Junpei thinks that if a teacher doesn't want him to skip school he should instead make a concentrated effort to make school less hellish. Instead of what this teacher does, which is ignore any and all bullying going on because it's inconvenient and awkward.

He forces an awkward smile anyway.

"Oh. Hi. Uh, yeah, something. Came up."

"So did you not hear? Sayama, Nishimura, and Honda are dead," he says. "You were friends with them, weren't you? They spent a lot of time with you when you had no other friends, right?"

Junpei stares at his dumbass teacher. He was not friends with them. He was the opposite of friends with them. He hated them, they hated him, he is kind of okay with how they're dead and is cozying up with their (terrifying) murderer even if he has some trauma about how they died gruesomely. How his teacher could somehow think that his bullies were friends with him is just... beyond him.

"I was in the theater with them. At the time," he says. "So. No. I didn't just hear."

"Oh? But you didn't even attend their funerals. Honestly what's up with you? You should go light some incense for them. I'll even go with you."

"Thanks," he says, almost brightly, "but I think that I would—" really rather jump off a bridge instead! dies in his throat as he spots something.

Uh. Uh. Is that a curse? That's totally a curse. Headed right for him! Uh! Uh! What does he do!! What does he do!!! Actually Mahito did teach him something about how to use sorcery, a little, Junpei was very insistent about learning literal magic, but, like, what! How does that translate to, like, fighting a thing??? Does he run? He should probably run! But wait, it'd probably go after his teacher, which. ... He's also okay with but not okay okay with, it's the kind of thing that if it were really actually not his fault he wouldn't mind, but being directly responsible by inaction sounds. Worse, somehow. And he does technically know how to maybe defend himself! Maybe? Maybe that means he has a responsibility to? But that's so scary though, and it's for this guy, and he might literally die doing it!

While he has this internal debate, he is standing completely still, like a deer in the headlights.

    The curse is tiny and flying right at the mundane teacher, who looks somewhat concerned by Junpei suddenly freezing like that? "What's gotten into you? Self-isolation making you a bit crazy? Hahahah just kidding."

"STOOOOOOP!" yells a—boy? about Junpei's age?—in English as he leaps from kami know where and grabs the curse out of the air just as it almost lands on the teacher's head. Except of course now he has too much momentum and even as he spins a bit in the air to try to regain balance he ends up landing facefirst onto the light pole. "...ow."

What is going on.

Who is this strange loud person who so easily jumped out of nowhere to grab a curse like that?? Why was there a person hiding in the bushes or something to grab a curse? This didn’t happen to him before. Why is it happening now??

“Um.” He stares, blankly, at the boy. He looks at the curse. He looks at the boy, again. “Are you… okay?” The implication is physically, but he is wondering a bit if this strange curse grabbing boy is okay in the head, too.

His teacher looks equally nonplussed—more, even, since he couldn't see the curse. The boy is holding onto it (it's small, about the size of a teddy bear) with one hand and clutching his forehead with the other, making pained noises as a reply.

    "What the.... You a gymnast or something?" the teacher asks.

That seems to shake the boy out of it better than Yoshino's inquiry after his well-being, and he quickly hops to his feet and sprints up to Yoshino. "Hi! I wanna talk to you!" he says, with his most winning smile.

    "Hey! Don't you see we were just talking? That's rude!"

Strange loud person makes strange choices that Junpei does not understand. Like wanting to talk to him! Who would do that, he's not very good conversation. The terrifying stitched curse man Mahito will lie to him about liking talking to him, but Junpei is pretty sure he just likes watching Junpei squirm while trying desperately to acquire magic. Which is not, actually, the same thing.

"Uh. Why," he says, still incredibly confused. That would be 'why do you want to talk to me' instead of 'why is interrupting two people having an unpleasant and one-sided conversation rude.' He knows the answer to that second one, and it is because social graces are liquid insanity that society is eternally drunk on.

"It's, you know, about the thing. I'm sure you know the thing I mean."

    "Excuse me? Young man?"

Now he turns to look at the teacher. "Hello," he says cheerfully, which kinda discombobulates the teacher for a couple of seconds before he manages to rally:

    "What could you possibly have that's so important? You're children! And what uniform is that, anyway? Shouldn't you be in school, whatever your—"

Before he can finish that sentence, Itadori decides that the best way he'll find of talking to Yoshino will be getting rid of this clown here so he summarily (and with superhuman speed) pulls the teacher's trousers down. Then some further superhuman displays of strength and athleticism are enough to pull them clean through past the teacher's shoes, despite his protests and attempts to push the boy off, and Sotomura is on his bottom watching the strange boy run into the sunset (sunrise? sun... middle?) with his trousers.

    "What are you doing?!" he calls once he's recovered enough presence of mind to say things, and enough presence of mind to say things is enough presence of mind to get back on his feet and go chasing the weird crazy kid.

...Okay, that is admittedly pretty funny. And if there was a better way to get rid of that guy, Junpei definitely didn't know it at all, so. Good solution?? He guesses??? If very strange??? This person is very strange.

But he does elicit a bit of a snort from Junpei, as he watches his terrible, terrible teacher chase after the weird crazy kid who stole his pants. What is going on. Why is this happening.

The amount of time it takes for Itadori to show back up, coming from the opposite direction—and still holding onto the curse, though Sotomura-sensei's trousers are nowhere in sight—is even more superhuman than all displays shown so far.

"Okay! Now that that's taken care of," he says, slowing down to a regular walk before stopping at a reasonable distance away from Yoshino. He lifts a hand and grins again. "Itadori Tōkan, at your service."

"Uh. Hi. Yoshino Junpei. How did you...? But you're human, he could see you, how did you do that??"

"No idea! —well, the direct answer is I ran, but the answer to the indirect question of how the heck I can run that fast, probably something related to the plot, still unexplained to the viewpoint characters. Maybe the audience knows. All I know is that I have anime levels of physical—everything—since always."

"I can't tell if you're joking or serious."

"I guess I don't know for sure that we're in an anime, it could be a manga or maybe even a movie! Although if it's a movie it's, like, actually several movies, there's been too many plot-relevant events already to fit in just one movie.

"...the part where I have super-everything and don't know why and no one I've met knows or has told me why either is just straightforwardly true, though."

"Okay but if people just kind of have super-everything for no reason then why is the world like this! Why isn't there, um, someone with super strength and super speed spinning a very big generator to power Tokyo, why don't the Olympics have, have." He waves a hand towards Itadori. "That!"

"See, that's what makes me think this is an anime! Anime logic doesn't explain those things, they kinda just happen. And I always figured, you know, if I went to the government with super-everything then it would turn out the anime was about, I don't know, a dystopic setting where people with superpowers exist but are kept prisoner by the government as slaves or something, and that anime would suck. ...this one kinda sucks too, I guess, to be in, I don't know if I like it better than that."

"But narrative tropes are things that we've made up, not things that actually affect reality—" uh, no, Junpei, you know curses exist and are really made by what people think are scary, try again, "—Actually no I guess they do, considering, but the scale and planning of plotting media in real life is so exponentially beyond the scope of things being made real because people think they are! Entire complicated anime plots just because the general public watches a lot of anime, that's, like, at the very least people watch different anime, how do the chosen protagonists sort themselves, who gets picked to be a protagonist, and if this is a thing about reality then why haven't we noticed it before, making up stories isn't new, humans have been doing it for millenia!"

Blink blink. "I like you. Also we should go somewhere else, your teacher is bound to succeed at retrieving his pants from the tree and come back here be overbearing and insensitive at you."

"What? Oh. Yeah. Yeah he's always like that and I have no idea how to make him stop so avoiding him is best."

Itadori shrugs. "Some people just are like that. Let's go, then," he says, and starts walking in some direction he probably didn't pick at random.

He trails after Itadori, desperately trying to figure out if reality is or is not hacked by media tropes, and where they would have historically shown up if in fact they were. World War II is very explicable, in an anime? Except history's often not quite that tidy, is it, and humans definitely like making much more simple and straightforward stories. Is magic trailing along behind what people are doing and nudging them along to do things that make tidy narratives?? How would that even work, what would that look like, what examples might show up in ways he could verify...?

He finds somewhere by a river and sits on the grass there. "You know, one possibility is that the universe started existing only a few weeks ago," Itadori muses, "when a mysterious boy with anime hair and eyes coincidentally showed up at—" Uhhhh he did not think this sentence through in advance and now he's remembering his grandfather's dead. He skips a beat, then continues, mostly-successfully hiding the waver in his voice. "Showed up where I was, with a convenient plot-relevant explanation for some stuff that had happened—that I remembered having happened—I guess that's pretty self-serving, I don't really know that the anime is about me, maybe I'm just a backstory character, maybe you're the protagonist actually and the universe started existing whenever you first discovered curses," and he's paying attention here, depending on Yoshino's reaction to that word... well, that could imply someone already met him and taught him things, right? "So this could be episode one or two and all my memories are fake."

"..... That would be the worst though!!!!"