Five wrinkles.
Maya's first impulse was to hit Jennifer with a Giant Rasengan, direct to the face. That would definitely clear up the wrinkle situation.
"Jennifer, think about this rationally," Maya said instead, with what she felt was impressive patience—and she was only being patient because Jennifer was her mother. "You woke up in a good mood today. Maybe that's why there's one fewer wrinkle. It happens."
Jennifer tilted her head back at a forty-five-degree angle, expression somewhere between theatrical sorrow and wounded dignity.
"Maya," she said, in the voice of someone who had been carrying a great burden, "from the moment my very first wrinkle appeared, I have applied anti-wrinkle cream every single morning without fail. I've been diligent. And despite everything—all that effort, all that dedication—time simply does not care. The river of years sweeps everything away: youth, beauty, vitality. All that remains is a body carved by seasons, and a heart that has known too much."
She paused for breath.
Before Maya could respond, Jennifer shifted registers, raised her hand in a delicate orchid-finger pose, and began reciting: "Let not time's delay steal what is yours—while beauty blooms, come, kiss me now—for autumn comes for us all—"
"Jennifer." Maya clapped both hands over her ears and dropped into a defensive crouch. "You win. Stop. I don't care that you woke me up, but James is still sleeping, and you do not want to be responsible for his nightmares."
Jennifer lowered her hands, mildly affronted. "What kind of thing is that to say? I'll have you know that after fifteen years on the fringe of Broadway, I can fill a house—"
Every time you were in a show, people came because the show was popular. Not because of you. Did appearing as an extra in someone else's film make you a box-office legend? That's not how it works. Maya kept this observation firmly inside her head. Telling someone they'd spent fifteen years as a background character in other people's plays was simply not a productive use of anyone's time.
"Jennifer," Maya interrupted, "weren't you here to ask about the fruit?"
That worked.
"Right! The fruit!" Jennifer snapped back into focus immediately. "Maya, listen to me—I check my eye corners every single day, religiously. Anti-wrinkle cream has barely made a dent. But after that green fruit last night, I am telling you—one wrinkle is gone. And if one fruit removes one wrinkle, then ten fruits removes ten wrinkles, and if I eat enough of them, I could go back to looking twenty again!"
"It's gone," Maya said flatly. "That was the only one."
"That is not possible. You can call me uncultured, but don't insult my intelligence. Fruit comes from trees. If there's one fruit, there's a tree with more fruit. What was it called? I'll go find it at the specialty market myself."
Maya opened her mouth and found she had nothing. Jennifer was harder to handle this morning than usual. Faced with matters of personal appearance, even the dumbest women developed a laser focus that no evasion tactic could defeat.
Maya's green eyes slid sideways. She coughed once.
"Jennifer, think about it—if that kind of fruit were easy to find, would last night have been your first time having any? Use that high IQ of yours."
Jennifer considered this. Her head tilted. She nodded slowly.
Maya pressed forward. "The truth is, I grew it myself. Look—that little tree." She pointed at the Mokuzan banyan sapling sitting by the window.
"Maya." Jennifer crossed her arms. "I've walked past the noodle place on Ninth Street dozens of times. The one that turned down Howard Stark's private chef offer—you remember, the really atmospheric one with all the potted trees? They have banyans just like that in the window. I took the whole family there six months ago. Don't try to fool me."
Maya had not anticipated Jennifer's memory being this good. But she also knew why it was good—Jennifer had spent months using that dinner as bragging material. The restaurant was small but expensive, quietly famous among Wall Street regulars nearby. The owner cooked entirely on instinct, no fixed menu, whatever she felt like that day. Jennifer had talked about the décor so many times she'd memorized every detail.
"Look at it carefully—it's still a sapling, not like those twisted potted ones you saw in the restaurant. And look at the leaves," Maya said calmly. "See how big they are? Each one is almost the size of your palm—several times larger than a normal banyan. Does that look like what they had in the restaurant window?"
Jennifer looked. Her eyes widened slightly. "That's... actually true. The leaves are huge."
Of course they are. Mokuzan quality, Maya thought, keeping her expression neutral.
"If you want more fruit eventually, water it regularly."
She managed to see Jennifer out. Then she exhaled, fell back onto her bed, and stared at the ceiling.
Did the fruit actually do something? Was that real?
But Mei Terumi—
She turned it over several times and still couldn't work it out. Fine. She'd table it. Whatever happened to Mei Terumi's skin was Mei Terumi's problem. If Maya kept finding these fruits on the black market she'd just buy them all for Jennifer. They were only a few hundred Influence Points each, and a single black market refresh cost a hundred anyway.
She had more important things to think about today. Maya put Jennifer and the fruit aside and turned back to yesterday's deductions.
Back to the question of the Three Body Techniques.
The Silver High-Level Experience Package had been worth its ten-thousand-point price tag. It had given Maya the complete theoretical framework for how frequency and vibration worked across all matter. And through her own experimentation, she had already succeeded in perceiving her own bodily frequency.
The problem remained: in the Naruto world, chakra resonance made it trivially easy to sense a target's frequency. In the Marvel world, there was no such shortcut. No resonance meant no sensing. No sensing meant no Transformation Technique, no Substitution Technique.
But the Clone Technique was a different case.
She hadn't drawn another Clone Technique skill card—and even if she had, it would have been useless without an experience package to go with it. A skill card could only teach the hand seal sequence; it couldn't transmit the underlying principle. Through the theoretical framework she'd already extracted, Maya had worked out the underlying principle herself—from first principles.
If this worked, she had already decided what to call it: the Hansen Three Body Techniques.
Starting with the Hansen Clone Technique.
The logic: she had already perceived her own bodily frequency. The next step was to take a portion of her chakra and shape it to simulate that same frequency.
Maya settled into stillness and turned her attention inward.
Her chakra moved through her like a slow tide—pale gold, restless and vast, pressing at its own boundaries. She reached for it, coaxed it toward a shape, willing it to echo the frequency of her own body. She almost had it. The pattern was right there, hovering at the edge of articulation—
And then it slipped.
She reached again. The shape nearly stabilized.
Beside her on the bed, without her consciously directing it, something began to form. A smear of pale gold light, rough-edged and unsteady, like a lump of clay being kneaded by invisible hands—collapsing into a human silhouette, then dissolving back into a shapeless mass, then almost resolving again.
Almost.
Almost.