The Emperor's Dragon

Unintended Connections

Hey First, have you heard?

The message was somewhat tame for Mei and while Izuku hadn't noticed it when it first came in on his phone, he was surprised that it wasn't accompanied by at least a few more. Mei did not believe in compressing everything into one message even though sometimes, it would make more sense!

She'd sent the message about an hour ago so she'd probably be awake to answer. Mei ... well, he hadn't figured out if Mei got up early to take advantage of the light and sales opportunities for her babies, or if she liked working late. She seemed to do both.

She had told him that she kept regular hours. Very regular hours and only stayed up in the fever of creation. He didn't know how much he trusted her on that.

Maybe? Izuku sent back. She hadn't been specific about what he'd heard.

About All Might. The message came back close to instantly.

He thought about it for a moment before shaking his head in a gesture Mei wouldn't see but assured him she could add a baby to his phone which would read it and translate it into text for him. He hadn't taken her up on that offer even if it sounded very interesting. No. I haven't heard anything about All Might lately. Nothing beyond the news which said the hero was still going strong.

His dad had softly laughed at that and had reminded him that All Might was injured, just that the media couldn't say it and probably didn't know.

There's a court case pending!

That wasn't that answer he'd been expecting from Mei. He'd been expecting to hear that All Might had tried out some new support gear, or made a change to his costume to include something that was obviously support gear. Given her interests...

How do you know?

It was more the type of thing he'd expect Inasa to tell him, or Hitoshi. His purple haired friend knew he liked hearing about difficulties heroes experienced. Or even Ochaco, if the case was about a building or something similar. Or Tomura or even his dad. They usually paid far more attention to that sort of thing than Mei.

It's not actually a case yet. It's going through pre-trial mediation.

My cousin told my mum about it.

Izuku looked at the reply. He didn't know much about Mei's mum and even less about her cousin and it would probably be too much like hard work to try to get more details out of her. That sort of thing... she wasn't exactly uninterested in it but to Mei family was family and that didn't change. Your cousin was always going to be your cousin, whether or not you knew them, or even spoke to them. And those immutable details, especially about relationships, just didn't interest her.

Now business relationships, those did interest her because as Mei had told him, they were a choice.

Won't it just stop at mediation? Izuku sent back. He was aware that there were sometimes cases against heroes. His dad made sure he was well aware of that, but he was also aware that many of them never made it to trial. Lots of cases, against heroes and just normal cases, never made it to trial. The courts had various checks and balances to try to resolve cases before they went before a judge and mediation was one of them. Those mediators must have been good because they did prevent a load of cases going to court. Statutory crimes also were pretty quick to go through the system, where the Police or Heroes had enough evidence. Although his Dad had pointed out that such a system was not compassionate. It simply looked at events, without taking consideration of circumstances, though he also admitted that circumstances could not erase the events. It was about balance.