it had been her first attempt. She already knew they had been a success as this had not been the only jar in the batch. But there was one little problem....

“Hnnnnnnnnnng~”

This was unacceptable. Had the jar developed some sort of vacuum within? She didn’t recall having had any trouble opening the other one.

“Hnnnnnnnnnnngghnnnoo.” Sigga replied to the blond, amidst another unsuccessful attempt at opening the jar. She was far too lacking in strength to neutralize the stubborn, glass vessel in its current state. Well, guess what? She could be stubborn too.

Seldom was it that the girl would decline an offer of help when it was needed. However when it came to certain tasks she took pride in, such as cooking, her mind had devised some arbitrary limit in receiving assistance. It was stupid, yes, but that’s what pride was. Her’s anyway.

She wasn’t about to give up on the jar, however. Far from it. And as tempting as it was to simply drop the pickles from a height, that solution would simply be replacing one problem with several more. Sigga turned towards the counter. The idea of heating up the lid with some warm water hadn’t occurred to her, and with Hyou remaining silent after his initial offer of assistance Sigga took it upon herself to brainstorm a fix.

The jar remained held against her swimsuit with one hand as her other drummed some lanky fingers against the lid. Eventually her amber gaze landed upon a solution. Sigga pulled open the drawer containing 1-B’s shared cutlery and withdrew from it a butter knife. Sometimes one had to literally leverage a situation.

Knife in hand, Sigga plopped herself down on the kitchen floor like a toddler. With the tip of the knife wedged between the edge of the lid and the jar itself, she gently tapped the jar and knife against the floor.

An almost inaudible hiss began to emanate from the jar of pickles. There wasn’t a satisfying pop to be heard once the pressure escaped, unfortunately. Still, with the pressure equalized it proved little effort was now required to get at the pickles. Sigga dropped the butter knife haphazardly onto the floor next to her seated form, and twisted open lid.

Like bony chopsticks covered in warm ivory flesh, her fingers pinched and pulled out a pickle. Sigga bit into the vegetable which gave off a wet and meaty CRUNCH. She didn’t even need to say anything to describe the taste. The expression on her face was of true bliss.

Having gone so long without a meal probably contributed to the pickle’s taste in it’s own way. It took a moment for her to remember Suzuki-san was still there, so her head tilted up to face him. “Want one?” the fish asked. Mouth still full of pickle, her words sounded more like an impression of a dog barking rather than a question.