Era

46

"I thought you said it was only going to be a couple of people."

"Apparently I lied."

Era scowled at Hitoshi, shoving him in the shoulder when he didn't even look up from his phone. The by now familiar sight of gym Upsilon was more crowded than she had ever seen, with classmates milling about on the track or sitting down to chat with their backs pressed against the walls. In all honesty it wasn't that many people—there were only twenty kids in their class after all, and there were certainly a couple missing—but it was enough that Era couldn't keep them all in view at the same time, and that made her nervous.

When she'd agreed to teach her classmates lockpicking, she expected Midoriya and Uraraka, maybe Kaminari and Ashido as well since they'd expressed interest. Instead, as they let the door fall closed behind them, Era felt at least fifteen pairs of eyes focus on her.

"This was a mistake," she muttered beneath her breath. Hitoshi chuckled, deftly splitting off to the side as everyone seemed to descend on her at once.

"Era! Thanks for doing this, I really appreciate it, I mean it could be a really useful skill you know?" Midoriya dragged Uraraka and Todoroki of all people along behind him. Era tried not to let herself glare at him, but his cool, disinterested gaze was making it difficult.

"Yeah, well, my pleasure I guess," Era lied. Already she could tell this was going to be a nightmare—she wasn't a great teacher at the best of times. If she taught at all it was by example, which was less intuitive with lockpicks than with slamming someone into the ground over and over again. "Uh, let's all... sit over here, I guess?"

As the group gathered in a circle on one of the training mats, she was struck again by how many of them there were. She'd only brought the picks she had, plus a few suitable practice locks that she'd managed to scrape up from around her apartment. It seemed the entire class had shown up except Satou, Aoyama, Bakugou, and Iida... there was something concerning in that last absence, but she couldn't quite pin it. She hadn't expected Todoroki, certainly, and the hulking form of Shoji was also a surprise...Is that Yaoyorozu? Well, she guessed that made some amount of sense, she would be able to make her own picks and... wait, actually this was perfect.

"Hey, Yaoyorozu? How much do you know about locks?"

The girl looked up from where she sat a little ways across, brow furrowing in thought. "I'm... not sure, why?"

Era pulled out one of her old, partially rusted padlocks, something she'd salvaged from the roof of her building long ago. "Do you think you could make more of these?"

Yaoyorozu hesitated, and Era handed her the lock when she held out her hand for it. "Probably. I mean, the chemical composition isn't too complicated, but I'm not completely solid on the internal mechanism."

Era nodded, taking the lock back. "If I took it apart and showed you, do you think you could do it?"

She blinked, seemingly taken aback. "Oh, if you... yes, I think I could do that. You know how?"

"It's a lot easier to take things apart than put them together." Era settled down, legs crisscrossed beneath her, and began laying out all of her various tools on a wrinkled piece of cloth. Basic lockpicks, of course, weren't difficult to come across, but she had a few other sets of rakes and tension tools in her collection, along with some more aggressive modes of attack like drills and hammers.

"Dude, do you have all of that on you all the time?" asked Kaminari, scooting closer.

"Not all of it, but I usually keep the basics on me." This lock wasn't too complicated, but hopefully the mechanism wasn't too rusted over for Yaoyorozu to get a good look at it. She glanced up for a moment to find that everyone was just... staring at her. Am I supposed to be talking? Is the lesson starting now? She cleared her throat awkwardly, trying to narrate as she worked. "Okay, so, I'm going to pick it open first so I can start taking apart the core. Uh, this is a pretty simple padlock, you can tell it's just a basic design, four pins, no security pins... I could probably just rake this honestly."