Sha Danshan's Clique

Sha Danshan's Clique (の派閥), also referred to as the Sha Clique (沙派閥), is the largest clique in Tokiwadai Middle, one year prior to the main story, led by Sha Danshan.

Principles
The Sha Clique was the largest of Tokiwadai's 'big three' cliques (ahead of the Mikagami Clique and the Hasekura Clique respectively), one year before the main story, during Misaka Mikoto and Shokuhou Misaki's first year at Tokiwadai Middle. It was led by second year student Sha Danshan, said to be the closest to the title of "Majesty" at the time. Around 23% of Tokiwadai's students were members of the clique. According to Shokuhou Misaki's analysis, ignoring numbers and in terms of power, the Sha Clique was the weakest of the top three cliques.

According to Kessai Kiyoshi (a first-year member of the Hasekura Clique but actually related to Sha herself), Sha and her clique believed that the gifted had a duty to do volunteer work (such as buying and greening deserts) and its members were dedicated to service, earning them popularity and power. She also mentioned that it was suggested that their efforts might have been to thank for Tokiwadai being considered one of the top five schools, and that the secret to Sha's popularity might have been the protective desire inspired by her weakness and frailty, having a weak constitution and being nicknamed the Infirmary Empress.

However, Shokuhou Misaki believed another factor was behind the clique's size. According to her analysis, most of the clique were fairly unremarkable with unfortunate powers and/or grades - while they may have been lifted up as gifted individuals in their previous home, they were nothing special at Tokiwadai and on experiencing failure, they likely felt inferior and started to fall behind. They would then find new hope in the clique's volunteer work, which provided a mental refuge for them. Although Hokaze Junko initially saw this as a win-win making everyone happpy on hearing this assessment, Shokuhou also recognized that it wasn't volunteer work that originally brought people there, but it happened to be a good way of using the member's parents as ATMs, though she noted in annoyance that although it was abusing philanthropy, as Hokaze said it was technically a win-win-win, with Sha getting members and funding, members getting peace of mind and society receiving service.

Behind Sha's benevolent and frail facade, and unknown to members of her own clique, she engaged in secret and malicious manipulations against the rival cliques, other people and Tokiwadai itself, ultimately planning to bring down the school.

Background
The clique's full background isn't known, but it was likely formed during Sha's first year at Tokiwadai. It overtook the Mikagami Clique to become the number one clique a short time after the Mikagami Clique had overtaken the Hasekura Clique.

First Year Arc
During the summer, after the clique leaders' initial encounter with Misaka Mikoto in May, while Hasekura Reiri was away from Tokiwadai for a demonstration in Paris (with her clique hoping to get more applicants),  Sha sought to undermine her rivals (and Tokiwadai) by engineering a conflict between the Hasekura Clique and the Mikagami Clique. By secretly using her Psychometry, capable of temporarily 'printing out' results from physical objects at the cost of burning them up, and the stolen personal effects of other espers to reproduce their powers for a hidden attack, making it seem like clique members were being attacked by their rivals, starting with Enjou Kasumi and Kazan'in Tsukasa after the two had nearly come to blows earlier in the day.

In the following days, Sha talked with her subordinate Lily about the conflict while in the infirmary (with teachers having requested their intervention), keeping her clique members in the dark about what she had done while making statements about what she supposedly believed. Following these conversations, Lily took two other clique members and went after Shokuhou Misaki, their attempt to detain her for questioning ultimately being thwarted by Hokaze Junko. At some point prior to or during this incident (in which Shokuhou was separated from her bag for a time),  Sha obtained one of Shokuhou's remotes. The three girls apologized to Sha afterwards, when she had just reproduced the image of a dinosaur for some researchers from a fossil, and Sha reassured them but expressed supposed irritation at them acting without telling her.

The state of tension and conflict would continue until Hasekura returned from Paris and began her own investigation. Finding enough to make a truce and suspecting a third party (though given that the events were harming Tokiwadai's reputation, she believed the top clique would not want that),  after a period of no apparent action from the mastermind, Hasekura made it appear as though she was getting help from Shokuhou as well as Mikoto, in order to provoke action, with members of Sha's clique believing the ruse. In response, Sha enacted a scapegoat plan in the form of Antikythera (and Montgolfier who worked for them), who were researching esper powers in order to break through a road block in their development of the Attachment Dark Matter and had received data from her, using the remote to reproduce Mental Out and manipulate Antikythera higher-up W. G. Waitley.

A few days after Hasekura had enacted her plan, Sha approached her and shortly afterwards, Montgolfier agents carried out an ambush. After it was thwarted, Sha read out the apparent residual information left on the spear left behind, providing hints that put Hasekura on the trail of Montgolfier. In the subsequent meeting between the three clique leaders when Hasekura voiced her intentions to raid the culprit company, Sha advocated the cliques joining forces, ultimately having her oblivious clique act as reinforcements. Meanwhile, while supposedly resting in the infirmary, she acted to dispose of her pawns in Antikythera after they were discovered and on the run, and destroy evidence of her involvement with them. She met up with Kessai Kiyoshi afterwards, deciding to change her plans and wait for the third years to graduate before moving forward.

Named s

 * Sha Danshan (Leader)
 * Ouyang Qian
 * Lin Lihua
 * Wu Lili

Trivia

 * Similar to the other two cliques in the 'big three', all members of the Sha Clique seen so far as of have dark-colored hair, depicted with black in the monochrome sections of the manga, like with their leader (black in her case).
 * All three of the known abilities among the clique's members, as of the release of Chapter 143, involve in some way; the manipulation of birds and plants, as well as the capacity for temporarily reproducing organisms from samples.