Synopsis
Mayuri Shiina is Rintarou Okabe's childhood friend and neighbor, a part-time waitress at the maid café MayQueen+Nyan², and the second member to join the Future Gadget Laboratory. She loves anything cute, sews cosplay outfits for herself and her friends, and is close with Luka Urushibara and Rumiho Akiha.
Mayuri comes across as childlike and a little scattered, something Okabe attributes to her simply always having been a bit different. In practice she is unusually observant, picking up on things the rest of the lab misses entirely, such as being the first to realize who Suzuha's father actually is while everyone else is absorbed in gadget-building.
That sensitivity traces back to her childhood: with both parents often working, she was raised mostly by her grandmother, and when her grandmother died when Mayuri was eleven, she fell into a deep, month-long depression. It was to keep her from slipping away entirely that Okabe invented his mad-scientist alter ego, a moment that has bound the two of them together ever since.
