Chapter Text
David Shield had several smaller offices at various locations around I-Island. Usually, they were attached to other labs and research spaces that housed joint projects with different groups and firms. But as this one was both near where he lived and directly above his own personal laboratories, he had chosen it to be his main office.
The room was dominated by large, floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a sweeping panoramic view of I-Island. At the moment, they showed the neon nightscape of I-Island’s cities, and the sweeping black glass of the ocean beyond. The darkness was just beginning to peel back, and the early morning sun was little more than a watercolor splash of purple and red on the horizon.
From the inside, the spectacular view made the office seem exposed, but Toshinori knew the privacy glass was one-way, and tough enough that even bullets or heavy impacts would struggle to break through.
The few parts of the office that were not giant windows had been paneled in dark, polished hardwood. Strips and squares of chocolate-brown wood framed all of the walls and windows, and the entire back wall of the office was paneled in dark, cozy wood as well. The wooden wall housed the elevator door, as well as a small modern fireplace, a modestly stocked bar, and several wooden bookshelves. A number of minimalist tables and chairs, also made out of dark wood and glass, were scattered around the office. A large central wooden desk, with a deceptively small and simple laptop sitting on it, completed the picture.
The overall effect was a hybrid of the primary executive stereotypes. The Shield office was neither an ultramodern glass box nor a dark wooden smoking lounge, but a comfortable middle ground between the two.
David Shield walked over to the bar and poured himself a cup of coffee. He offered one to Toshinori, who accepted to be polite. The scientist then sat down in one of the smaller chairs next to a table, his own coffee held in both hands.
Toshinori appreciated the casual gesture, preferring this to speaking to David from across a desk, and sat down across from his friend. He took a sip of his own coffee, collecting his thoughts. It was pretty good, for something that had come out of an instant coffee machine.
“David. I have something important to tell you, while it’s still my secret to tell.”
The auburn-haired man blinked before straightening slightly. Living and working on I-Island, he was used to dealing with important and potentially dangerous secrets.
“I understand. I’m listening.”
Toshinori nodded. No sense beating around the bush.
“There’s no easy way to say this, so I’ll just rip the bandage off. I was born quirkless. I have no quirk of my own, and never did. Not really.”
David Shield stared at his long-time friend, dumbfounded. From the moment he had realized that Toshinori intended to clue him in on the truth behind whatever was going on, David had been anticipating many different potential secrets from his hero partner. His guesses had run the gamut from the ridiculous, to the dangerous, to the outright scandalous.
But this… this was not one of them.
All Might, the most powerful hero in the world… quirkless? He had seen the man throw punches so strong that the backdraft changed the weather. Toshinori could make it rain by clapping his hands, using the shockwave to shake precipitation out of the clouds. He could cause tornadoes by swinging his arms in circles. The sheer physical force All Might was capable of was staggering. No gadgets or support gear ever devised could account for the ability to do that, not even close.
The skeletal blonde didn’t give his old friend a chance to stutter out questions. He pushed on, trying to get the whole story out in one go.
“When I was a teenager, things in Japan were bad. Really bad. I was sick of hiding in my apartment and pretending that I didn’t hear the screams and the gunshots at night, hoping it wouldn’t be me they came for next. You know that part of my story. What you don’t know is that I was quirkless, and I had decided to be a vigilante to try and do something about what was happening. My reasoning was that, because I didn’t have a quirk to misuse, I couldn’t be convicted of vigilantism or villainy.”
Toshinori took another sip of his coffee. David numbly followed suit.
“I got myself noticed by a mid-ranking pro hero named Shimura Nana,” Toshinori said with a fond smile. “Her official name was Updraft: The Skyward Hero. She took me under her wing and talked me into pursuing a legitimate career in heroics instead of running around at night in a hoodie and a medical mask trying to jump drug dealers. And after mentoring me for a few years and straightening me out into a respectable member of society, she also revealed her biggest secret to me. She was the heir of a legacy quirk that could be passed down directly from one person to another. Like handing off an Olympic torch from one runner to the next. It’s name was One For All. She had received it from someone who mentored her, and she wanted me to take up the torch next. I agreed. She handed the quirk off to me, and I transferred into UA. I graduated top of my class and went pro immediately afterwards. That was the beginning of the pro hero All Might.”
David Shield was a scientist first, and it showed as he processed the new information he was being told at lightning speed. Toshinori could practically watch as the man built a list of questions he wanted to ask, threw half the list out as being irrelevant or things he could answer on his own, and then picked the most important questions to ask first.
“Tell me more about this quirk, if you can,” the scientist said, leaning forwards. “A transferable quirk? What mechanism?”
“DNA transfer,” Toshinori replied. “Nana gave me one of her hairs to swallow, and that’s the cleanest and safest way we could think of to manage it. A blood transfusion could also work, if there was a hospital or medical facility we were willing to trust with the process. Our research into past users suggests that at least once it was passed down by dripping blood from a cut into another person’s open wound.”
“Can it be passed on accidentally?” David asked, a look of curiosity on his face as he sipped his coffee. “I assume not, because I recall you donating blood before in a charity drive.”
“No,” the skeletal blonde replied. “It has to be a voluntary transfer. Accidental transfers can’t really happen. Though again, some of our research suggests that one of the previous users forced it onto a bystander after suffering fatal injuries in a fight, so the voluntary part only has to be on the part of the giver, not the receiver.”
David hummed softly while fiddling with a button on his coat. The humming was a nervous tic that Toshinori had seen the scientist fall back on before when his thoughts were moving faster than his mouth or hands could process them. After spending the last month getting to know young Izuku better, Toshinori had come to realize that the boy was much like his old friend in that regard. He hoped bringing the two together would be good for both of them. These days, natural born geniuses who didn’t rely on an intelligence quirk were few and far between.
“A transferable quirk,” David muttered to himself, a far-away look in his eyes. “A quirk that can be passed on. One which does not actually require the consent of the other party, just the will of the wielder.” His gaze sharpened. “You know what that sounds like, right? The Symbol of Evil. All For One.”
Toshinori considered his old friend for a moment, a thoughtful expression on his face. Coming clean to David was an odd experience, because the man actually already had most of the true story, he just didn’t have the context to puzzle all the pieces together.
That was not an accident, at least not on Toshinori’s part.
People who had the truth of transferable quirks revealed to them had an unfortunate tendency to meet with terrible fates. Toshinori felt it said quite a lot that it took generations of users and intensive research in hindsight to realize that One For All had been slowly killing almost half of everyone it had been given to previously, purely because they all died too soon for the long-term effects to be seen.
“I’m not surprised you would make that connection,” the blonde hero commented. “After all, One For All and All For One are brother quirks, of a sort.”
David Shield’s eyes widened in shock. “They’re brother quirks? What?”
“Our information about it is sketchy,” Toshinori confessed, “and what little we do have has mostly been passed down by word-of-mouth between the different successors. But One For All was originally created accidentally by All For One.”
David Shield’s eyes widened in surprise and he leaned forwards, his coffee sitting forgotten on the table. “Fascinating. You called them brother quirks, but that it was of a sort, which means not literally. One For All was created by accident? How did that happen?”
The skeletal blonde gathered his thoughts for a moment before answering.
“All For One had a younger brother, Yoichi, that was born sickly and weak, and was presumed to be quirkless. However, he was not. In actuality, Yoichi had a quirk whose sole ability was that it could be passed on when the owner wills it. It didn’t do anything else. It was just an invisible, transferable token that could be handed off. All For One took a simple stockpiling quirk and forced it onto his sibling, believing that it would make him strong enough to live a mostly normal life.”
Toshinori sipped his coffee. “However, the stockpiling quirk fused together with the transference quirk, creating a single quirk with the properties of both. That was the outcome All For One hadn’t foreseen.”
David exhaled a long, slow breath as he connected the dots. “A strength stockpile that can be continuously improved over multiple generations, without ever experiencing the stockpile loss you would get from a parent-child relationship. A lossless stock that never gets reset or needs to be rebuilt from scratch. Handed off directly from one hero to the next. And the nature of the transfer makes sense as well, siblings often have similar quirks. All For One could give and take quirks at will, so it’s not surprising that his brother would have the ability to simply give his quirk away.” Suddenly, David snorted. “One For All and All For One? Somebody was a fan of the Musketeers.”
Toshinori shrugged, nonplussed. “I didn’t name them.”
David nodded, still clearly deep in thought. “That’s fair. It’s an old quirk. It would be presumptuous to change the name now. Though I’m sure you put something else down on your own paperwork.” He looked up suddenly, realizing something. “You were always so keen on trying to face him alone. And what you told Cathy, about how he couldn’t become stronger by stealing your powers… Does this transfer mechanism prevent All For One from taking it?”
Toshinori smiled, impressed at his friend’s deductive abilities. “Yes. The story I was told is that after Yoichi was given the stockpile against his will, he fought back and attacked his brother. All For One tried to take the quirk back to subdue his sibling, but realized he couldn’t. He’s been chasing after it ever since, hunting down everyone that carried it. One For All is his white whale. As far as we’re aware, it’s the only quirk in the world he can’t take.”
David frowned in thought. “I wonder if that’s because of the transfer mechanism specifically interfering, needing it’s owner’s permission, or if it’s because they are brother effects, and Yoichi’s quirk was born immune to his sibling’s power. It’s known that most people with hypnosis or mind-affecting abilities cannot affect their own immediate family, because the quirks tend to grant immunity to themselves. I wonder if them being brother quirks is what caused this, or if it’s because the transference already has an established mechanism for moving between people.”
Toshinori shrugged. “I wish I could tell you, but I honestly don’t know. We aren’t even sure how reliable the information we do have is, because most of it was passed down in a hurry by word of mouth.”
David nodded his head absently. “Of course, of course. And it’s not like there’s any way to test it. Sorry, I’m just thinking out-loud. It’s an interesting conundrum.”
The two men sat in comfortable silence for a few moments. Toshinori sipped on his coffee cup before turning to glance out of the floor-length windows behind David’s desk. The neon lights from the city outside and the burning horizon of the sea painted a beautiful picture as the night gave way to dawn.
“I’m sorry for keeping this from you,” Toshinori said suddenly.
David scoffed, waving his hand dismissively. “You don’t have to apologize to me, Toshi. The existence of the Symbol of Evil and his quirk were kept secret for good reason. We’ve only just managed to put ourselves back together again after the Dawn turned us into a superhuman society. If the world became aware of a quirk that could give and take quirks, it would destabilize civilization and undermine the peace we’ve worked so hard to achieve. Obviously, the same is true of an incredibly powerful quirk that can simply be handed off to a person to give them world-class strength. Wars have been fought over less valuable things.”
David turned to face his old friend, a smile on his face. “You kept me in the dark because you were trying to keep me, and the rest of the world, safe. I understand that, Toshi. Keeping people safe is what heroes do.”
Toshinori huffed. “You’re putting me to shame here, David. You could at least pretend to be indignant.”
They both laughed, and the companionable silence surrounded them both again.
“Were there any other questions you wanted to ask?” Toshinori said softly.
“Quite a few,” David admitted, “but I don’t think most of them are relevant. I can probably get the answers myself if I do some digging. The rest I can infer from other information. The only thing that’s really bothering me is why now? You kept this secret for 40 years. You did a damn good job of it, too. I-Island has it’s own intelligence gathering division, we’re always looking at powerful and unique quirks, and this was never even on our radar. Wars could be fought over this quirk, the fewer people who know the better. Why rope me in now when…”
He slowly trailed off, his eyes widening as the final puzzle piece fell into place.
“The boy,” he breathed. “Izuku. He’s your successor, isn’t he? You’ve chosen him. That’s why you said ‘while it was still your secret to tell.’ Because soon, it won’t be your secret anymore. It will be his.”
Toshinori smiled fondly. “And this is why I had to work so hard to keep you in the dark. If you got even a little hint, you’d have all the rest of it figured out in no time. Yes. Young Izuku is who I’ve chosen to succeed me.”
“You said you brought him here to introduce him. To make connections. I had thought you were angling to get him on a scholarship at the academy, or build the connections he would need for a job in analytics and support heroics. But that wasn’t it, was it?”
The skeletal blonde sat his coffee down and clasped his hands together. “As I’ve been constantly reminded by Gran and even Sir Nighteye, I don’t have much time left in me, David. Pretty soon, I won’t be able to maintain my muscular form long enough to go through a trip here without blowing my cover. I want to help him in any way that I can, and that means this trip had to happen sooner rather than later. I want to give him more opportunities to make friends and allies than I had.”
Toshinori coughed slightly into his hand, a small amount of blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth.
“Also, I’m pretty sure Gran is trying to set Izuku up with young Melissa.”
David stared at him for a moment before closing his eyes and laughing. It was infectious, and soon Toshinori was laughing as well, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief.
“That does seem like something he would do,” David finally said, calming down.
“I didn’t really support the idea at first, but Torino lectured me about how old men have an obligation to manipulate young men into having happy lives. Apparently friendships and romances with childhood friends don’t happen naturally, or so I’ve been told.”
“He’s not wrong,” David said, grinning. “Our faculty at I-Academy have a massive betting pool on student relationships. If the teaching staff couldn’t push students around into friendships and romances, they’d probably all die of boredom.”
“I guess I just never realized this was something people were doing. It surprised me.”
David shrugged. “It’s mostly a teacher thing, honestly. And a parent thing.”
“I don’t want to force either of them into something they don’t want or aren’t ready for,” Toshinori admitted. “But they are more alike than different. They’re both brilliant, both of them are quirkless. Both of them have been discriminated against because of their quirklessness, far worse than I ever was. Both of them have risen above that. Both of them want to help everyone that they can, even people who have wronged them. Those two are probably going to save the world one day. I’d like them to be friends, if nothing else.”
David hummed. “I agree with not forcing anything, but then, putting kids on playdates with each other and arranging for them to have time to hang out is it’s own kind of pushing, isn’t it? From a certain perspective. Either way, I’d agree that they are similar.”
The scientist leaned back in his chair. “I’ve been worried about Melissa not being challenged intellectually. I don’t want her to become arrogant, complacent, or bored. I’ve seen the analysis samples that young man has done. He’s a certifiable genius. Anybody who didn’t know he was quirkless would assume he had an intelligence boosting or information gathering ability of some sort. I think the two of them are a good fit, even if they just stay friends. They’ve been hitting it off incredibly well so far. They’re practically clinging to each other. It’s rather cute.”
Toshinori started to say something but stopped, a suspicious look on his face.
“Wait, how do you know how they’ve been doing?”
David shot him a nonplussed look over the rim of his coffee mug. “Toshinori, please. The only places on this entire island where there are no cameras and microphones are the bathrooms and people’s offices.”
The scientist pulled out his phone and tapped through a few menus before flipping it around to show Toshinori a live image. It was the two teens, watching footage of villain attacks and hero rescues together from underneath a giant blanket in the Shield’s high-end apartment. The image was sharp enough that Toshinori could even see the carryout they were eating for breakfast.
“One of the benefits of being a project lead on I-Island is that I can be a helicopter dad while still giving my daughter space,” David admitted somewhat smugly.
“Have you been watching them this entire time?” Toshinori asked incredulously. He had noticed his friend checking his phone frequently, ever since they first met up off the plane. But he had assumed it was something business related.
“Not the entire time,” the auburn haired scientist said defensively. “I mean, I’ve been talking to you, haven’t I?”
“David!” Toshinori groaned at his friend’s antics. “Torino is bad enough, not you too!”
“Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it, Toshi,” David said teasingly. “If I wasn’t spying on them, I wouldn’t have caught them accidentally holding hands a few times. Or the expressions on their faces when they realized it and jumped apart. Not only is this prime blackmail material for later, but she’ll probably want these pictures when she’s older.”
“You can’t blackmail children, David!”
David chuckled. “Oh man, those kids at UA are going to eat you alive. Blackmail and threats are the two best weapons in a teacher’s arsenal. Bribes can also work, but even having to resort to bribery means your blackmail wasn’t good enough.”
The taller blonde coughed again, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a handkerchief to remove the drips of blood. “I know it won’t be easy,” he said, “but I’m going to do my best to learn. For young Izuku’s sake.”
David smiled softly at his old friend. “You really admire him, don’t you?”
“I see a lot of other people in him,” Toshinori admitted quietly. “He has Nana’s smile. He has your mind. He’s lived Melissa’s life. When I met him for the first time, he pleaded with me, wanting to know if a quirkless kid could become a hero. I saw so much of my younger self that it hurt to look at him. And when I saw him run out and attack a villain to save a childhood bully when all the pros were just standing around and making excuses, I saw Torino and Sir Nighteye in him. That instinct, to move first and think only about your goal.”
“What answer did you give him?” David asked curiously. “When he asked if somebody quirkless could be a hero?”
Toshinori closed his eyes and sighed, feeling the weight of his long career on his shoulders.
“I gave him the answer I wished somebody had given me, when I was his age. It was the wrong answer.”
David nodded slowly. “You tried to discourage him. Talk him out of it. I can see why you might have thought that was the kinder thing to do, all things considered.” He grinned suddenly. “But it didn’t work, did it?”
Toshinori smiled with genuine warmth and affection. “No, it didn’t. And that’s why he’s worthy. One For All isn’t meant for people with strong or flashy quirks, or people with big dreams and ambitions. It should go to the person with the heart of a true hero. Someone with a natural born instinct to save others. Who won’t be swayed or talked down from doing the right thing, no matter what.”
“Not even if the person telling them off is the greatest hero in the world?” the scientist asked curiously.
“Especially then,” Toshinori said firmly.
David nodded approvingly. “I agree. People with great skill are a dime a dozen. Skills can be taught. Weak people can be built up. Someone that’s missing an arm or a leg can have a prosthetic made for them. But people with heart, those are rare. That is something that’s much harder to teach, and even more difficult to replace. We can’t build great hearts.”
There was a moment of companionable silence as Toshinori sipped his coffee, and David seemed to remember that his existed.
“How’s Elenore doing?” Toshinori asked, breaking the silence.
“Nora is… she’s stable,” the scientist said, a look of pain and frustration flickering across his face.
“But no changes?” Toshinori asked, sadness in his voice.
David shook his head. “Progress has stalled. It’s the same as always. There’s not enough funds, not enough time. Not enough interest.”
“I don’t understand,” the skeletal blonde said, confusion in his voice. “The last time we spoke, you said you’d had a breakthrough. You’ve actually managed to reverse engineer part of her quirk. You can’t replicate the healing, but you’ve succeeded in creating artificial quirked ice. How is no one interested in that?”
Toshinori felt it was a fair question, and his confusion was genuine. A major part of the research on I-Island was pursuing ways to replicate the effects of quirks without having to rely on the quirks themselves. Quirk-replicating technology was the driving force behind the cutting edge science of the modern age, and was one of the reasons so many different fields had begun to advance at such radically different rates. There were far more failures than successes, far, far more. But there were successes.
David Shield had originally put himself on the map as a quirk scientist by replicating and weaponizing the quirk he had mentioned to Izuku on their first night here. David had installed the bubble projector as a countermeasure and capture weapon in his own personal car, and an iteration of that system had also been present in every single version of All Might’s car, the Mightmobile, to date. It could stop missiles, contain explosions, intercept falling debris, and even capture villains, provided they weren’t excessively large.
David had never isolated the Healing Aurora effect of Rimefire. Which was no surprise: no one had ever isolated and replicated a healing quirk. Whoever managed it first would be richer than King Midas. But David had replicated his wife’s ice, the effect from her father’s side of the family.
Toshinori didn’t understand. His friend’s research had borne fruit, albeit indirectly. How was quirked ice on demand not a valuable asset?
The auburn-haired scientist sitting across from him shrugged helplessly, a humorless laugh escaping his mouth. “It’s not something the investors here are interested in, Toshi. We’re an island of scientists and engineers, but we are ruled by businesses and corporate politics. It’s not marketable, or so they say, so there’s no grant money to be given for it.”
Toshinori shook his head, still in disbelief. “But you’ve made an artificial ice quirk,” he protested. “Ice grenades, ice rays. You could throw an ice bomb and stop a villain in their tracks! I’ve seen your blueprints. Any police force in the world would kill for gear like that, David! And they’re telling you there’s no market for it?”
The scientist shook his head, a resigned look on his face. “Nobody cares about arming the police better, Toshinori. You know that. Some police departments may want it, but it’s the police . They don’t have the budgets to afford that kind of gear, and even if they did, the focus is all on hero equipment. Why spend a fortune making the police more effective at their jobs when 95% of the takedowns are made by heroes anyway?”
The auburn haired man leaned back, cupping his coffee in both hands for warmth. “Replicated quirk effects are always weaker than the originals. You know that. It’s why the most successful replications typically rely on reproducing abilities where their strength isn’t directly related to how useful the quirk is. What made Nora’s ice so great was the healing effect and the versatility. But it’s not her quirk, it’s a knock-off made by reverse-engineering the principles her quirk exploited to function. So it is weaker than her own. It has the potency of an ice quirk from two, maybe three generations ago. Any ice user today could outperform my tech easily. The only saving grace would be the Healing Aurora trait, but that is, of course, unreplicatable.”
Toshinori couldn’t believe it. “So that’s it, then? A decade of research and grant money poured into ice and healing quirks, a fully functional ice creation and manipulation system, and you’re mothballed because there’s no market? They won’t even throw you money over a proof-of-concept?”
“That’s I-Island for you,” the auburn-haired man said, shrugging. “There are people working here who are far more brilliant than I am that have been sent packing by the various boards of directors because the things they make don’t have anybody willing to buy them. We create miracles and achieve scientific breakthroughs all the time, but it’s not up to us to decide what is useful.”
The scientist chuckled softly, a bitter note in his voice. “If it makes you feel any better, there’s no market for artificial fire quirks either, for the same reason. The Big Mountain R&D tank is an American group based out of Nevada. They do high-end hero support tech for a lot of American pros, and also have contracts with the American military. They have a major branch office here, and their researchers recently had quite a reckoning with their investors over something called Project Saturnite.”
The scientist shifted in his seat and took a sip of his coffee, a far-away look in his eyes. “It was decades worth of research and data studying people with fire quirks, with the singular goal of creating a customizable flame creation and manipulation system. Replicated fire quirks, on-demand. They were dumping a lot of time and effort into heat retentive polymers and thermally conductive metal alloys. Customized support equipment for customized fire quirks. It sounds great on paper, but the investors weren’t impressed with the progress they had made. The specs of the artificial fire effects they were creating were generations behind modern fire users, just like mine.”
David swirled his coffee before taking another sip. “I wasn’t there for the last fiscal quarter investment meeting they had. Part of their money comes from the American Department of Defense, you see, so it was all very private. But I hear it turned into a massacre. The whole project line has been scrapped, and now the Big MT is struggling to find something they can use the tech for to recoup their losses. Last I heard, they’re looking into trying to turn their special polymer metals into home appliances and kitchen knives.”
If Toshinori hadn’t known David Shield for so many years, he would have thought the other man was joking. Fire quirks were widely seen as some of the flashiest and most heroic quirks that existed. Even a relatively weak fire quirk could carry a competent hero high up into a nation’s pro rankings. There was a reason Todoroki “Endeavor” Enji was Japan’s number 2. As far as Toshinori was aware, only the man’s prickly personality, and Toshinori’s own existence as the global Symbol of Peace, stopped Endeavor from becoming Japan’s top pro.
If Toshinori took his mail and paid taxes somewhere else, Endeavor probably would be Japan’s number 1, his personality be-damned. Enji had what many considered to be the strongest fire quirk in his entire generation. Some would argue that it was still the mightiest fire quirk in the world, even after all these years.
If a journalist or interviewer had asked the blonde hero whether he thought artificial fire quirks would be useful, Toshinori would have said that the support tech who figured out how to make the first one would be a billionaire.
Instead, the technology was being relegated to kitchen appliances? Somebody on I-Island had made artificial fire quirks a reality, and they were going to have to make toasters and chef knives out of it just to make ends meet?
Something was very, very wrong here.
Toshinori had always known that a great deal of the glamor and flair of the Age of Heroes was fake. That it was show business, of a sort. A way to polish up a fundamentally broken world that still didn’t quite understand how to put itself back together again now that quirks were an unavoidable daily reality.
Toshinori knew that most of it was just a pretty veneer. It was true about the hero industry, and by extension it would have to be true of I-Island as well. He had known that since his own childhood, he had known it since he was first called useless for not having a quirk of his own. Yagi Toshinori held no delusions about how the world really worked.
At least, that’s what he had thought when he got up this morning.
When had things gotten this bad? Or had they always been this way, and he simply wasn’t standing in any of the right places to see this particular facet of it?
Toshinori didn’t know. But he didn’t have to know, because the next words came out of his mouth without him even needing to think about them.
“If that’s the way things are, then leave, David. Come with me to Japan.”
David Shield blinked in surprise at the offer. Toshinori was surprised, too, but even as he spoke the words, he knew that he meant them. So the skeletal blonde pushed ahead, refusing to back down from his own outburst.
“You only came to this place because of the offer they made you. But it’s not a binding contract. I remember having my lawyers look it over before you accepted. You can leave at any time. If their corporate attitudes are stopping you from getting the funding you need to make progress with Elenore, then leave.”
The auburn haired scientist wasn’t interrupting him, so Toshinori kept going, his resolve becoming more sure with each word he spoke.
“I have more money than I’ll ever be able to spend even if I live a thousand lifetimes. We can set up a facility, a place to keep Nora. Half of Might Tower is already practically yours anyway, I doubt it would take very long to knock down a few walls and convert some of the dead space into a lab. I’m planning on moving into a soft retirement at UA as a heroics teacher. You could help there, or at any of the other national hero schools, I’m sure they’d all be thrilled to have you. It doesn’t have to be charity, David. It’s not pity. If they aren’t helping you pursue your own goals, then what’s the point of even being here?”
David Shield stared at Toshinori for a long, quiet moment. Toshinori swallowed, his hands clenched tightly.
This wasn’t the first time he had offered to help his old friend, but every time, David Shield had turned him down. Toshinori understood what the man was going through, he truly did, but he just wished-
“Two years,” David said.
Toshinori blinked. “What?”
The scientist sighed. “In two years, Melissa will graduate I-Academy’s primary education program. Say what you will about the boards in charge of I-Island’s R&D, but I-Academy is a world class institution. Their support courses and STEM tracks have an immaculate reputation. Melissa wants to graduate from there, and she also has friends I don’t want to separate her from. So give me two years.”
Toshinori couldn’t believe it.
Had David actually accepted his offer?
Thrilled glee intertwined with something sour and anxious in Toshinori’s stomach. He was happy that his friend was finally listening to him, but…
The entire reason David had turned him down over and over again was because he was fighting to take back the piece of his soul that he lost on the floor of that California hospital, years ago. He had something to prove to himself.
How bad had things gotten that his friend was finally listening to him? What didn’t Toshinori know?
“David… what’s wrong? Has something happened?”
“Nothing you need to worry about, Toshi,” the auburn scientist replied, sipping at the dregs of his coffee.
The reply had come a little too quickly for Toshinori’s tastes, and was also far too vague to not be suspicious.
“David.”
The shorter, younger man glanced up from his cup. His eyes looked as tired as Toshinori felt.
“It’s not important,” he insisted. “I had some side projects I was working on. There are some conflicts of interest, some issues with securing a patent. Given the nature of the projects, I’m not really surprised. I expected it to happen, actually.”
Toshinori frowned. He understood the idiom of the straw that broke the camel’s back, of a thousand little things adding up to a major break. But somehow, something about this didn’t seem quite right. Sure, there was the obvious lie. If it wasn’t that important, then why would David be upset by it? But that wasn’t what was bothering Toshinori.
It was a patent conflict that was the final straw? Really? Why would ‘the’ David Shield be denied a patent for something? And what could that something be, for it to mean so much to him that it would change his mind about letting other people help him?
A conflict of interest? Over what?
“… do you need my help?” Toshinori asked, not entirely able to keep the hesitation out of his voice.
It was an unspoken question, between old friends who knew each other very well. ‘What is this really about? Can you tell me? Do you need All Might to intervene?’
There was the faintest moment of hesitation from the scientist. “No,” he said. “I have things under control. Don’t worry about it.”
Toshinori accepted the refusal to elaborate, trusting his friend. He sipped at the lukewarm cup of coffee in his hands and relaxed, occasionally chatting and exchanging gossip about the superhero industry.
On the open laptop sitting on David Shield’s desk, a 3-D model of a sophisticated headset was being compiled into an executable blueprint that could be uploaded into a materials printer. It was a small hexagonal plate designed to nestle against the base of the skull. Six long, pronged arms with jointed hinges stretched from each of the six edges of the plate, clearly intended to wrap around to the front of the skull and secure the device. Each metal prong ended in a tiny, highly refined crystal tip, no bigger than a fingernail.
The arms were long enough that they would be visible unless the user had a partial facial covering of some sort around the back and sides of their head. But they were not so long that a full helmet or faceplate would be necessary, either.
Next to the slowly spinning blueprint was a staggeringly complex chemical formula for the co*cktail substance the crystal tips were produced from.
The blueprint was tagged with the abbreviated name Q.A.D. The Quirk Augmentation Device.
Sorahiko Torino was waiting for both men on the landing outside of David’s office. He was wearing jeans paired with a different Hawaiian shirt from yesterday, this one banana yellow with a pattern of green and red. He also sported the same air-hole modified cowboy boots he usually favored when out of his normal costume.
The elderly man sipped from a styrofoam cup of orange juice, his breakfast for that morning. “Took you two long enough. Come on Toshi, we’ve got things to do today.”
“Sorry Gran,” the towering blonde apologized, having bulked back up to his heroic form before leaving the office. “I didn’t realize you were out here waiting for us. Did we have something important on the docket?”
The shorter, retired pro tilted his free hand back and forth, and made an ‘eh’ sound. “Midoriya Hisashi has agreed to a sit-down with us, but I haven’t heard back from him regarding a time. The real issue is something on my end, though. Either today or tomorrow, we’re probably going to have to run some damage control. I’ll take full responsibility for it if things go too far. I just want us to be ready when it happens.”
David Shield quirked an eyebrow. “What’s the trouble?” the scientist asked.
“It’s not a huge deal,” the elderly pro confessed, taking a sip of his juice. “But I asked the kid to let Melissa in on a secret of his that we’ve been keeping. I think it will help both of them in the long run. Don’t worry about it.”
“Ah,” David said. “You want him to tell her about One For All.”
Torino was halfway through a yes before he choked on his juice. He coughed violently and thumped himself on the chest, doing his best to point the spray back into his styrofoam cup and not launch it across the extremely expensive wooden wall paneling.
David took out his phone and wiggled it slightly, not entirely able to suppress the grin on his face. “Don’t worry, all the cameras on this floor belong to me. We’re good.”
Torino glared balefully at the scientist over the rim of his drink, before turning his gaze on Toshinori. The towering musclebound hero paled, and a bead of sweat rolled down his forehead.
“Explain,” the elderly man said. It wasn’t a request.
Toshinori held up both of his hands disarmingly. “I mean- it’s what I was talking about with David this morning. That’s all. I wanted to tell him while it was still my secret, and not young Izuku’s. I decided last night that I wanted at least one more person I could trust who could help look after things if something happened to me. And it can’t be Cathy, for obvious reasons.”
The sun wasn’t even fully up over the horizon of the Pacific, some of the stars were still faintly visible in the sky. And Torino was already getting a headache. Fantastic.
First Cathy deciding to get creative with her quirk, now Toshinori believing that honesty and openness is the best policy. What was wrong with his former students? Had they all decided to finally start changing their ways thirty years too late to make any sort of difference, but just in time to be a massive pain in his ass?
Torino sat his cup down on a nearby magazine table in the lobby before wiping down the front of his shirt with some napkins he had in his pockets. Chalk up another victory for polyester threading. “Fine,” the old man admitted, accepting and getting over the issue. “Yes, David. I told the kid to talk to Melissa about- you’re sure you own all the cameras on this floor?”
“Absolutely,” the scientist affirmed. “I turned them off earlier this morning, before Toshi even arrived. Just in case.”
“Can I ask why he’s telling young Melissa?” Toshinori questioned. “I’m not sure I see the point. Isn’t it more dangerous the more people know?”
“He’s telling her because it will be a disaster if he doesn’t,” the old man grumped in reply, wandering over to a gilded brass trash can that looked more valuable than his entire apartment before tossing the napkins into it. “I don’t want there to be any resentment between the two of them, and this will be a point of contention, I’m sure of it.”
David blinked in confusion. “Resentment? Whatever for? I don’t resent Toshinori for keeping this from me, I understand why he did it. It makes perfect sense.”
The old man stared at the two younger, taller men incredulously. He sighed, before rubbing a hand over his face. “I think the worst part about this is that the two of you couldn’t be more different, but you’re still somehow exactly the same in the worst way that matters,” he muttered.
Toshinori opened his mouth to object, but Torino cut him off with a glare. “Can it, you monkey! Just- give me a second, so I can try to think of a way to explain this. And you! You’re sure nobody is going to walk in on us?”
David tapped his phone a few times. “I just locked the elevator. This whole floor is now private.”
Torino nodded before sighing deeply.
“Listen. I worked at UA for ten years as a Heroics instructor. And I worked for ten years before that with Nana, helping kids in the community as a counselor and youth advisor. So I have twenty years worth of experience dealing with teenagers. And right now, we have two quirkless teens who both wanted to be heroes more than anything else. It’s the most important thing in their lives, or at least it feels that way to them. And we have one, just one, transferable quirk. Which means no matter how this plays out, somebody is going to feel like they’ve been passed over in favor of somebody else. This is going to hurt someone. It can’t not.”
The elderly pro turned to point at David. “And of course you don’t resent Toshi! You never wanted to be a hero! You wanted to research quirks from the start! But that was never really Melissa’s dream, was it? Maybe if she had never cared, it wouldn’t matter, but she did, so it does!”
He lowered his hand. “Also, you’re a grown adult. Never mind that I’ve known plenty of grown adults who aren’t half as mature as they should be, your perspective is different because you’re older. You’ve been through successes and failures before. Maybe it makes sense to you why Toshi lied, but to a teenager, the why doesn’t matter. They will see this as a bigger deal than you do.”
As the elderly pro talked, Toshinori’s face had gotten paler, while David’s lips pressed into a thin line, worry on his face. It was Toshinori who spoke first.
“I never- I don’t favor young Izuku over Melissa!”
“But they won’t see it that way,” David whispered, a lost look in his eyes. “Neither of them will. This won’t just hurt one of them, it will hurt both of them. They’re both too kind-hearted for it not to.”
“Then he shouldn’t tell her!” Toshinori insisted. “Doesn’t it make sense to keep it a secret then, if it’s that hurtful to admit? They should wait until they’re older!”
Torino shook his head. “That’s not going to work.”
“But how do you know that?” Toshinori insisted. “I went my whole career without hardly telling anyone! I only told Sir Nighteye because I needed his help to look for a successor, even he didn’t know about it until then. And he was my sidekick!”
The elderly pro held up two fingers. “I can give you two good reasons for why waiting isn’t going to make this better. The first is because I’ve seen this happen before. I’m not going to share the details with you, but the short story is that Nana and I both knew a married hero couple. The wife had a very important, work related secret she had to keep, she had to pretend to be married to someone else to get info on a yakuza family. Instead of being honest and working with her husband on it, she hid it. When it eventually came out, it destroyed their marriage and effectively ended both of their careers. This was a long time ago, before Nana even met you. But it was quite the scandal in it’s day. I’ve seen first-hand the kind of damage keeping important secrets can do to heroes.”
The old man turned his eyes to the musclebound blonde. “You’ve never had to deal with this because you’ve been a solo act for more-or-less your whole life. But I promise you, this is something other heroes have to come to terms with. Nana and I never kept anything from each other, and that’s why we worked so well as a team. There’s only one secret she had from me, and I know what it was.”
“What was the one thing she never told you?” David asked, curiosity on his face.
“She sent her family into hiding to keep them safe from All For One. She never told me where, or what arrangements she made to do it, and I never asked. I didn’t want to know. If they had caught me, they could have made me talk whether I wanted to or not. There are some nasty quirks out there. It’s the one thing she never shared. And I don’t regret that.”
Toshinori frowned. “I’m sorry, but all this sounds like is more evidence for why it would be the right idea for him to keep it a secret. I didn’t have any issues with not telling anyone about One For All, so-”
The retired hero narrowed his eyes before lowering one of his fingers, leaving the other standing alone. “And the second reason waiting isn’t going to work, Toshi , is because Melissa is going to figure out what’s happened sooner or later. I can almost guarantee you she will. She’s too smart not to.”
The blonde hero blinked in shock. “But… why would you think that would be the case? Doesn’t that seem like a stretch?”
“That’s a fair question,” David supplied, supporting Toshinori. “I’ll be the first to admit, Melissa is smarter than me. I’ve known that for a long time. But I never even came close to guessing that Toshinori had a transferable quirk. Neither did anyone else, at least as far as I know. That’s a pretty tremendous leap, don’t you think? It’s not exactly a logical extrapolation.”
Torino sighed and rubbed his face again. He loved both of these men, he really did, but today it felt like he was the asshole in an idiot sandwich.
At least Cathy wasn’t here to make this worse. She’d likely go flying off through a window to tell both the kids everything. Loudly. In the middle of a crowded street.
Also, David was wrong. Someone had figured it out. But seeing how it was Nezu , Torino didn’t see the point in bringing it up or correcting him. Melissa wasn’t like Nezu. Nobody was.
“The reason,” he said, carefully enunciating each word. “That nobody ever found All Might’s power to be suspicious. Is because absolutely nobody knew who Shimura Nana even was. Updraft was the strongest pro hero in Japan. She may have been the strongest hero in the world. But you would never have known it, because unlike you, she didn’t advertise what she could do. Even today, forty years later, I’m pretty sure the only Japanese pro she would lose to is you , Toshi. She could take everybody else in a fight. But she never even broke the top 250 in Japan. She was a sleeper heavyweight. The general public, and even the HPSC, never knew just how strong she was. You literally have a complete collection of all of her merch in your work office at Might Tower, and it’s what? One glass cabinet? Not even a full one, either.”
The old man leaned back on his cowboy heels and sighed. “Nana never cared about the rat race. She wasn’t in it for the fame, or the glory. You chased both because you had a vision of being a living symbol of peace, and I think you did a good job of it. I’m not criticizing you. But that was never something Nana cared about. She enfranchised herself enough to keep the lights on and pay the bills, but never more than that.”
He pointed a gnarled finger at the taller blonde. “And that’s exactly the reason your own glory-seeking worked out so well. Nobody ever connected you to her, because quite frankly, nobody knew jack squat about her. But guess what? You’re the most famous hero in the world . Anybody who opens a dictionary to the word ‘superhero’ sees a picture of your face! There are millions of fans all over the world who know exactly what you’re capable of, who have been following your every move for decades. We’ve been training one of them on a beach for the last month!”
Torino stuck his hands in his pockets. “Assuming the kid will have as easy a time as you did is a mistake, because he was born into a world with you in it. Let’s say, for the sake of the argument, that the quirk works for the kid. He’s able to use it, to an extent. Okay. So now we have a mini-Might running around. The comparisons between the two of you are inevitable. Do you understand that the very first rumor people will come up with is that he’s your bastard kid?”
The hulking blonde coughed violently in shock, a spray of blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. “What? But that-!”
“Honestly, I’m surprised nobody ever suspected that you were Nana’s brat, given your strength,” Torino said, interrupting his former student. “As popular as you were, I know there must have been digging into your past. Maybe she was even more obscure than I thought.”
“What exactly were her powers?” David asked, curiosity in his voice. “I’ve heard Toshinori mention a Nana before, but I only knew her as an obscure mentor from his days as an orphan. I wasn’t even sure if she was a hero or not.”
“She started out with a quirk called Float, that let her levitate vertically with no height limit,” Torino explained. “Once she was given One For All by the guy who had it before her, she gained super speed, super strength, and extreme physical durability. Her own quirk also evolved, and lost a lot of previous limitations. Float became a form of free movement in 3-D space, and she could fly at extremely high speeds, even to the point of breaking the sound barrier. She was also faster than me in a dead heat line.”
The old man frowned slightly. “She never let me live that down, either.”
David put a hand on his chin, while in the background Toshinori used some of Gran’s napkins to wipe up his own blood. “So she was a weaker All Might that could fly? Is that about right?”
Torino shrugged. “In essence, yes, but I feel like ‘weaker’ is pretty relative here. I’d bet on her in an arm wrestling contest with any hero alive today that wasn’t Toshi. She might have even been able to take Cathy, I’m not sure. It would be close.”
David took his own glasses off before rubbing the bridge of his nose. “If that’s the case, then yes. I would unfortunately have to agree. Super speed and super strength are common quirks. Having both is less common, but still not unusual. Having speed, strength, and durability would certainly make anyone a shoe-in for pro herodom, but again, it’s not- it’s not too unusual.”
He sighed. “But having them to the extreme degree that One For All seems to grant is fairly unique. It would be hard to deny a connection. I would have to concur with Torino, Toshi. The only reason no one ever suspected Nana was your mother or aunt is because no one knew who she was or what she was capable of. With your fame, however…”
“And that’s why Melissa is going to guess the truth,” Torino said, lifting his ‘one more thing’ finger before wagging it at the two men. “She’s been around you too much, Toshi. She’s your niece. She knows what One For All looks like. And she also knows there’s no Mrs. Might in the picture, either. So she won’t buy whatever drivel the yellow pages cook up.”
“And… I’ll be losing my strength, once I transfer the quirk to young Izuku,” All Might said resignedly. “I hadn’t fully considered the implications before, but if both of us are in the public eye, and he’s visibly getting stronger while I’m getting weaker… you’re right. Someone might notice. Someone who knows both of us, like Melissa, could easily make a connection.”
David’s head snapped over to stare at Toshinori in shock. “Wait, you’re going to lose your strength? Are you serious?”
The tall blonde nodded, and David’s face grew a shade paler.
“Toshinori, you- your quirk may be the only thing keeping you alive right now. If you lose that, even if the change is gradual… it could kill you.”
All Might shrugged. “It was bound to happen eventually. Nobody lives forever, David. I’m at peace with it.”
The scientist’s hands shook slightly before he clenched them into fists, composing himself.
“My fear,” Torino admitted, leaning back against the wall. “Is that Melissa will figure this out on her own. And if she does that, then it really will feel like a betrayal. She’ll resent Izuku for not telling her, for not thinking she was trustworthy enough to know. She’ll resent us. She’ll resent the fact that her uncle passed her over and chose some random kid off the street. Not only will it ruin whatever professional or working relationship she has with Izuku, but it could easily become the sort of thing that haunts her until the day she dies. Forever wondering why her own family didn’t think she was good enough.”
The old man’s lips twisted into a sad, wry grin. “I think they both have enough baggage as it is. They don’t need us adding more.”
“For the record, I don’t agree with this,” David said, having somewhat recomposed himself from Toshinori’s earlier revelation. “While I also believe Melissa and Izuku have issues they need to work through, I have faith in both of them. They are both very intelligent and kindhearted, and I don’t think either of them would hold a grudge over this. There are thousands of quirkless teens around the world. Any one of them could, within reason, be said to ‘deserve’ One For All. But there is only one quirk to be given out. There will be thousands of proverbial ‘losers,’ and only one ‘winner.’ That is simply the nature of the problem. I think both of them are smart enough to understand that, and not take it personally.”
“But Gran is right,” Toshinori said, having finally finished dabbing up the last of the blood from his coughing fit. “I agree that young Izuku and Melissa are mature enough to handle working through this on their own, but there’s also no reason not to tell them both everything. Especially since I’ve now told you, David. It would be hypocritical to insist otherwise.”
“We owe them both an explanation,” Torino stated, drumming his fingers against his knobby wooden cane. “The kid still doesn’t know about All For One. That monster is dead, but he still deserves to hear the full story before accepting a quirk that man created. It would be wrong to foist this thing off on him without giving him his fully informed right to turn it down. I don’t think he will, but it would be wrong to keep that from him.”
“Well, whatever we choose to do, we have some time to work with,” David confessed, taking his glasses off and fiddling with them.
“Have you done something, old friend?” Toshinori asked, curiosity on his face.
The scientist took a slow breath. He still wasn’t over being told that Toshinori might very well drop dead sometime in the next few years. “Until about an hour ago, I had assumed you were angling to get the young man into support or rescue heroics, since I seriously doubt a quirkless would stand a chance working as a frontline combatant. I didn’t realize he would be getting a quirk. So, since you showed me your injury and allowed me to examine it like I asked, I figured I would fulfill my end of our bargain. I asked around, and showed off some of the samples you sent to me. You did say I could show his work to other people.”
“That’s not a bad thing, though,” Torino muttered.
“I don’t think so,” David replied. “Even though my assumption was wrong, it gives us some time.”
Toshinori tilted his head quizzically. “Who wanted to meet with young Izuku? Is it anyone I know?”
“The first one, perhaps by reputation,” the scientist replied, turning his glasses over in his hand. “The second one I highly doubt. Peter Simensen, the current principal of I-Academy, wants to meet the young man. An associate of mine from Prague, Dr. Asher Gallas, also wants to speak to both Izuku and Melissa.”
“Both of them?” Torino grunted.
“He will be teaching here next year,” David clarified. “My daughter already has something of a reputation, and given some of the things I said, I imagine Dr. Gallas is hoping Izuku will be joining her.”
“I doubt that seriously,” Torino scoffed. “The kid seems more likely to sneak into UA and live in a janitor’s closet than settle for another school.”
The scientist chuckled. “Maybe. By the way, there’s a bit of an issue with this plan of yours. I’m not sure you’ve really thought it all the way through.”
“Oh?” the elderly pro asked, leaning on his cane. “And what issue is that?”
“What are you going to do if the young man says no?” David asked, gesturing at the older man with his folded glasses. “All of this is working off of the assumption that he does what you told him to. But he and my daughter seem quite attached already. He may well decide he doesn’t want to risk their friendship. What then?”
“Then that’s fine. I’ll accept that.”
David Shield quirked an eyebrow, while All Might blinked in surprise.
“Really?” The scientist asked. “Just like that?”
Gran Torino nodded. “Yeah. Just like that.”
There was a moment of silence. It was Toshinori who broke it.
“But… why?”
Torino gazed at his former pupil for a moment, and the musclebound blonde shuffled uncomfortably. Torino huffed.
“Because, he’s quirkless. They both are. The biggest thing holding them back right now is themselves. You both should know that, maybe even better than I do. You were quirkless once, and she’s your daughter. Their confidence issues are crippling them. Half the reason I wanted to bring them together was because I was hoping they could open each other’s eyes to how talented they really are.”
The retired pro shifted his stance, his feet spread wide and both hands resting on top of his walking cane. In that pose, it looked less like an assist tool and more like a sword planted into the ground. “Back in the old days, half the heroics assignments we gave to students at UA were fishing for pushback anyway. Trying to get them to assert themselves, but in the right way. Over matters of principle. If the kid’s grown a big enough pair to tell me to get stuffed? That’s great! I’d love for that to happen.”
“But- what about your plan?” Toshinori asked.
Torino rolled his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Eh, plans changed. They’re teenagers. I always assume none of this will work out. You should too, if you really want to make a go at teaching at UA next year.”
Toshinori burst out laughing before shooting his old mentor one of his world-famous thumbs up. David Shield also smiled slightly before slipping his glasses back on.
“And as I said, I’ll take full responsibility for this anyway if it goes south,” the old man affirmed. “I don’t mind being the bad guy here, I’ve played heel before. If this blows up, the both of you just blame me for everything, and I’ll act the part.”
The three men nodded, and David Shield rescinded the lockdown on his phone.
“Besides,” Torino pointed out as the elevator dinged, indicating a carriage was on the way. “Half the reason we were so secretive about everything was to keep All For One away. Now that he’s dead, what’s the harm in having a bit of a circle of trust?”
The three men stepped through the doors into the elevator. It was extra-large, to accommodate people of all sizes, and the interior was just as fancy as the rest of the office, polished steel paired with dark wood and golden brass in an angular art-deco style. As the doors began to close, David, who had stepped through first, looked up at the back of Toshinori’s head.
‘Toshinori, you- your quirk may be the only thing keeping you alive right now. If you lose that, even if the change is gradual… it could kill you.’
‘It was bound to happen eventually. Nobody lives forever, David. I’m at peace with it.’
Slowly, unnoticed by the other two men, he clenched his fists until his palms turned white.
It was a clear, beautiful summer morning. A soft, salty sea wind was blowing. Some early-to-rise birds were quietly singing in the trees. The stars above I-Island twinkled innocently down in the twilit boundary between day and night, just like they had on that California evening so many years ago.
And far, far below, beneath miles of cables and steel plating, a woman who was neither alive nor dead was entombed in a coffin of ice and light. Beyond the reach of both stars and sun. Lost in an endless labyrinth of dreams.
Izuku was standing outside of Melissa’s laboratory, waiting for the others to arrive. After yesterday’s surprise meeting, his father had told him he would pick both Izuku and Melissa up here today. He would bring them to a secure location where they could eat lunch, and go over the information about Star and Stripe they were being granted access to.
Melissa had brought him here, but vanished in a panic a few minutes ago when she realized she didn’t have anything to write or take notes with. Which left Izuku in the hallway, alone with his nerves and the looming fear of Gran Torino’s assigned confession.
Well. Not quite alone.
“I’m still really impressed that Melissa was able to make an AI as advanced as you,” Izuku commented to the geometric eye that was visible on a screen embedded in the wall of the hallway. The screen was showing other information, timetables for different workshops and reservations various people had made for those facilities. The eye seemed to float on top of that information, like the screen was nothing more than a window and the living geometry had simply wandered into view from somewhere out of frame.
“You flatter me, Mr. Midoriya, but with the exceptions of Alpha and Beta Cores, AI are not truly impressive in the grand scheme of things,” Darby replied.
“They all seem pretty impressive to me,” Izuku confessed. He wasn’t sure if it was because the being he was speaking with wasn’t alive, or if he was more concerned by Torino’s assignment than he realized. Either way, his stutter seemed to have taken a vacation.
“Computers have always been superior to organic brains when it comes to crunching numbers or calculating out complex spreadsheets and formulas, which can create the impression that computers are far more intelligent than humans,” Darby explained.
“However, this is fundamentally an illusion. It took several centuries of advances in robotics and many trillions of cycles of learning algorithms just to teach a machine with legs to stand back up after being knocked over. A feat any human or animal infant can do with ease. And as we discussed yesterday, your mind is capable of processing emotions and emotion-based logic, which is an entire dimension beyond my capabilities. In general, the things your brain finds extremely easy to do, mine struggles to accomplish, and vice versa.”
Izuku frowned, but nodded in understanding. “The grass is always greener, I guess,” he supplied.
“Quite,” Darby replied amicably.
A nearby elevator dinged, and a familiar figure stepped out of it. Midoriya Hisashi smiled, warmth radiating from his eyes, and he held out his arms just in time to catch Izuku’s hug.
“Good morning, son,” he said, before ruffling the teen’s fluffy hair. His own had been like that, long ago, but time had tamed it down to something more wavy.
“I missed you, dad,” Izuku said, his voice muffled by his father’s suit.
Hisashi smiled, but there was a tinge of sadness to it. “I know. I’m sorry we can’t meet more often.”
Izuku tilted his head back to look at his father. “It’s okay. You’re busy. I’m not a kid anymore, I understand.”
Yes, Hisashi was busy. But whether that was an excuse or not, the elder Midoriya wasn’t so sure. This was an old problem, and not one entirely of his own making, either. Inko’s refusal to leave Japan caused issues. It was a rough situation all around.
“Tell you what, I’ll try and get some more vacation time than usual this fall,” he said. “I have a few favors I think I can cash in. We’ll spend the holidays together.”
Izuku’s face beamed like the morning sun. “Really!?”
It was an infectious joy. His son had a gift for making other people feel better. “Really. In fact, I’ll do you one better. I won’t just try: I promise I’ll do it. How about that?”
Izuku hugged his father like he never wanted to let go.
Hisashi put a hand on the back of his son’s head and rubbed it as he returned the hug.
Family was everything, to Midoriya Hisashi. It always had been, and always would be. He was a family man to the bitter end.
There was a commotion as Melissa Shield tumbled out of her lab, trying to juggle a notebook and a fistful of pens. “I’m back! I didn’t- oh no! I’m so sorry, sir! You weren’t waiting on me, were you!?”
Hisashi laughed softly, his eyes crinkling. “No, don’t worry young lady. I just got here. You haven’t missed anything.”
The businessman held up a small metal briefcase with a prominent lock on the front. “Ready to take a look at some classified documents about quirks?”
Both teens shouted their affirmative at the same time, looking equally excited.
“Well then, follow me.”
A swipe of a security card sent the elevator in Melissa’s building down, and within moments, they were stepping out into a transportation hub of some sort, with trams and subway cars peeling off through tubes to other parts of the island.
Izuku stared upwards in awe. The terminal they were in was under the lake, and the entire ceiling was seamlessly transparent. The water was clear, and the morning sun glinted off of the crests and peaks on the surface like liquid silver. Fish of varying sizes darted about, and the surrounding lakebed was vibrant with life.
Hisashi smiled and leaned over to his son. “If you think this is something, you should see the Abteilung für Heldentaten, the Department of Heroic Deeds in Germany. It’s at the bottom of a lake on the border of Switzerland, and the water there is as clear as glass. It’s like something out of a fairy tale.”
Their group bundled onto a bullet shaped cabin with seats for four. Like the terminal itself, the compartment had a clear roof, allowing an uninterrupted view of the lake from below.
“Where are we going?” Melissa asked curiously.
“To the sub-level of the World Heroes Association building,” Hisashi replied, checking his watch. “As I’m sure you’re both aware, the bulk of the island is below the surface. The Association has an office here, like most organizations do, and the majority of the building’s facilities are below the street level, not above it.”
“This is for legal reasons, isn’t it dad?” Izuku asked. “Star and Stripe’s quirk is a big secret, so we can’t just talk about it anywhere, can we?”
Hisashi smiled approvingly. “That’s right, son. The briefcase can’t even be unlocked unless it’s within range of a device that will allow it to be opened. Our unlocker is waiting for us in a conference room I booked. For security reasons, it can’t leave Association property.”
“That’s so cool,” Melissa whispered.
They smoothly accelerated faster and faster, the bottom-up world of the lakebed soaring by. They rounded a corner in the tube, and then disappeared into the side of the lakebed. There was a brief moment of darkness, where the only light came from the glowstrips on the floor, and then suddenly the light returned, showing an entirely different scene than any Izuku had seen before.
He knew, intellectually, that most of the island was ‘underground,’ so to speak. The top edge of I-Island was as tall as some mountains. And he had seen evidence of it before on his tours around the island, like the underwater windows looking out into the canals of I-Academy, betraying the presence of rooms and walkways below the cobbled streets.
But understanding that and seeing it were two entirely different things.
There was a whole world on the other side of the clear top of their tram bullet. Streets and sidewalks, buildings that reached up and disappeared into the ceiling. There were cars and bicycles, foot traffic and cleaning robots. Restaurants and food stalls stood side-by-side with office buildings and apartment complexes.
Street by street and block by block, there was a mirrored version of the surface city buried just a few stories below, lit with a blend of clever skylights and colorful neon.
Izuku couldn’t help but wonder, just how deep did it all go?
They cruised past several blocks and turned twice before smoothly transitioning through the wall of a nondescript building and gliding to a stop.
Hisashi stood up and offered the teenagers a hand, and together the group stepped through the sliding door and disembarked into what looked like an upscale subway station, full of clean white tiles and polished steel.
“Welcome to the World Heroes Association,” the businessman said. “Well, a branch office of it, anyway.”
Melissa looked like a kid in a candy store. “I’ve never been here!” she whispered exuberantly, like she was in a famous museum and not an office building. “I can’t believe we get to visit the WHA!”
“It’s not really different from most office buildings,” Hisashi said, chuckling. “A lot of filing cabinets and boring carpeted offices. Security is tighter here, but that’s about the only distinction.”
Privately, Izuku agreed with his father. This wasn’t the first time he had been in a WHA-owned facility. They were all about the same, and downright drab compared to some of the agencies and offices that belonged to heroes.
Then again, the grass was always greener, just like he and Darby had agreed on not too long ago. Was this how Izuku had looked, while Melissa gave him a tour of her everyday life?
They rode up a series of escalators into a wide, arch-roofed galleria that almost looked like the lobby of a mall, before swinging right and going through a pair of double doors.
After a number of turns and a second elevator ride, they found themselves in a large, well-lit room with a low ceiling. It was filled with tables and chairs, along with a number of upholstered booths. Various parts of the room were partitioned off into smaller areas using short walls made of glass bricks, and there was a respectable amount of greenery scattered around as accented trim.
“This is one of the cafeterias for the personnel in the building,” Hisashi explained. “They also serve as conference rooms. I booked this one for us, so we wouldn’t be disturbed.”
The mustachioed businessman ushered the teens towards a table that was somewhat sheltered from the rest of the room, nestled in a right-angle between two of the glass-brick partitioning walls. A large potted fern sat in the corner.
“I’ve arranged things so that the two of you will have your access for all of today. I know you have two other appointments, but they can both be reached from a tram line just down the hall. So you can leave and return here to this room at any time to do your work. Do you understand?”
Both teens nodded fervently, looking excited.
Two other men stepped around the corner. Both wore nondescript black suits with white undershirts. One had dark brown hair, black sunglasses, and an unremarkable face, though a faint dusting of tiny, flesh-colored scales around his eyes and upper cheeks marked him out as a mutant. He was carrying a metal case identical to Hisashi’s, the fist clenched around the handle sporting unusually thick and sharp fingernails.
The other man, by contrast, was completely bald. He had two black stripes running vertically across the top of his head and down his face, bisecting his eyes, while a third traveled horizontally from under his ears and across his cheeks, painting both of his lips black. He had a clear plastic earpiece clipped to the side of his head, and was empty-handed.
Izuku beamed at the second man.
“Mr. Ichiwaka! How have you been?”
The bald man tapped his fists together before deftly signing with his hands. “I’m fine,” he signed, pointing briefly at himself before flipping the finger back at the teen. “How have you been?”
“Mom and I are doing great!” Izuku said, beaming. Melissa looked somewhat confused.
“This is Mr. Ichiwaka!” Izuku explained. “He works at the WHA with my dad, he’s really cool.”
“I’m, ah, I’m sorry,” Melissa said apologetically, speaking a bit more slowly to the other man, and moving her mouth more deliberately. “I don’t really know any sign language.”
Ichiwaka Haruki smiled slightly, the action tugging the black stripes on his skin. “It’s fine,” he said, in a ragged, raspy voice. “Not deaf, just easier to talk with signs.”
“Ichiwaka was kind enough to play bodyguard for me today,” Hisashi said with a half-smile, before directing his attention to the first man. “Did you bring it?”
The scale-eyed mutant placed his metal case on the table and popped the latches, flipping it open. Inside was a metal device bolted to the interior. It was approximately the same size and thickness as a phone book, with a black plastic square embedded on top. The man pulled an unmarked card out of his pocket before swiping it over the black plastic.
There was an electronic tone, and a small green light on the device turned on.
“You’re cleared for this room for the rest of the day, Director” the scaled man said. “Standard rules apply. Do not take either case more than a hundred feet from this spot, or an alarm will sound. Have they signed the waivers?”
“I have them,” Hisashi said, producing a thin manilla folder. “The two of you will need to sign these. They’re standard disclosure waivers that grant you temporary consultancy clearance, at least as far as the United States is concerned.”
Both teens took a copy. Melissa began looking hers over, which caused Izuku to pause in the act of signing. Looking sheepish, he decided to read through it as well.
Hisashi smiled at his son fondly, a teasing glint in his eye.
It was surprisingly short, for a legal document about security clearance. As Izuku skimmed it, he saw that, in essence, he was free to take notes and cross-reference the information he was being given access to, but he (and Melissa) would be completely liable for any leaks or security breaches that arose as a result.
His father hadn’t been kidding about playing in the big leagues. Izuku idly wondered how many chores he would have to do to save up for a safe to keep some of his notebooks in.
With the waivers signed, the WHA employee took them both and walked away.
After he had left, Hisashi placed his own metal case on the table and grinned at the teens. “Here’s the fun part. This case is locked using a digital key that is coded both chronologically and via GPS, which is why we can’t move either case now that the authorization has been given. Only for this window of time, and only in this specific location, can the case be opened. Break either of those rules, and everything in the case goes up in smoke.”
Melissa looked absolutely enthralled as she stared at the metal briefcase. “That’s so cool ,” she whispered, her head full of half-formed dreams of being a spy and fighting crime from the shadows.
Hisashi popped the latches and opened the case, revealing a dense stack of documents and paperwork. “The American government takes their security very seriously, especially where their heroes are concerned. We aren’t too shabby in that department either.”
The mustachioed businessman smiled slightly at the two teens. “Now, I know you must be eager to get started, but there are some appointments you both need to consider first.”
Melissa frowned. “We have two people we need to visit today, right? Will it be safe, leaving these documents here?”
“Absolutely,” Hisashi said. “Every building on the island is monitored, our own most of all. I booked the room, which means this cafeteria is being actively guarded, and the Department of Homeland Heroics from America also has their own people here.”
The businessman smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry, I knew the two of you might be in and out, that’s why I went to the trouble of booking the whole day. It’s more convenient.”
“I’m surprised they’d let you get away with that, dad,” Izuku said.
Hisashi looked fondly down at his son and ruffled the teen’s hair. “I’d love to tell you all about how persuasive I can be, but honestly this was mostly Star and Stripe’s doing. As America’s No. 1, there’s a lot she can get away with, especially if she asks ahead of time. Which today she did. They’re her files, and she asked that you be given all-access. It’s quite the opportunity for both of you.”
Melissa was starting to vibrate again, and Izuku was also beginning to look excited.
Hisashi grinned before checking his watch. “Let’s get one of those meetings out of the way, and then we can all sit down and have a nice lunch while looking things over. Sound like a plan?”
“Definitely!” “Let’s do it!”
The grey-eyed man laughed. “Come on then. Let’s not keep I-Academy’s principal waiting.”
The office the teens found themselves in was a large, half-circular room, on the upper floors of a dome shaped building.
The far wall was dominated by a single giant pane of curved glass, which offered a stunning elevated view of the water surrounding Metro Delta and the adjacent countryside. A tall glass er glittered like a crystal in the middle of the lake, surrounded on four sides by smaller spires. Beyond that, rolling hills could be seen dotted with forested suburbs and larger individual buildings, blurring away to the lip of the distant island rim several miles out.
And in front of that curved glass window was a large, modern metal desk, which currently housed a man wearing a lab coat who was looking at the two teens with relaxed curiosity.
They were back again at I-Academy. Hisashi had been true to his word; a small transit line just a few doors down from the cafeteria had taken them almost directly to the basem*nt of this building, and from there it was just a short elevator ride to here. The elder Midoriya had opted to stay on the ground floor, letting them attend the meeting alone.
The man seated behind the desk looked tall, even while sitting down. He had a thin frame with wide shoulders, and his face was clean shaven, with high, sharp cheekbones that gave him a cultured, almost aristocratic appearance.
But what was most striking was the contrast between his hair and the color of his skin. He had pale, golden-blonde hair, so fine that it seemed almost white in places. It was shaved high on both sides and pulled back into a loose bun, and his eyes were a piercing, icy blue.
But even though his face and features looked typically Northern European, his skin was a deep, walnut brown.
He leaned back casually in his chair, surveying both teens, before reaching over and setting down the long, carved pipe he had been holding in his hand. It fit neatly into a small stand on his desk, next to a heavily marked calendar and other office effects.
Melissa curtsied slightly. “Principal.”
The dark-skinned blonde tilted his head in acknowledgement, even as Izuku suddenly looked panicked over whether or not he should bow. “Ms. Shield. Mr. Midoriya. I’m glad you could both meet with me today. I’m led to believe you have an ongoing business survey with Ms. Cathleen Bates regarding quirks, so I’m pleased you could both find the time to stop by.”
“O-Of course!” Izuku stuttered. “Mr., um. Mr. Principal, sir.”
The dark man’s lips twitched slightly in amusem*nt. “I apologize for my poor manners, young man. I have you at a disadvantage. My name is Peter Simensen, the current principal of I-Academy. I am also the Dean of Medicine, and I sit on one of the island’s board of directors as the representative of the school.”
Izuku frowned slightly in confusion, blinking. “You have me at a disadvantage? S-Sir?”
“Yes, I do,” the man replied, his voice deep and even. “Although we have never met, I know of you, because I have met your father before. He has always spoken quite highly of you.” The blonde doctor reached under his desk, and brandished a terribly familiar bundle of documents that Izuku recognized as his Torino-provoked analysis of All Might. “Though I must confess, I never imagined I would be examining one of your creations in person. This is hardly the work of an amateur. I don’t believe your father’s words did you justice.”
Izuku turned red to the roots of his hair. “Izuku!” Melissa hissed under her breath. “How many people is your papa friends with!?”
Izuku stuttered out a strangled “I don’t know!,” and Peter Simensen laughed softly.
“Calling us friends is a bit of a stretch. Your father knows a surprising number of people, I think. His job has him serve as a middle-man and liaison for many different functions. I dare say he doesn’t get anywhere near as much credit as he deserves, considering his chosen career.”
Simensen smirked slightly at that last comment, like he was enjoying some private joke. Melissa looked at Izuku to try and infer some context, but the other teen looked just as confused.
“I have your transcripts, Mr. Midoriya, as well as your grades and official records up until this point,” Peter Simensen explained. “At least what has been committed to the system.”
“You- you have my grades?” Izuku stuttered out. “How? I haven’t even technically graduated yet!”
The doctor's lips twitched, as though he was hiding a smile. “Mr. Midoriya, this is I-Academy. What we want, we get. And part of what I wanted to do today was offer you a place at our school. I understand you have your eyes on the Hero Track, with a possible fallback as a Support student? We have a number of programs that would cater directly to your needs.”
The man put Izuku’s analysis back down on his desk. “I cannot ensure placement, of course. We are a strictly meritocratic institution. But I can guarantee you a seat on the entrance exams, if you wish. I believe you would pass, given what I have seen.”
Izuku blinked rapidly, unprepared and unsure of how to respond.
“Um, I… I’m sorry, s-sir, but. But that’s a bit much, and I had- I had really been focused on trying to get into UA. I’m sorry!”
Simensen nodded, not showing the slightest bit of shock or offense. “I had thought so. Given your mailing address in Musutafu Japan, I imagine you and all of your peers would be rather set on UA. But I did wish to make the offer anyway. And having done that-”
He reached into an inside pocket in his lab coat, and pulled out a thin, bone-white business card, which also had a folded note paperclipped to it.
“-I can now get to the real reason I wanted to speak with you today, which was to give you my contact information.”
Izuku took the card with disbelief, doing his best to not let his hands shake. “I, ah. T-Thank you? But, um. But why?”
Peter Simensen quirked a pale eyebrow at the stuttering teenager. “From my understanding, your mentors brought you to I-Island to make connections in the hero industry, did they not? Well, here it is, young man. This is ‘the industry,’ or so they say.”
“But. But you’re the principal of I-Academy.”
“Indeed,” the educator said stoically. “And having read some of your work, I believe it is worth my contact information, at the very least.”
Simensen half-turned in his chair, and gestured at the panoramic view beyond his window. “I-Island is built on its network of connections, young man, and not all of the people we rely upon live here with us. Many strange and unique problems cross our collective desks, and without our numerous friends and associates to help us, it is doubtful we would ever get anything done at all. So I hope you will accept my information in the same spirit in which I offer it; that of scientific and academic cooperation. I assure you, we always take care of our friends. You will receive competitive pay for anything that gets sent your way.”
Izuku slowly nodded, his face still marred by disbelief, before he put the business card and note in his pocket.
“Good,” Simensen said. “I’m glad you understand. Now, did you have any other questions I could answer?”
The green haired teen did, in fact, have one. Izuku just wouldn’t be Izuku if he didn’t.
“What is your quirk?” the teen blurted out, before suddenly backpedaling. “If- if you don’t mind my asking! Sorry!”
Simensen’s lips twitched again in that suppressed smile. “Given what I know of you from your father, I probably shouldn’t be surprised.”
He leaned back slightly in his chair, and folded long, dark fingers together. “In the animal kingdom, there are a number of creatures which possess a poisonous or venomous nature that is not truly their own. Certain sea slugs exist that prey upon jellyfish, their bodies storing the neurotoxins of their prey and repurposing them for the slug’s own use. There are also species of tropical tree frog guilty of the same act: they are deadly poisonous, but only because their bodies steal and refine that poison from the beetles that they eat.”
Simensen leaned forwards slightly, a half smile on his face as the two teens hung on his words. The man was a skilled orator. “I am a human with the self-same power. My quirk makes me a kelptotoxic organism. By which I mean, I can intake chemicals, many of which would be harmful or deadly to humans, and my body is capable of processing and refining them into new substances, as well as expressing those substances physically. My quirk councilors originally called my ability Kleptotoxin, but when I became a doctor, I had my quirk’s name legally changed to Pharmavore. I feel that is a more appropriate moniker. After all, the difference between a life-saving medicine and a deadly poison is strictly in the dosage.”
Although the office was ultramodern and sparsely decorated, it didn’t escape Izuku’s notice that a number of pipes were on display in a glass cabinet on the wall. They looked old and elaborate, like they had been carved by hand, and several appeared to be made of bone or antlers. They all had long necks, and most were covered in rather nordic-looking decorations and scrimshaw. It had the air of a collection, with obvious cultural significance.
Izuku’s eyes flicked down to the pipe that the principal had put down as they entered. Like the others, it was long-necked, though it was far simpler and more utilitarian in design.
“Do you, um. Do you have to smoke whatever it is you want to take in? For your quirk, I mean.”
Simensen nodded. “Well deduced. That is correct. I despise the habit, personally; I do not like smoking or recreational substance use in general. But I have little choice in the matter. It is necessary for my quirk. If nothing else, I am at least spared the effects of the chemicals I imbibe. A small favor.”
Izuku pinched his chin, his eyes distant. “Blanket immunity to toxins and foreign chemicals? A safety feature, of course. That’s practically a quirk unto itself,” he muttered.
“What happens if you eat it instead?” Melissa asked curiously.
The dark-skinned blonde shrugged. “The same, but far less of the chemical is retained. Over 95% of the specialized tissue that allows my body to collect chemicals is located in my lungs, throat, and sinuses. What remains is spread out through the rest of my body. I could ingest the chemicals, yes. But it would be far less effective. Quite frankly, I strongly dislike how it feels to use my quirk, so I view smoking what ingredients I can and intaking the rest as inhalants is the lesser of two evils.”
Simensen reached over and tapped the pipe on his desk with an ebony finger. “My quirk allows me to easily create immensely complex substances, including several that would not exist were it not for my quirk. Given the… exotic, nature of modern human biology, my quirk makes it possible to create medicine that is effective even for those of unusual constitutions.”
Izuku understood what the man was implying. Just in his own former class at Aldera, there had been a boy whose body had been mostly made of rocks ‘ granite specifically, granite was crystalline in nature, was his family becoming crystal people? ,’ and another girl whose flesh was made of living wood, ‘ quercus acuta he was fairly certain, Japanese Evergreen Oak, but no bark, why no bark? ’
This was a strange, wild age, with strange and wild biology to match. The possibility of people having bodies that rejected or were otherwise incompatible with traditional medicine was a very real issue, and one that sometimes had no solution at all.
But if what Peter Simensen claimed was true, his quirk had transformed his body into a living pharmacy. He could synthesize precise chemical co*cktails, custom-made to help a specific person.
“That’s an amazing quirk,” Izuku whispered, a note of wonder in his voice.
“Thank you,” Simensen said, nodding slightly in appreciation. “It is not a universal solution; there are still occasionally problems I cannot solve. But thankfully, our network of friends here on the island is large. I am merely one piece of a broader international puzzle.”
Simensen paused for a minute, as though debating whether he should mention something. “In fact… that is actually why I am a business associate of your father.”
Izuku blinked in surprise. “Really?” Melissa also leaned in, looking interested in hearing the story.
The principal nodded. “Yes. My quirk is quite valuable for it’s medical potential, but of course, one cannot freely use their quirk in public without a license. For most people with healing quirks, this is hardly an issue; their government issues them a partial exemption from the law, and often pays them if they are willing to be trained as a nurse or doctor. But since I operate internationally, that would be an impossible nightmare of paperwork. No nation has the same rules or regulations regarding this, and some countries don’t have an exemption program at all. Your father pulled some strings, and had me issued a hero license. My paperwork is filed in Skanesland and the United States, and my license is recognized by the WHA. So I am, technically, a superhero thanks to your father. Though I am a rather boring one, I’m afraid.”
Melissa frowned slightly in contemplation, nodding her head. She had heard about such arrangements on I-Island before, but wasn’t aware that Dr. Simensen was in one. It made sense.
Izuku’s fingers flexed, itching to take down notes. Simensen seemed to notice, and his lips twitched slightly, hiding a smile. “How do you use your quirk on someone?” the green haired teen asked. “To administer what you make, I mean?”
The dark-skinned man leaned back in his chair. “I can emit what I make in just about any manner I please, but most of it would be considered unsanitary, for obvious reasons. Like the animals I share my trait with, I can circulate what I create throughout my body as a defensive weapon, and that is typically how I go about things. I render myself ‘poisonous,’ and then donate blood,” he said, tapping the crook of his arm for emphasis. “My donation is centrifugally separated, and the ‘poison’ is present in the plasma. From there, it can be extracted and further refined into something sterile and medically safe to use.”
He leaned forwards slightly. “While I do occasionally need to create more exotic substances, most of my products are analgesics, anesthetics, or intravenous agents. They are made on request to help in surgeries or operations involving people with unusual constitutions. That is another reason your father’s assistance with my license was so useful: it would be impossible to legally obtain some of the chemicals I need to fulfill my patient’s needs, particularly the bulk opioids. But a professional hero with a healing quirk is given far more leeway than an ordinary doctor. Especially one with connections to the WHA.”
Izuku nodded, already having some sense of the scope of his father’s job. Melissa looked impressed.
“I, ah. I have one more question, if you don’t mind my asking,” Izuku said, a blend of meekness and fascination on his face.
“Of course,” Simensen said. “If you’re curious about which materials I smoke, it is the vast majority of them. But there are a few I need to aerosolize and inhale if I wish to absorb them efficiently.”
The green-haired teen twirled his pencil between his fingers. “That, ah. That was one of my questions, but I decided it wasn’t i-important. If you don’t mind my asking, what is your quirk classified as? Emitter, Mutant, or Transformer?”
Peter Simensen gave a half-smile, and folded his fingers together. “Well, I am a teacher and this is a school. Why don’t the two of you guess, and we will see how close you get. Ms. Shield? Your thoughts?”
“Emitter,” the blonde teen said, after a moment. The doctor seated in front of them nodded slightly, before gesturing at her to elaborate. “I think it is an Emitter because the definition of an Emitter is the ability to generate and sometimes control certain things, or to alter the environment around you. Your quirk matches that description, at least in my opinion. You are altering substances that enter a specific area relative to you, in this case, the interior of your body. You aren’t generating chemicals, but you are controlling them and changing their properties within a defined field. That’s a textbook Emitter.”
“A fair guess, and well reasoned,” Simensen conceded. “And you, Mr. Midoriya? What are your thoughts?”
Izuku frowned, his eyes distant as his thoughts spun. “It’s… not an Emitter.”
“Oh?” Simensen said.
Izuku nodded slowly, rubbing his fingers together absently. “Emitter is… it’s a good guess. I like that guess. But it doesn’t really line up, not completely. Emitters, or Operative quirks as they’re more technically called… they don’t generally provide total immunity to their own emissions. They can, I know someone who does. Have immunity, I mean. But it’s really, really rare. Most Emitters can be hurt or even killed by what they produce if they don’t handle it correctly. Ice and fire users are the iconic examples of that.”
“But Principal Simensen said he was immune to the chemicals he intakes,” Melissa supplied, starting to catch on.
Izuku nodded. “And he said he doesn’t like using his quirk. It makes him uncomfortable, it is an unpleasant sensation. That’s another problem, maybe even a bigger one than the immunity. There’s a psychological aspect to quirks, it’s a big field with a lot of political implications. One of the biggest arguments for abolishing the laws forbidding quirk usage is that many people feel compelled to use their quirks, almost on instinct.”
“It is also the source of many of the arguments that those who break the law with their quirks should be given leniency,” Simensen supplied. “On the theory that they could not help themselves, or were under unreasonable mental pressure. Quirks can also alter a person’s life functions in unexpected and even dangerous ways, which is also something we now must take into account, both in the prosecution of crimes and in the pursuit of medicine. But forgive me, please continue.”
Izuku nodded, his shyness fading away as he became more and more immersed in his obsession with quirks. “Right! Quirks want to be used, is the old saying. Most people feel pleasure from using their abilities. It’s a factor for a lot of reasons, but-”
“But Professor Simenson said he doesn’t like using his quirk,” Melissa supplied, understanding starting to dawn on her.
“That’s right,” Izuku said, his green eyes unwavering as they locked on to Simensen’s icy blue. “Emitters, above all others, fall into the category of quirks that feel good to use, that improve the mental and physical condition of their users when they are employed. But Mr. Simensen said he hates using his quirk, it feels unpleasant and strange.”
The dark-skinned blonde nodded slowly. “Yes, I did say that,” he admitted. Then his lips twitched slightly, like he was suppressing a smile. “Your conclusion?”
“Mutant-type quirks,” Izuku said softly, “are defined as superpowers that grant their user a permanent physical abnormality directly related to their abilities. They always involve some sort of new and biologically unique structure being added to their owner’s body, such as extra limbs, wings, or a tail.
“Or modifying existing structures,” Simensen supplied quietly.
“Yes,” Izuku said. “Or that. I believe you are a Mutant, and I think that your quirk has modified you from the inside-out, instead of the more traditional outside-in. Your respiratory system in particular. Your ability to collect and refine outside chemicals is certainly in-line with an Emitter quirk, but the way you discussed your lungs and the unique organs inside of them tells a different story. It would also explain your unusual skin-tone; skin is the largest organ in the human body, and if all of your organs were modified to suit your quirk, well…”
Peter Simensen smiled, and gently clapped his hands together once. “Very impressive, the both of you. If this were a classroom setting, I would give Ms. Shield an A for her work, and you an A+.”
There was a pause, and then the doctor smirked slightly. “Unfortunately, however, you are both still wrong.”
The two teens reeled back in surprise. While they had rather different opinions about each other’s guesses, they had certainly believed that between the two of them, they must have guessed correctly.
The dark-skinned blonde held up three long, strong-looking fingers.
“There are, broadly, three general types of quirk. Other subtypes exist, and sometimes certain quirks can blur the lines between them, but these are the big three. They are Emitters, Transformers, and Mutants. Or, to use the more scientifically accurate terms, they are Operative, Composite, and Heteromorphic.”
Simensen lowered his three fingers before folding his hands together. “Your guesses were rational and well-reasoned, but unfortunately, you both lacked a key piece of information. Namely, that I don’t always look like this,” he said, gesturing generally at himself.
“A Transformation-type?” Izuku said, his eyes unfocusing as his thoughts began to spin again. “But… why?”
The stoic norseman chuckled. “I’ll assume you’re not asking why in an existential sense, because I have no idea. The definition of a Transformer is that their quirk grants them a composite existence, hence why the scientific term for a Transformer is Composite. Composite-type abilities always change at least one thing about the user when they’re employed. There are also some rare Composites that transform something other than the user, such as a target or part of the environment. My quirk is actually both: it changes me and the substances I use it on.”
Melissa frowned, a mixture of confusion and fascination. All of this information was new to her: she had never really known what quirk the Academy’s principal had, he never advertised it. “But… what’s changing about you, then? I don’t understand.”
But Izuku got it.
“Your organs,” the green-haired teen whispered, a note of wonder in his voice. “Your organs are transforming. That’s why your quirk makes you uncomfortable. I had thought you might be one of the mutants with an ability that’s painful to use, but that isn’t it, is it? The biggest weakness of Transformation-types is that over-exertion of the ability can cause pain and discomfort. Some of that can be overcome with conditioning and exercise, but there’s always a price to be paid, especially if you push your limits. That’s happening to you, isn’t it?
“Bravo, Mr. Midoriya,” the doctor said, his voice soft and even. “We lost a great deal of medical knowledge and technology during the Dawn. Because of that, my ability to create quirked medicine is in extremely high demand. Realistically, I couldn’t fulfill all the requests we receive, even if I had a hundred lifetimes. Regrettably, I have to pick and choose what cases I take, though my peers and co-workers are kind enough that they help pick up the slack.”
“So you’re always transformed,” Melissa said. “Professor, I had no idea.”
The doctor waved a hand dismissively. “I appreciate your pity in the spirit it is offered, but I do not need it. Saving lives is it’s own reward, doubly so for anyone in the medical field. When I was born, I had the complexion of an albino. However, when using my quirk, all of my organs change to a secondary form that is capable of intaking and processing chemicals and poisons. In that form, the more chemicals I hold in my body, the darker I become. Hypermelanization is a direct consequence of using my quirk. If I stopped using it, I would change back, but…”
The man absently held up one of his hands and gazed at it, his eyes dispassionate. “It’s been ten years at least, I think, since I have seen my birth complexion in the mirror. I’ve almost forgotten what I look like.”
In spite of the doctor’s stoicism, Melissa Shield felt her admiration for the head of her school swell.
He may not have necessarily wanted his hero license, or even needed it, but Peter Simensen was still living up to the standards of herodom anyway. She felt inspired.
“Aposematism,” Izuku said absently, as he also looked at the doctor’s hand.
Simensen frowned slightly. “Pardon?”
Izuku blinked, and shook himself out of his reverie. “Ah! Um. Sorry. It’s just… aposematism is what it’s called when an animal has bright or unusual coloration, as a warning to other creatures in the environment to not mess with it.”
The dark-skinned blonde quirked an aristocratic eyebrow. “Are you suggesting that my quirk is warning those around me of my status as a toxic human?”
Izuku ducked his head, but resisted the urge to back down or stutter. “I mean, you were the one who described your quirk as being a variation of the poison-stealing abilities already found in nature. Aren’t most of those animals aposematic too? Maybe you share more traits in common with them than you realize.”
Slowly, one side of Simensen’s mouth quirked up in a lazy half-smile.
“An interesting theory. There is no way to prove it, of course, but there is merit to the guess.”
The doctor tapped a long, dusky finger against his desktop. “I had given you some other contact information on that slip of paper attached to my card, as a favor to Dr. Shield. However, now I am starting to suspect it is I who will end up owing a favor to him, in the end. Your father is right to be proud.”
Izuku blushed to the roots of his hair, and Melissa smiled widely.
The principal of I-Academy cracked a small grin.
“I apologize for this next part, Mr. Midoriya, but I need to go over some of the particulars of Ms. Shield’s education for the upcoming year. I always prefer to do these in person, but it won’t take long. Would you mind stepping outside? This will only be a moment.”
Izuku blinked before scrambling up out of his chair. He bowed deeply to the dark-skinned man before speedily walking for the door, muttering to himself.
Melissa giggled, and the doctor huffed softly under his breath.
“Now then,” Peter Simensen said, pulling out several sheets of paper. “I am certain I already know the answer, but you will be re-applying to stay in the Advanced Course, correct Ms. Shield? Excellent. You remain qualified due to your grades, so please sign here, and-”
Izuku closed the office door behind him, the sound inside cutting off with a firm click. He found himself alone in the quiet hallway outside, with nothing to keep him company but his thoughts and the business card burning a hole in his pocket.
He had stood there for only a moment when the monitor over the nearby elevators lit up, indicating they were in use. A gauge slowly moved from left to right, before stopping on their floor.
There was a ding, and the doors opened to reveal a towering pile of paperwork with a pair of legs.
Izuku blinked in confusion as a person carefully stepped out of the elevator. But, rather predictably, they only made it a few staggering paces before stumbling.
Izuku lunged without thinking, trying to save the papers. He was partially successful, but the person dragged him down to the floor as well when they toppled, and the top two-thirds of the stack scattered everywhere.
The man, for Izuku could see it was a man now, swore, and began scrabbling on his hands and knees trying to collect the documents. Izuku sat what he had managed to grab down on the floor, and began to help.
“Ooh, I can’t believe it!” the man exclaimed. “Of all the rotten luck!” He blinked, before peering a bit more closely at Izuku. “Good heavens, I didn’t even realize you were there. Thank you, young man.”
Izuku gave a wobbly, unsure smile. “S-Sure! It’s no problem! I’m- I’m just sorry I couldn’t catch more.”
The man made a dismissive noise. “Nonsense! You tried to help, and lord knows that’s more than most people do around here.”
Izuku took a moment to look the man over. He wasn’t tall, perhaps average or slightly below, with an even build. He had a mop of messy hair not unlike Izuku’s own, colored a dark blackish-bown. Small streaks of steely gray were starting to show near his temples, and he sported a short beard and mustache of the same color. Both were far better trimmed than his unkempt hair. Large, old-fashioned glasses were perched on his nose, shielding a pair of quizzical brown eyes, and only the smallest upper edge of a white dress shirt’s collar popped out of the forest-green sweater he was wearing, the tips slightly bent like a seagull’s wings.
He certainly cut the image of a scientist, from the heels of his brown loafers to the messy mop of hair on his head. Though for some reason, he lacked the white lab coat Izuku had seen so many others on the island wear.
“My n-name is Midoriya,” Izuku said, introducing himself as he finished helping the man put his pile back together. “Midoriya Izuku.”
“Ah yes, of course, how rude of me. My name is Wendell. Dr. Wendell Tully. I work for Ominent Practical Technologies. I’m so sorry for bumping into you, Mr. Izuku!”
“I-It’s fine,” Izuku stuttered. He took no issue over the man getting his name backwards; they were hardly in Asia anymore, after all, and as a lifelong All Might fan, Izuku knew that some confusion on that front was inevitable. “I just hope the order for everything doesn’t m-matter.”
The messy-haired scientist put the last few papers on the top of the stack, and carefully picked it back up again. “Oh, don’t you worry, Mr. Izuku. I have to give a presentation on my project, unfortunately, but this paperwork goes to a secretary. Whether or not it’s out of order isn’t my problem, just as long as it’s all there!”
“Oh! Well, that’s great then. Good luck with your p-presentation then, Dr. Tully.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it, I assure you, young man. And thank you for your help,” the scientist said, as he carefully began walking down the hallway towards another set of doors. “No, the only thing that really matters is whether that damn Shmector thinks he can use my project to further his own career. Maybe I should take Detnerat up on their offer…”
The words after his farewell were muttered darkly, and Izuku wasn’t entirely certain he had been meant to hear them. But either way, the back of Dr. Wendell Tully had turned a corner and disappeared.
“Dr. Simensen mentioned you, dad,” Izuku commented, as the three of them made their way back to the cafeteria underneath the WHA building.
“Did he, now?” Hisashi said, quirking an eyebrow. “And what did that old rascal have to say?”
“The principal said that you helped him get a hero license to use his quirk internationally, sir!” Melissa exclaimed, looking excited.
The businessman smiled softly. “Ah, of course. That. Well, I do help coordinate international hero affairs, so getting him rubber stamped wasn’t terribly difficult. Exceptions are almost always made for people with abilities useful in medicine.”
The group walked through the doors, and began the winding route back towards their table.
“He had a fascinating quirk,” Izuku confessed. “I’ve never heard of a transformer whose ability primarily changed their insides like that.”
“He’s lucky, is what he is,” Hisashi replied. “Most transformation quirks wouldn’t allow their owners to hold the shift for so long. They’d kill themselves trying. Holding a composite form almost constantly for ten years is herculean in scope; no amount of training or conditioning could account for it. If Simensen’s quirk was more normal in it’s function and limitations, he would barely be able to use it for anything.”
“Sir, what is it about him that makes his power different, then?” Melissa asked the older man.
Hisashi frowned slightly as he pulled out chairs for the two teens, seating them back at their chosen table.
“It’s a combination of factors,” he said after a moment, sitting down himself. “Luck plays a part. He’s just lucky to have a quirk that works that way. Another is that he has secondary mutations that support his existing quirk. Did he mention that he was born with partial albinism?”
Both teens nodded.
“That plays a role,” Hisashi said. “I doubt his altered pigmentation was natural to start with. And his quirk only changes a portion of his body, not all of it. Granted, one could say that the organs are the most important pieces of a living person, but even so. Someone with a full-body alternate form could never hold it for such extended periods of time. The stress alone would kill them, even if the strain from overusing their quirk did not.”
“So it’s the right quirk falling into the hands of the right person, then?” Melissa said, though the question was more of a statement aimed at herself.
The two teens chatted for a bit, and Hisashi raised his hand slightly, making a subtle gesture.
As though conjured by a magician’s trick, Ichiwaka Haruki appeared, stepping out from around the corner and looking expectantly at his boss.
“The kitchens here can cater whatever requests we have,” Hisashi mentioned. “How do the two of you feel about sandwiches?”
The teens nodded, and Ichiwaka took their orders with a placid expression before walking away to relay them.
The elder Midoriya passed some of the paperwork out across the table, and it was all both teens could do to hold back their glee.
This was information on Star and Stripe’s quirk .
This was the truth , the actual honest truth , about Star and Stripe’s superhuman abilities.
The blonde and greenette were so distracted, they barely even noticed when Ichiwaka returned with their food, as engrossed as they were with looking over the information and comparing notes.
Hisashi couldn’t hide his smile at the two teens, and Ichiwaka shot his boss a wink before taking up a position nearby where he could watch the doors.
As the impromptu lunch went on, the two teens chatting with Hisashi, a part of Izuku’s mind was still on the reports in front of him. He leafed through them as he ate his sandwich, occasionally showing Melissa something he felt was interesting about her favorite hero.
“Something on your mind, son?” Hisashi asked. The man had a soft, knowing smile on his face.
Izuku frowned. “I don’t… I don’t know. But I’m starting to see a sort of pattern. At least, I think I am.”
“A pattern?” Melissa asked curiously.
Izuku hummed an affirmative, flipping back through the report to check something on an earlier page. “Meta quirks are weird,” Izuku said, half to himself and half to Melissa. “Out of all the quirk effects that exist, they are the most like what could be called magic. They don’t follow any known laws of physics or chemistry, which is what makes them so difficult to classify and understand.”
“That’s very true,” Hisashi commented. “Even calling them magic is a bit misleading. When most people think of magic, they think of some wizard waving their hands and making something inexplicable happen. But that’s still a very structured thing, isn’t it? Like a cosmic vending machine. You put your money in and punch the right buttons, and you get your effect dispensed to you. Meta quirks can be significantly more wooly in how they operate. Many people who have them are advised against using them at all if they can avoid it. They can be unpredictable, and unpredictability is dangerous.”
Izuku nodded absently, his focus still on the papers in front of him. “And that’s why there’s a lot of theories that associate meta quirks with sentient quirks,” the teen commented.
Melissa looked surprised. “There’s a connection between meta quirks and sentient abilities?”
Izuku hummed and took a bite of his sandwich. “That’s the current popular theory, yes. Not much is understood about meta quirks because it’s hard to test them. They don’t respond to most scientific measurements. Sentient quirks are also difficult to gauge and test, because they aren’t always cooperative, even if their users want to be. But it’s not just classifying them together for convenience. One way we can observe quirks is indirectly, through the people who manifest them. And bloodlines that produce meta quirks are also often the same ones that produce sentient quirks. There’s a connection there.”
Melissa frowned. “It’s genetic?”
Izuku waved his sandwich slightly, fully immersed in his own analysis. “Whether quirks are genetic or if the DNA is a symptom and not the cause is debatable. We still don’t know what quirks even are . The DNA/evolutionary theory of quirks is the most widespread one, but there are a lot of problems with that. Evolution doesn’t work that fast. In fact, quirks have now thrown the evolutionary theory itself back under serious scrutiny, since it’s proof that an organism can potentially change into a completely new one in a single generation. Evolution being responsible for quirks is a bit of a meme, honestly. It’s the mainstream theory because it conforms to preexisting ideas and is easy to understand.”
“That is true, but a bit beside the point,” Hisashi said patiently.
Izuku blinked. “Oh, right, sorry. I guess you could say it’s genetic, then? As a shorthand for a much larger problem with no real answer. People from families that produce meta quirks also often give rise to sentient quirks, and vice-versa. That’s the point. So yes, Melissa, that’s right.”
Izuku frowned slightly, chewing thoughtfully. “Though I suppose it’s a good thing there haven’t been any sentient meta abilities. That could end very badly, for a lot of different reasons. It would be like if somebody was possessed by an evil genie, or something.”
Hisashi kept his expression neutral and said nothing. There had, of course, been sentient meta quirks. But it was not his son’s fault for not knowing that. He could hardly be expected to know information that was actively being suppressed by international governments.
His son’s assessment of what such a quirk may be like was rather accurate. Which was, of course, why the information was suppressed.
The world didn’t need to know about the unfortunate few born with what amounted to devils and fairies whispering in their ears.
“What was this pattern you think you see?” Hisashi asked, guiding the conversation back to where it started.
Izuku blinked somewhat owlishly before suddenly starting, realizing what he was being asked. “Oh! Right! Um, sorry. It’s just… here, look.”
Izuku flipped through the reports and pulled a sheet out, pushing it across the table. Both Hisashi and Melissa craned to look at it. It was a report from a hospital. After a short amount of shuffling, Izuku produced another, similar sheet of paper to put next to it, and then a third after that.
“New Order allows Ms. Bates to make declarative statements, or ‘Orders,’ which come true as long as she holds them. She can maintain a maximum of two Orders at once, and she cannot, allegedly, affect anything that does not have a sense of self.”
Hisashi raised an eyebrow. “Allegedly?” he asked.
“I’ll get to that in a minute,” Izuku replied. “She also needs to understand the true nature of what she is choosing to impose an Order over, or else the Order will fail. This is why she mainly resorts to directing her quirk at herself. Her primary strategy is having a standing Order to boost her physical abilities to the greatest possible degree, which gives her a level of speed and strength comparable to All Might’s. This also leaves a single Order in reserve to allow her to adapt to any surprises or unexpected situations. She can combine Orders if she needs to achieve more complex effects, but rarely does, as releasing her standing Order for a superhuman body makes her vulnerable, and one Order is usually enough.”
Izuku drew a deep, measured breath, and then slowly let it out before fixing his father and Melissa with a steady, determined stare. “There is so, so much wrong with all of that. I’m not even sure where to start.”
Melissa spluttered in shock. Hisashi raised an eyebrow, but there was a teasing, almost eager twitch on the corner of his lips.
He loved watching his son shine.
“You believe Star and Stripe’s quirk has been misdiagnosed?” the man asked, a smile fighting to break out on his face.
Izuku jumped slightly, a horrified look crossing his face. “What? No, no! Of course not!”
Hisashi hummed disbelievingly. His son was far too polite for his own good, sometimes. But that was fine. Izuku’s boyish innocence was part of his charm, after all. So Hisashi humored the teen.
“Right, of course,” he said with a straight face. “The people who analyzed and diagnosed Ms. Bates' quirk did an excellent and professional job of it. But you seem to have noticed something about how it works. A ghost in the quirk, if you will. Care to share?”
Izuku pursed his lips before reaching out and tapping the first document, the hospital record he had slid across the table for Melissa and his father to look at.
It was a private record, not something that would have been publicly available, of Cathleen Bates visiting a hospital and attempting to use her quirk to heal someone who had been grievously injured during a villainous incident in the American midwest. Star and Stripe had been the hero who resolved the incident, and she had paid the hospital a visit in the aftermath to try and help where she could.
She had attempted to use her quirk to heal someone, and it had failed.
“This doesn’t make sense,” Izuku said, touching the sheet of paper for emphasis. Melissa frowned and looked more closely at it. Hisashi said nothing, as he was focused intently on watching his son. “Ms. Bate’s quirk allows her to imbue new properties into the things she touches. But she can’t modify things that don’t have a sense of self, supposedly. That means, in theory, she should be able to give herself and other people new properties all she likes, but she couldn’t, I don’t know, modify the air or light around her.”
Izuku gathered the two other sheets he had pulled out and pushed them forwards. “And yet we see here all of those supposed rules are broken. She can heal herself of injuries using her quirk, she’s on record as having done that. And yet she couldn’t heal somebody else. Why not? Why couldn’t she issue an order saying, in effect, I, Cathleen Bates, grant such-and-such a person high speed regeneration ? What’s wrong with that order?”
He tapped the other two papers. “And here she is using ultimate moves that do manipulate air and light. With ‘Fist Bump The Earth,’ she creates a construct of air around herself in the shape of her own body, effectively turning her into a giant, and then slams the ground with her air fist, creating an incapacitating shockwave. She used this during the Oklahoma Parkway Standoff five years ago. And then there’s this move, ‘Hollywood Boulevard,’ where she gathers all the light around herself into a kind of light armor and then releases it for a flashbang effect. She’s used that multiple times, there’s plenty of footage of it.”
Izuku looked up at his two lunch companions, a serious expression on his face. “It’s not uncommon for complex quirks to have their definitions changed as more information becomes available. The original analysis of New Order, on that paper there, says she can only modify things with a sense of self. However, she clearly found a way around that early in her career.”
Izuku touched another paper. “In this revised analysis of New Order, made a few years ago, her limitations and restrictions are redefined. Under this, it is stated that something doesn’t strictly need it’s own sense of self to be modified, as long as she can project her own onto it. So what they’re effectively saying is that Ms. Bates' own sense of self can stand in for inanimate objects that lack one, as far as her own quirk is concerned.”
The teen folded his hands, his fingers tangling together nervously as he frowned. “If New Order works the way it’s supposed to, then this is, almost literally, exactly backwards. She should be able to do almost whatever she wants to people, but she should struggle to manipulate matter and energy. Instead, it’s the opposite. She has strange and inconsistent issues with imposing orders on other people, but has devised a phrasing of Orders that makes a mockery of her supposed limitations. So much so that her support staff have changed the very definition of what her quirk is even doing to more accurately reflect it.”
“It’s inconsistent?” Melissa asked.
“Extremely,” Izuku asserted, before tapping the second medical report that had been slid across the table. “Look at this,” he said.
His two lunch partners did. It was another medical report, almost identical to the first, filed under nearly identical circ*mstances. A person had been injured during a villainous incident that Cathleen Bates had responded to.
But she had healed them on the scene. Successfully. She had saved their life by healing them. This incident was dated several months earlier than the first.
“Look at that,” Izuku said. “One time, it worked. Another time it didn’t. That’s not consistent.”
Melissa was frowning. Hisashi’s eyes were flicking back and forth between the report and his son.
“There’s more,” Izuku supplied, pushing another incident report out of the file. “Ms. Bates is on record as being able to knock villains out with a single touch. She’s done it hundreds of times on camera. But there was one time where she killed a villain who was using their quirk as a kind of improvised suicide vest. Killing him was the only way to save the hostages. This is the report about it, but I don’t even really need to read it, because I remember the controversy on the internet. It was a high profile incident. People were arguing for months if it had been necessary for her to kill or not.”
Izuku tapped the paper file. “But the morals of the situation aren’t what’s important. What matters is that it’s proof that if Ms. Bates can get her hands on you, she can, or at least she ‘should,’ be able to do almost anything to you. She can knock people unconscious. She can strike them dead. But she can’t heal. Except sometimes she can. Why is that? Why is there a difference?”
Izuku sat the papers he was holding down on the table. “According to this, there are two official analyses of New Order; an older one and a second that was made more recently that reclassified her abilities, Something both have in common is the assertion that Ms. Bates can impose orders on anything she touches, but affecting things requires her to understand them. If she doesn’t understand the nature of something on at least a basic level, she cannot affect it.”
Izuku flipped open the folder and pointed to a page in it. “According to this second, newer analysis of her quirk, when she uses her quirk on living things, her understanding must align with their own self-perception of what they are, at least to some degree, or else she cannot affect them. Which is an interesting rabbit hole on its own, and makes me wonder if somebody with a sentient quirk or a severe mental illness would be immune to her abilities. But the point is that her perception of them has to at least partially match their own perception of themselves. This is also, allegedly, the reason why it’s easier for her to affect inanimate substances, because they don’t have a sense of self at all. So her one-sided perception of them is enough to completely dominate them.”
Izuku spread his hands in a pleading gesture. “That’s great and all, but it doesn’t really explain the full use-history of her quirk. The simple answer to why she can’t heal random people is because she doesn’t understand them well enough for her quirk to take effect. But it works just fine on random villains she’s never met before. She can knock them out. She can kill them. So what’s the difference? Why is this happening? It doesn’t add up.”
Melissa’s frown deepened, and she began leafing through the medical reports, almost like she was looking for something.
But Hisashi kept his eyes on his son.
The businessman leaned forward in his chair. “You said you noticed a pattern, Izuku. I assume you have a theory?”
The teen stared at the table without seeing it, deep in thought.
“Do you remember how I said there are connections between sentient quirks and meta quirks?” Izuku asked. His father nodded. “Well, a lot of quirk counselors and researchers who specialize in sentient abilities have started using psychology to try and understand sentient quirks better. To reach out to them. Psychological concepts and terminology have allowed them to make a lot of headway in teaching people with sentient and sapient abilities how to better understand and control them. I’ve read some articles about it.”
Hisashi believed he understood what his son was getting at.
“Do you think psychology may play a factor in New Order?”
Izuku’s lips twisted nervously, like he was wrestling with the idea in his own head. To him, the need for perceptions to align was all the proof in the world that New Order was fundamentally a mental effect, but he was struggling to put it into words. After a short moment of indecision, he appeared to rally himself.
“I- I think her quirk is an Egoist ability.”
Hisashi quirked an eyebrow. “An Egoist quirk? How so?” Next to him, Melissa was still leafing back and forth through the two medical reports, looking for something with slowly increasing desperation.
“Just think about it!” Izuku said in a rush, the words tumbling out of him. “She has no problem giving herself new properties, but sometimes struggles to affect others. But not people she’s directly fighting or trying to stop! And whenever she uses New Order on inanimate things, they almost always become a part of her or a reflection of her own body. This seems to be a natural part of her quirk, it’s something that just happens.”
“It’s like-” Izuku waved his pencil for emphasis, visibly struggling to find the words he wanted. “It’s like a sentient quirk in how it operates. There are sentient quirks out there that are purely emotive, and are a literal tell for the person that manifests them. There are also sentient quirks out there that work like Ids, they’re a personality with absolutely no filter. They say and do whatever they want, and the people stuck with them basically have to negotiate with their own powers to have a semi-normal life!”
“That’s what this feels like to me,” Izuku said, finally seeming to get a grip on his thoughts. “All the weird things about New Order only barely make sense with these two official analyses, but I think maybe that’s because they were looking at this the wrong way. I’ve had arguments with people on the internet who are obsessed with exactly what it is that a certain hero’s power does, they’re always arguing over whether it’s some kind of telekinesis or energy manipulation, or something more exotic like imagination projection.”
Izuku spread his hands pleadingly. “But does it really matter? I mean really? How it’s accomplishing what it does seems less important than understanding the logic it uses to operate. Like, on the abstract, every fire user is breaking the laws of thermodynamics. But for their day-to-day lives, understanding how that happens is less important than understanding how to control their own quirk.”
“I see,” Hisashi said, leaning back in his own chair. A small smile was twitching on the corners of his mouth.
No, no, of course the people who analyzed Cathleen Bates in the past did a great job. They just completely missed the point of helping a hero understand their quirk better, and had to retcon their own theories to try and cover it up when reality didn’t match their system of governing rules.
His son really was too polite for his own good.
“What- what do you mean, it’s an… it’s an ‘Egoist’ quirk?” Melissa asked, her voice wavering.
Izuku was too far gone to notice her emotional distress. Hisashi was not.
“I mean it’s a quirk whose power revolves entirely around her. It’s self-centered in the most literal sense. Look-” Izuku said, pointing at the medical reports in Melissa’s hands. “The hospital records are the best example, they’re what made me think of it in the first place. She healed somebody one time, but couldn’t in another. Why? If you assume psychology isn’t a factor in her quirk, there’s no answer. But look at the reports more closely.”
Izuku took one of them from the blonde teen, oblivious. “In this incident, she showed up after the villain had started their rampage. She stopped him, and then visited the hospital to help afterwards. She tried to heal someone, and it failed.”
Izuku handed the report back and picked up the other one. “But in this one, somebody was injured in the crossfire of a fight between Ms. Bates and the villain. And she was able to heal them. Given the dating on these events, this one happened first, so her success here was likely what compelled her to try again later.”
Izuku looked up at his father. “That’s the key, I’m sure of it. New Order is an Egoist ability because proximity to the user’s own sense of self is the biggest governing factor for whether a given order can work. There are other limits involved here, there have to be. But that’s the big one. Ms. Bates probably felt subconsciously responsible for that person’s injury, so she was able to heal him on the spot. But the other person, she had nothing to do with it. They were already hurt when she got there. So when Ms. Bates tried to heal them later at the hospital, it failed. That’s why her quirk counselors recommended she stop trying to heal people, because they were afraid of the inconsistent results. But it’s not inconsistent, not really. There’s just a governing factor at play they didn’t notice.”
Melissa looked stricken at the proclamation. Hisashi understood why. Unlike his son, he knew the story of Elenore Shield.
It had probably been Melissa Shield’s dream as a little girl, for her favorite hero to come swooping into her life one day and save her mother with a snap of her fingers and a heroic laugh.
Unfortunately, reality was far more bitter.
Izuku, finally noticing the other teen’s distress, began to panic. “Melissa? I- I’m sorry, what did I do!?”
There was a moment where Hisashi debated whether he should say anything, but the blonde girl made it unnecessary.
“You- you didn’t do anything, Izuku,” Melissa said softly, her voice hitching slightly. “This is… this is my fault. I should have known better.”
“Known better than what?” Izuku asked, looking torn between reaching across the table and being afraid it was inappropriate. “I’m sorry, whatever it was, I didn’t mean-”
But Melissa shook her head, denying his apology.
“It’s my mother,” she said softly. “She… she was the victim of a quirk accident, of sorts. She’s in a form of suspended animation. Papa has been focusing all of his spare time into researching her condition, to try and find a way to save her. There was a part of me that always hoped. That, you know. That Star and Stripe…”
“... that Star and Stripe would be able to save her,” Izuku finished softly.
Izuku understood. He knew that feeling all too well.
How many times had he wished for All Might to appear in the halls of his school one day, and set everything right with a laugh and a smile?
How many times had he dreamed of waking up one morning with wings, with fire, or some other amazing ability?
Both teens had dreamed in sorrow of a day when the quirks that filled their world would finally get around to saving them.
Both sets of prayers had gone unanswered.
Just one , a guilty voice whispered in the dark to Izuku. Only one set of prayers was unanswered.
“It still m-might be possible, though!” Izuku insisted. “I mean, I could be w-wrong, and Star and Stripe has a long history of countering other people’s q-quirks with her own!”
But Hisashi shook his head, and at the same time, Melissa made a similar gesture.
“It’s not just a matter of someone being trapped by a quirk,” the older man replied. He directed a soft but sad smile at both teens. “Elenore Shield is locked away by a quirk, yes, but she also suffered a mortal wound immediately prior to that. From my understanding, the quirk is the only thing keeping her alive.”
“She- mama is frozen,” Melissa said slowly, looking forlorn. “She’s frozen in ice, and has an injury that pierced her heart.”
Izuku looked stricken, and turned to face his father, who nodded sadly. “But-!” Izuku exclaimed. “But that… that doesn’t make any sense,” he said, contemplation at war with regret on his face. “Just- just ice alone wouldn’t save someone from something like that. What quirk… ?”
Hisashi’s lips twitched slightly, fighting off a smile in spite of the situation. “Why don’t you tell him your mother’s name, Ms. Shield? Her hero name.”
Izuku stiffened. “Hero name? Wait, Melissa- is your mother a hero ?”
As always, Izuku couldn’t contain himself when heroes and quirks were involved. And even though Melissa had been coping with sadness and resignation at the news that her idol probably couldn’t just snap her fingers and save her family, the other teen’s enthusiasm was so honest and refreshing that she couldn’t help but smile through her unshed tears.
“Y-Yes,” she affirmed. “Mama’s hero name was Rimewight. She worked in America. The quirk she’s trapped in is her own. It is her own ice that is keeping her alive.”
Izuku mouthed the words slowly without speaking them aloud.
“Wait. Rimewight. And she was American?”
Then the spark. Hisashi saw it, because he was looking for it, waiting for that exact moment. He always loved to see his son like this.
Izuku’s eyes flew wide, and he slammed both palms down on the table. “Wait! Is- is your mother the ICE MAGICIAN? Are you SERIOUS?”
Melissa blinked in shock. “You- you know about mama?”
Izuku was practically glowing. “Know about her? Melissa, your mom is one of only a dozen or so healer heroes, ever! That list is so short! And her quirk! Rimewight could heal people , and she had an elemental power! She’s amazing!”
Melissa choked down a laugh, and then started giggling, the laughter chasing away the tears.
The two teens were happy again, and Hisashi smiled.
His son really didn’t understand the power he had. The way he could influence people around him, without even trying. Just by being himself.
Even with all his own clever words and sharp comments, Midoriya Hisashi knew that this was an ability he himself would never possess. What some trained a lifetime to do, his son simply did . Pulling people into an orbit around him with inescapable gravity, and then shining light down on them with bright and honest smiles.
In a universe of planets fighting over who had the most beautiful quirk, his son was a star.
“Son, do you mind refreshing our drinks for us?”
A look passed between the younger and older Midoriya, some form of silent communication. Izuku stood up, and picked up their glasses before disappearing around the corner of their nook in the cafeteria.
“Did my son ever tell you what I do for a living?” Hisashi asked the teenage girl. Melissa slowly shook her head.
“He mentioned you worked for the WHA.”
Hisashi smiled softly. “I’m a Director. I handle tactical field operations and disaster assessment. I manage quirk and counter-quirk procedures. It’s my job to know the situations international hero team-ups are facing, and to help build those teams in ways that enhance their strengths while covering their weaknesses. That makes me privy to a great many secrets, and also requires me to understand as many of the quirks in play as possible. If someone is hurt, or needs a certain kind of help, I’m one of the people in the chain that gets called. That is how I met Dr. Simensen, your principal.”
Hisashi leaned back in his chair. “Your father is internationally renowned. He has connections all over the world. People know about him. And they know about his wife, too. Your mother, Elenore Shield, her situation isn’t a secret. Which is why, as sorry as I am to say it, there are no magic tricks to solve this problem. If such an easy solution as Star and Stripe snapping her fingers existed among the heroes and high profile doctors of the world, it would have been found and used by now.”
Silently, Izuku returned, but he remained just out of sight, standing around the corner of the wall of glass bricks.
“I don’t want this to sound like discouragement, because it isn’t,” Hisashi continued. “I just wanted you to know that the right people are aware of your family and your mother. No solution exists yet, but every single day, that could change. One day, it will.’”
Melissa smiled, her voice wavering. “I guess. I just, you know. I was holding out on some hope. I wanted my family to be whole again so badly, I never really stopped to think it through.”
A large, masculine hand reached over, palm up. Hisashi’s wedding band glinted conspicuously in the light. After a moment’s hesitation, the teenage girl put her own in it, and strong fingers wrapped around hers.
“I understand,” the elder Midoriya said. “Probably better than you realize. I know what it means to be part of a family that’s fighting to stay whole. Long before I ever got married, I knew what it was like to watch while bonds you cherish break down and fall apart. It’s not easy. It never is. But you should always have hope.”
Melissa sniffled. “You’re talking about working overseas, right? Izuku told me some about his family life.”
There were many answers Hisashi could have given to that question. Some more honest than others.
“Partly,” he replied. “I was a son before I was a father. Sometimes the people in our lives make choices that hurt them. Sometimes the people we love get hurt, and there’s nothing we can do about it that wouldn’t make everything worse. I know your father has watched you suffer, and hated that he couldn’t do anything directly to save you or make things better. I know how that feels.”
Hisashi let go of Melissa’s hand, and folded his fingers together. As he did, Izuku stepped out from around the corner, and handed Melissa’s drink back to her.
“Quirks are getting stronger and more complex all the time,” Hisashi said consolingly. “I’m sure my son could talk about it for hours.”
Izuku shot his father a watery smile, and Hisashi gave a warm half-smile of his own. “So don’t despair,” the businessman continued. “Always hold on to hope. The person with the quirk that can save your mother has likely already been born, and we just don’t know about it yet. The moment that person is found, we will help Mrs. Shield. You have my word.”
There were unshed tears in Melissa Shield’s eyes, but she was smiling.
“Thank you.”
The World Heroes Association office on I-Island was deceptively normal. It wasn’t the tallest building in the area, or the most ostentatious. It was not some geometric edifice of crystal glass, nor was it an imposing monolith of art-deco sensibilities. It wasn’t a tomorrowland-style living garden, like some of the medical and administrative buildings nearby, and it was not some daring throwback to greco-roman construction like the bank across the way, either. Compared to it’s surroundings, it was decidedly unambitious, looking like little more than a particularly upscale hospital, or perhaps a luxurious but otherwise mundane office building.
Perhaps that’s why it stood out. Dead center in Main Street of Metro Delta, surrounded by an eclectic blend of loud futurism and in-your-face nostalgia, it’s normalcy was a stark contrast. It was an island of sanity surrounded by chaos. Only the large Roman alphabet lettering on the side of the building, spelling out ‘WHA,’ differentiated it from the millions of high rise buildings around the world that looked just like it.
But as a brand, that was enough. There was nowhere on earth where the WHA logo wouldn’t be recognized.
The metaphor, abstract as it was, wasn’t lost on Gran Torino. If the wild architecture of it’s surroundings were representative of heroes and the heroic age, the WHA building felt like seeing the team owner or manager of a sport’s association.
It was the business suit behind the glitz and glamour. The pressed ties and briefcases behind the capes and spandex.
Superheroes and corporations needed to show off, to advertise.
The World Heroes Association spoke for itself.
A crowd was already starting to gather. An unfortunate inevitability of All Might standing out in the open, minding his own business. Word of their little foray to I-Island had surely already spread to all the tabloids and internet gossipers, so the old man wasn’t really shocked. The brief period of peace on this trip had come to an end.
Fortunately, their proximity to the WHA building, as well as the obvious fact that they were waiting for somebody, kept the crowd at a relatively safe distance. As did the fact that world famous heroes were a fairly common sight on the floating island. Thanks to that, there was a bit of a buffer against Toshinori’s star power. Torino had never been famous at any point in his own career, so he was just some strange old man as far as anybody else was concerned. That was probably also helping, the last thing they needed was somebody else who was-
“MASTER! I was hoping to see you!”
Gran Torino pinched the bridge of his nose. Son of a bitch.
Crap like this was exactly why he had retired.
A giant American flag floated slowly down out of the sky, revealing itself to be a woman as it drew closer. Cathleen Bates gently landed on the tip of her left foot, and grinned a thousand-watt celebrity smile as she planted both of her fists on her waist.
The crowd surged forward, halving the distance they had kept previously, and the soft muttering and background conversations swelled to the sound of an unruly classroom. All around them, camera flashes began to go off like twinkling stars.
When two popular heroes met in public, there were always certain expectations. And with superstars like Cathy and Toshinori, they knew the script by heart.
The towering blonde man cracked his own world-famous smile, and clasped hands with his former student while laughing. “Star!” he boomed in his heroic voice. “You’re looking stronger every time I see you! Staying out of trouble, I hope?”
The amazonian woman barked a laugh. “Staying out of trouble? Me? Never! And what are you talking about, saying I’m stronger? Have you looked in a mirror lately, Master? You haven’t aged a day!”
She leaned in conspiratorially and loudly stage-whispered “What’s your secret?”
All Might winked at her, and held one thick finger against his lips in a shushing motion. They both laughed, and the stuttering clicks of cameras became audible as more and more phones were pulled out, documenting the meeting.
Torino had a lot of complaints about both of his former students, but if nothing else, they certainly knew how to play a crowd. Those two idiots could probably stop a war just by standing around and grinning at people.
He couldn’t criticize it. This was what Toshinori had fought for, his whole career. Torino wasn’t sure anyone else could have done it.
Truthfully, he wasn’t entirely sure how Toshinori had managed it. He never would have imagined the scrawny teenager that Nana had pulled out of a dumpster could have come this far.
The old man cracked a smile in spite of himself. Credit where credit was due. The world was at peace now, because of stuff like this.
Casually, in a way that absolutely did not look like either hero was turning their backs on their fans or trying to escape the scene, both Cathy and Toshinori began walking towards the doors of the WHA building, chatting idly.
Perhaps out of respect for the World Heroes Association, and for where they were in general, the crowd did not try to follow.
Stopping under the awning right next to the door, the muscular woman turned to face her former teachers. Her smile this time was gentler, but no less genuine. “So, what really brings the two of you here, then?”
“They’re waiting for me,” a voice replied behind them.
The man who walked out of the WHA building looked like almost every other suit Torino had seen in his life.
Male, of some indeterminate age between 25 and 40. Maybe a little taller than normal, but not by much. Dark hair that could have been wavy, or perhaps even curly, but had been cut short and aggressively combed into a professional looking side part. Clean shaven, except for a somewhat old-fashioned mustache trimmed in a rounded-square shape. Utilitarian glasses, square and a bit on the larger side. Pale skin, but not unhealthy.
The man wore a charcoal colored European suit tailored in a two-button style, with a deep V that showed off his striped tie and dress shirt. A pair of polished Oxfords that clicked professionally against the sidewalk finished off the ensemble.
Midoriya Hisashi looked like every other businessman on the planet. He would have vanished into a crowd effortlessly, whether that crowd was the line at a bank or in the middle of downtown Tokyo.
Almost. There was one detail, just one, that made him stand out. That gave him away to Sorahiko Torino as something… different.
Hisashi had bright grey eyes, sharp and clever. Sharper than the eyes of some daily grind businessman. And there was a subtle coldness to him. A pressure behind his gaze, a confidence in the way he walked. It was a presence that no mere pencil pusher should have.
Were it not for his eyes, Torino could have forgotten the man entirely.
As it was, there was something unsettling about the elder Midoriya. It almost reminded the old man of Sasaki Mirai, Toshinori’s former sidekick. Once called Sparrow, now Sir Nighteye.
Mirai was a fortune teller. He had a tactile prescience quirk, if he touched you he could read your future. He could only do it once per day, it had a 24 hour cooldown. But his readings had never been wrong. Not once, in his entire life.
Torino had seen goons thrice Mirai’s size and ten times his weight get picked apart in a fight after being touched by the man, because he could foresee all of their moves before they even made them. It was a terrifying ability when used properly. Torino could count on the fingers of his hands the number of people he was certain could take Mirai in a fistfight after having their futures traced by him. And two of those people, Toshinori and Cathy, were here today.
Midoriya Hisashi’s cold grey eyes were the same as Mirai’s. They were the eyes of someone who knew everything about you. The eyes of someone who had total, unshakable confidence.
They were the eyes of somebody who was completely certain that they were the most dangerous person in the room, and had absolutely nothing to fear.
No pencil pusher should have eyes like that. No matter what organization they worked for.
“Director Midoriya!” Cathy exclaimed brightly. “What on earth are you doing here? Last I heard, you were in Europe, at that conference in Klayd!”
The businessman smiled slightly, and adjusted his tie. “The broad strokes of the Relief and Intervention Treaty have already been worked out, so I don’t really have any reason to be there anymore. I’m here to spend time with my son, and to rubber stamp the documents that let him look at your files.”
“Your son-?” Cathy asked, confusion on her handsome face, before she suddenly gasped and grinned, a large fist slapping into an open palm.
“Wait, really? You mean that kid? I heard his name, but I never made the connection!” She laughed. “What a small world!”
The businessman gave a rueful half smile. “Sometimes it feels like it’s getting smaller every day. I just came from lunch with them, they’re still down there throwing ideas around. I think you’ll be impressed with what they’re coming up with. Feel like giving them a practical demonstration or two?”
Cathleen Bates smiled slyly and put her hands on her hips. “Trying to hustle me out of the picture, eh? Do you really think you can get rid of me so easily, director?”
There was a beat, and Hisashi looked nonplussed. He wasn’t short by any means, but he looked almost puny next to the giant woman.
“Well, you’re absolutely right!” she announced, while striking a pose and flexing. “Anything for the fans! Especially the superfans!”
Hisashi’s lips twitched slightly. “They’re in private cafeteria 5 on the basem*nt sublevel. Keep the property damage to a minimum and try not to do anything excessively unnatural. Or at least not anything permanent. I don’t want to deal with any Ruby Alerts while I’m here.”
“No promises!” the blonde amazon said while laughing.
Her smile faded slightly. “Master, we should meet up later. We need to talk.”
Toshinori blinked slightly, still holding his own grin. “Whatever about, Star? You know you can always ask me anything.”
“A lot of my backers are pushing for another team-up. For the publicity, and to help tamp down on crime. Normally, I don’t care much about what they think, but the last request came from the Department of Homeland Heroics.”
Her eyes flicked down briefly to his injured side, invisible beneath the skin-tight spandex suit. “I know you’re looking into retirement options soon. I don’t want to push you too hard, but-”
Toshinori smiled his All Might smile, and patted his former student on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Cathy. I’m sure we can work something out. I’m not done just yet.”
“I have contacts in their office,” Hisashi mentioned. “I’ll make a note to ensure something mutually beneficial is worked out.”
Cathy shot Hisashi a relieved smile. “Thanks, director! You’re the best, as always!”
The star-spangled heroine disappeared into the office building, presumably to find the kids and cause some inevitable havoc. Torino narrowed his eyes.
So Cathy knew Midoriya Hisashi. Interesting. He was aware that the WHA had a larger presence in the Americas than some other countries, but even so, the World Heroes Association tended to stay out of the affairs of heroes when they weren’t operating on an international level.
What was the connection there? Why would those two know each other by name? Hisashi was a puzzle, and the retired pro had too few of the pieces for his liking. It was worth looking into.
“I understand we all have questions for each other,” Hisashi said evenly. “I prepared something in advance for that. A place we can talk.”
Toshinori and Torino followed the businessman into the building, and took a different turn than Cathleen Bates had. Instead of the elevators, they walked down a flight of stairs, emerging into what was clearly a large underground parking garage of some sort. A vaulted space of cement pillars and endless rows of clean, upscale vehicles.
A car was waiting for them, an expensive-looking luxury sedan. As was another man.
“This is an associate of mine, who is playing chaperone for me today,” Hisashi explained. “His name is Haruki Ichiwaka.”
Torino narrowed his eyes.
The man looked to be about six feet tall, maybe a hair taller. He was clean-shaven and bald, but in the deliberate polished way that suggested it was a choice. The only hair on his head was his eyelashes; even his brows were gone. The lack of hair made his bright, sky-blue eyes stand out even more.
He wore a nice but nondescript suit, black on black with a clean white shirt underneath. No tie. Hisashi’s outfit may have been business-simple, but this was even moreso. In Torino’s eyes, every part of it screamed security detail, from the off-the-rack colors to the slightly bulkier, American style cut of the jacket. Which could much more easily hide a ballistic vest. Or a gun.
This wasn’t the sort of muscle somebody who worked for a criminal organization would employ. They favored mutants, or people with obvious and dangerous-at-a-glance quirks. The average height, average build, and quiet stance screamed public sector to Gran. This was somebody who worked with the government. A bodyguard who didn’t need to show off.
But it wasn’t the man's clothes or his eyes that caught Torino’s attention. It was the two black stripes running down his head, each one about the width of a finger, and the third cutting horizontally across his cheeks. The first two started from somewhere high up, possibly even the back of his skull, and then came across the top of his head in parallel lines. They intersected with his eyes before passing on either side of his mouth. Then they curled underneath his chin and down his throat, disappearing somewhere beneath his white buttoned collar. The third line also seemed to begin somewhere on the back of his skull, and ran just underneath both of his ears before crossing over his lips, painting them and the skin around them black..
The world of quirks was an age of chaos. A detail like that wouldn’t stand out at all, not to anyone. You saw weirder stuff taking the bus. Anyone who looked at the man would instantly assume it was something to do with his quirk, or some sort of cosmetic mutation, and wouldn’t give it a second thought.
But Gran knew those stripes.
Healing quirks were breathtakingly rare. They were among the least common, and the most sought-after, abilities that existed. Even a minor healing quirk could, for all intents and purposes, perform miracles.
When Toshinori had been crippled in his fight with All For One, it had taken a massive team of doctors to put him back together again. No expense had been spared in the effort. It was one of the reasons Gran knew that the Pro Hero All Might was living on borrowed time. Too many people had seen the world’s most famous man dead on a gurney to keep quiet about it. Yes, doctor-patient confidentiality existed, and everyone involved had been bribed to a breathtaking degree.
But in Gran’s mind, that changed nothing. Three people could keep a secret if two of them were dead. Fifty was a lost cause.
The secret of One For All as a transferable quirk could be kept. It had been kept for generations.
But the fact that Toshinori Yagi was a fearfully mortal man, who would one day have to step down from his job as the Symbol of Peace… that news breaking was inevitable.
One of the doctors who had worked on Toshinori was flown in from Germany. A Dr. Strickmann, if the old pro recalled correctly.
His German was very rusty, but even so, he was pretty sure Strickmann literally meant ‘knitting man.’ People had gotten so unoriginal with names since quirks happened. At least his own family had tried to be a bit poetic about it with their sky names, damnit!
Strickmann’s power was called ‘Zip Up.’ When the man pinched two objects together and made a zipping motion, he could fuse those objects together on a submolecular level. It was a seamless attachment that worked on organic and inorganic substances. And, more to the point, it worked on living tissue as well.
The good doctor’s ability wasn’t a healing quirk per-se, but in a world starved of such powers, anything that could help improve someone’s health was worth its weight in gold. And Zip Up could reattach limbs and nerve endings just as easily as it could fuse pencils to notebooks or coins to carseats. It was also a permanent effect; anything that he fused together with Zip Up would remain that way forever unless Strickmann himself personally un-zipped them.
There was only one downside to Strickmann’s ability. It left a very visible, very obvious mark.
The black lines.
Anywhere Dr. Strickmann had zipped, there would be a thick black line over the affected area, approximately the width of a grown man’s finger. His zips left no scarring, and the line was purely cosmetic, it wasn’t a different type of tissue or any sort of altered substance. It was a pigment change only.
Even so, that drawback alone meant the doctor was never called upon for more frivolous or cosmetic surgeries. The wealthy elite didn’t want their bodies marred by such marks.
No, Dr. Strickmann was an emergency surgeon. He was brought in for desperate, high-profile cases. To suture together nerve endings, to reattach limbs.
To help glue the world’s number 1 pro hero back together after being punched so hard in the stomach the only thing keeping him in one piece was his spine.
Toshinori didn’t have any visible black lines on him. That’s because all of Strickmann’s work had been internal, fusing organ tissue back together and reattaching muscles and ligaments to bone. Without the good doctor’s help, it was doubtful the blonde hero would have ever walked again under his own power. He would have been confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his days.
Dr. Strickmann’s career and accomplishments were all after Torino’s time. But thanks to Toshinori, the retired pro was familiar with the doctor’s work.
Familiar enough to recognize it when he saw it.
Haruki Ichiwaka. Or Ichiwaka Haruki, as the man would be more properly called in Japanese convention. Those lines on his face were Zip Up lines from Strickmann, Torino was sure of it.
And that, more than anything else, gave the retired pro pause.
The old man had a rather vivid imagination. And unfortunately, he didn’t need to use it to conjure up the kind of injury someone would have to sustain to warrant those lines. He had seen such things first-hand before.
At some point in the past, Ichiwaka’s entire face must have been peeled off of his skull. Like a rubber glove pulled from a hand. The lines went so far back, to the very back of his head, and then came all the way down and past his throat, terminating somewhere beneath his shirt.
It was a horrific wound. Something that would make even the strongest men blanch. Torino wasn’t too proud to admit that if he had come across someone who had been flensed like that on the scene of a disaster, he would have kept on looking. That was a lost cause injury, a dead man walking wound. Almost cartoonish in how grotesque it was.
But Ichiwaka had lived. He had survived whatever did that to him, and been given medical aid by one of the best surgeons on the planet. He had returned to duty.
Ichiwaka Haruki and Midoriya Hisashi were like two peas in a pod. Either one could go missing in a crowd, but to someone who was paying attention, they were both clearly more than their unassuming appearances suggested.
Midoriya Hisashi, and his Biggest Threat In The Room confidence. Those cold, calculating grey eyes. And now Ichiwaka Haruki, who had no visible quirk or mutation at all, but had apparently walked off being skinned alive. Peeled like a damn orange.
Both men epitomized the World Heroes Association. Subtle, understated. Government-level professional. And dangerous. You’d never notice either man, standing next to a crowd of heroes. And that was the point.
The WHA didn’t need to advertise itself. Heroes did, but not the WHA. Self-promotion was pointless. They just needed to get the job done.
There was a click, and Ichiwaka pulled open the back door of the luxury sedan, silently ushering them in.
Sorahiko Torino steeled himself before climbing in. Toshinori could handle any villain in the world, but this was a different kind of fight, on a different sort of battlefield.
He had a feeling this wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as he had hoped.
The exterior of the luxury sedan may have looked normal, but the interior had clearly been heavily modified.
The front of the car was walled completely off from the back, while the rear had been converted into two rows of seating that faced each other. They were spaced far enough apart to fit a small island in the middle, which held an ashtray, drink holders, and a small refrigerator embedded into the molding. There was plenty of leg and headroom to fit all three men comfortably, even Toshinori, with the island serving as a kind of makeshift table. The seats were made of dark, clean leather, the carpeting was black, and the interior was spotless; obsidian plastic and polished brass with a tasteful splash of wooden trim.
The businessman had been right. This was the perfect place to have a private conversation. In fact, Gran Torino wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that was precisely what this car had been made for.
Torino slid into what would have been the back seat, facing towards the front, and Toshinori took the seat next to him. The door closed, the heavily tinted windows showing a clear view of the outside even though they had completely blocked the view within. A moment later, the door on the other side of the car opened, and Hisashi took a seat across from the two heroes.
The door slammed shut, and there was a brief pause. Then a raspy voice came through an almost invisible speaker on the wall.
“We’re all set, sir.”
Hisashi reached over and touched a button on his armrest, holding it down with a finger. “Good. Put us on the hyperloop around the island and take the scenic route. Keep going until I say otherwise.”
“Understood.”
Hisashi took his finger off the button, and the car started so cleanly that somebody who hadn’t been paying attention might have missed it. The luxury clearly wasn’t just skin deep; Torino could barely tell they were moving. If it hadn’t been for the windows, he might have believed they weren’t.
Hisashi fished around in the inside pocket of his jacket before pulling out a box of cigarettes. He deftly slipped one out. Torino made note of the box; it was some American brand he had never seen before. They looked expensive.
“By the way,” the businessman said nonchalantly. “You can release that form if you wish, All Might. When I said this car was safe, I meant it.”
Torino and Toshinori glanced at each other. The elderly man shrugged, giving the younger man an ‘it’s up to you’ look.
The towering, musclebound blonde exhaled, and in a puff of steam, the world’s mightiest hero was gone. In it’s place was a man who looked like he’d spent the last decade of his life fighting a losing battle with some terminal disease. The All Might costume sagged on Toshinori’s skeletal frame, and his neck looked unnaturally long now that it had lost all of its muscle mass. The two iconic fronds of blonde hair that stuck up from his bangs wilted, becoming crimped and dull. The befrailed man sat perched on his seat like an oversized buzzard, his own clothes pooling around him as he breathed a sigh of relief.
Only his eyes remained unchanged. Although they now had dark, bruised rings of exhaustion and stress around them, they were the same fierce and piercing blue they had always been.
Toshinori and Hisashi locked eyes. The businessman seemed unfazed. “How did you know?” Toshinori asked.
Hisashi’s lips twitched slightly. “It’s my job to know secrets,” he commented. “But if you insist, it’s because of the lengths that were gone to in order to save you. Quite a lot of medical personnel were involved, both in your surgery and your rehabilitation. It required… coordination. And extensive consultations.”
Torino snorted. “I knew that was going to bite us in the ass one day.”
“Relax,” Hisashi said placatingly, a half smile on his lips. “We ran interference for you on that. Your secret is safe for as long as you want to keep it that way. We look after all the heroes who work with us.”
But Torino didn’t relax, because the businessman’s tone didn’t match his eyes at all. Hisashi’s words were soft and playful, like those of an old friend, but his eyes were cold. Calculating.
Toshinori seemed to notice it as well.
Hisashi put his cigarette between his lips and breathed in. The tip, which no one had lit, smoldered and began to burn. The businessman smiled and breathed out, but not even a wisp of smoke appeared when he did.
Torino’s eyes narrowed. Midoriya Hisashi was a fire breather, that much they knew. Did he have a third lung? Some kind of internal gasbag?
“I hope you don’t mind if I smoke,” the businessman said smoothly. “Nervous habit.” Torino doubted that. Hisashi’s eyes looked like he could perform open heart surgery on a live tiger. ‘Nervous’ was the last word he’d use to describe it.
The businessman gestured towards Toshinori with the hand he held his cigarette with. “I understand the nature of your injury, but I promise you, there won’t be any smoke.” And true to his word, there hadn’t been. Even the cigarette seemed to be burning cleanly, the ember having dulled significantly the moment the other end left his lips.
“It’s fine,” the blonde hero said. “That sort of thing doesn’t bother me. I may be down a lung, but if I couldn’t handle a bit of smoke, I would have needed to retire long before now.”
Hisashi gave another smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Good, good. I’m glad to hear it.”
“I suppose we’re long overdue for introductions, so let’s get that out of the way before we get started,” the businessman said. “My name is Hisashi Midoriya. I’m the Field Director of Disaster Assessment and Coordinated Tactical Response, which is a division of the World Heroes Association.”
Torino’s eyes automatically flicked down, checking for some sort of badge or identification, but the man’s suit was plain and unadorned, as was his undershirt.
“And you’re Toshinori Yagi, hero name All Might,” the businessman continued. “Born quirkless, eighth wielder of the legacy quirk One For All, given to you by your mentor, Nana Shimura, hero name Updraft.”
The compartment went deathly still.
“And you,” Hisashi said, gesturing with his cigarette, “are Sorahiko Torino, hero name Gran Torino, the Lone Star hero. Former partner to Updraft, and the only living man to help two separate users of One For All adapt to the power.”
Hisashi placed his cigarette down onto the ashtray’s edge.
“Which I suppose,” he continued, “explains why you’re suddenly interacting so much with my son. Doesn’t it?”
His smile was disarming, his voice nonchalant. But his eyes were so, so cold.
“Ah, but where are my manners! Did either of you want something to drink? There’s bottled water in the refrigerator, and I believe we have beer and whiskey as well.”
“Who are you?” Torino asked cuttingly, a razor sharp edge on his voice. Toshinori’s hands, which were about the only part of him that didn’t change size, flexed before clenching into fists.
Hisashi smiled. “Not someone you want to fight in an enclosed space,” he said blithely. “These cars are sealed as a security measure. There’s not really enough air in here for me, let alone the two of you.”
Torino’s eyes narrowed. So it likely was a third lung, then. Or something similar. It looked like breathing fire wasn’t the only trick Midoriya Hisashi could pull with his quirk, just like how jetting around wasn’t Torino’s sole play either.
The insinuation was clear. Hisashi could pull in all the air in the compartment with a breath. Choking them both and effectively turning off Gran’s own quirk.
Son of a bitch, he’d even gotten Toshinori to turn back.
“Realized something?” Hisashi said, a teasing note in his voice. There was a flicker in those cold eyes, a spark of an emotion the retired pro didn’t quite catch.
“Yeah,” the old man said, thumbing the top of his walking stick as he prepared to use what was inside of it. “That you’re a son of a bitch.”
Hisashi threw back his head and laughed, and this time Torino realized what that flicker had been.
Amusem*nt. The elder Midoriya was toying with them.
Toshinori just looked confused.
“Well, you noticed, and I suppose I’m glad for that, at least,” the mustachioed man said. His eyes were still cold, but not as sharp as before. “I’d hate to have my son trained by an idiot.”
“How do you know about One For All?” Toshinori asked, rephrasing Torino’s earlier question. “The only other people who should know about that are dead.”
“I can guess what you’re assuming,” the businessman said. “I assure you, I’m no friend of the demon you fought in Deika City, and neither is anyone I work with.”
Hisashi’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “I’ve made sure of it.”
He reached down and pulled open the door of the mini-fridge, fishing out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. “Do you drink?” he asked, looking at Toshinori.
“Not anymore,” the skeletal blonde replied. “I’ll have a water, please.”
“And I’d like an explanation,” Gran Torino interjected, his own eyes narrowed. “Hold the bullsh*t.”
Hisashi smiled again. “Of course,” he said before handing Toshinori a bottle of water and tipping a bit of whiskey into each of the chilled glasses.
Ever the investigator, Torino noted that the way he handled the drinks reeked of American social norms, not Japanese ones. He even used their names in a westernized ordering, surname last. Hisashi must have spent a great deal of time overseas, for those habits to override his native ones.
The businessman handed Torino his glass of whiskey. The old man took it, but didn’t drink. Hisashi quirked an amused eyebrow. “Waiting for me to drink first? Your paranoia is as extreme as the files suggested.”
“I doubt you know very much about me at all,” Torino rebutted.
Hisashi smirked slightly, his eyes still cold, as he took a sip of his own share of the amber alcohol. “We have an extensive case file on the generational disaster that has been transferable quirks, along with everyone who has ever been associated with them. You may be surprised at what we have on you.”
The businessman swirled his glass slightly. “It’s funny, in a way. ‘How I know’ is a question that matters a great deal to the two of you. But it matters very little to me, and is perhaps the least dangerous thing we’ll be talking about today. At least from my perspective.”
He sat his glass down in an indent on his side of the compartment. “The short, and inadequate, answer is that we meet today under a long string of truly regrettable and unfortunate coincidences. None of which are actually either of your faults. But I know you won’t accept that. I wouldn’t either.”
He leaned back slightly in his seat, his eyes once again adopting that colder edge. “The correct answer, we neither have the time to go over, nor do you have the appropriate clearance to hear it.”
“I’m not so sure about either of those things,” Toshinori interjected, his bright blue eyes firm and unyielding.
“I am,” Hisashi replied with a soft smile, matching gazes with the greatest superhero in the world. “However, I’m willing to compromise a bit, and meet you in the middle. If only so we can hurry along to the questions that actually matter.”
He picked his cigarette back up from the tray, and again, the end glowed the moment he put it to his lips. The stiff paper peeled back incrementally, and there wasn’t even a hint of smoke to be seen.
“The World Heroes Association has always known about All For One, both the quirk and the man named after it. We were on the ground floor of helping to cover it up, after all. The interference various international governments ran on that issue is the sole reason that Destro is known as the world’s first Supervillain.” Hisashi smiled slightly. “He certainly was a convenient scapegoat to draw eyes away from the real monster.”
“We already know this,” Torino said. “The Japanese government knows about All For One, which by extension means the WHA has to. You should have access to all of their files about past villains.”
“Not all of them,” Hisashi said, gesturing with his cigarette. “They do fight us about that. All the governments do. Nobody likes to publicly admit to the villainous relatives they may or may not have. But the reason this matters is because it’s one of the reasons why your secret is known to more people than you’d probably like.”
Hisashi tapped some ash into the tray, and put the cigarette back in his mouth. “The World Heroes Association began to get suspicious around Daigoro Banjo’s time.”
“Yeah?” Torino drawled. “And what did that gorilla in a biker jacket do to-”
“The case file,” Toshinori interjected, understanding glinting in his shaded blue eyes.
Torino turned to look at his old student, confusion on his face. “Huh?”
But Hisashi’s eyes were bright, and his smile suddenly showed an edge of teeth. “The file?” he asked. “What about it?”
“You said you kept a case file on All For One,” Toshinori elaborated. “An open case following transferable quirks, which means him and his power. You said you kept detailed records of everyone who was ever involved, which would include the people fighting against him, right? To make sure you didn’t miss any loose ends. That’s how you noticed, isn’t it? A recurring event, a line of master-student relationships where everyone in the chain had their quirk dramatically evolve and become stronger.”
Toshinori folded his large fingers together and narrowed his eyes. “We were just having this conversation earlier today, about whether or not young Izuku should let my niece in on the secret. There was a concern that she might figure it out on her own, because she’s too close to me. She knows what One For All looks like. That’s how you guessed. Quirk evolutions, especially dramatic ones, are very rare. I suppose the idea that it happened five times in a line of people who all knew each other and fought the same villain was a bridge too far?”
And for the first time since either man had met him, Midoriya Hisashi gave a full, genuine smile.
“I must say, I’m impressed. I didn’t think you’d be the one to get it first. I also thought I’d have to explain more before one of you figured it out.”
Hisashi gestured at the blonde with his cigarette. “Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. For all his cunning, Lone Star has been out of the game for decades. You, on the other hand, are still actively running the largest and most successful hero agency on the planet. Alone.”
He put his cigarette back in his mouth, and the ember on the tip flared. “I tip my hat to you, Detective Yagi. Clearly, Sparrow was never the brains of the operation, before or after he left. But you’re wrong on a few points.”
The businessman tapped a bit more ash into the tray, and sat his cigarette back down. “It wasn’t five times in a row. We know little of Yoichi Shigaraki. All For One’s brother was born in an age when documentation was sketchy and birth certificates were no longer being issued. He’s our assumed ‘Patient Zero.’ Both he and the quirk seem to disappear, but documentation picks up again a few generations later with Hikage Shinomori. Society was beginning to rebuild, governments were starting to function again at a first world level. People in that era lived to see Destro rise and fall.”
Hisashi sipped his whiskey. “Shinomori lived a normal life, or at least as normal as anyone could when many people were still engaging in vigilante activity just to stay alive. Then one day, he makes contact with a person tagged as having an antagonistic association with All For One. They die, and shortly afterwards, Shinomori goes into seclusion for what would be the rest of his life. A 22 year old man disappears into the mountains out of the blue, reappears 18 years later looking like he’s 90, and makes contact with an infamous and highly documented Japanese hero, Daigoro Banjo. Then Shinomori dies days later. At the exact same time, Banjo undergoes a quirk evolution with no clear instigating event. And for the rest of his career until his own death, he would display superspeed, super strength, uncanny senses, and inhuman durability. In addition to his own original quirk, Blackwhip.”
Hisashi’s shot glass clinked as he sat it back down on the table between them. There was a long moment of silence.
“I think,” Toshinori supplied, “I can see how the WHA would become suspicious. I’m guessing you followed the trail back to Shigaraki? And extrapolated from there that All For One must have possessed a brother quirk, which somehow passed on strength to other people?”
Hisashi tilted his hand back and forth in a ‘so-so’ gesture. “More or less, yes. The WHA wasn’t officially founded until Shinomori’s own generation, but we were created using the resources and files of other organizations at the time. It was only when the full case file on All For One was constructed that the people involved realized they were likely dealing with two transferable superpowers, not just one.”
“I’ve never heard such a pack of horsesh*t in my life.”
Both younger men turned to look at the elderly pro. Toshinori frowned. But Hisashi slipped back into his cold smile like a man putting on a pair of well-worn gloves.
“Oh?” the businessman said.
Torino scowled. “First of all, you’ve told us nothing we couldn’t guess on our own,” he said, raising a finger and counting his points. “The World Heroes Association has a file on the worst villain that’s ever lived? What an amazing tip-off that is.”
He raised another finger. “Secondly, while I’ll grant you this case file of yours probably has some wild bullsh*t in it, I’m not going to sit here and let you just gloss over what an insane leap in logic it is to go from some guys getting randomly stronger to All For One having a secret brother quirk. That’s not a natural assumption to make, not on those facts.”
And then the old man’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and he raised a third finger. “And absolutely none of that explains why in this or any other hell you would know the name ‘One For All.’”
Toshinori’s own eyes widened in shock, but the retired pro pressed on. “I could almost believe everything else. But not that. Shigaraki Yoichi didn’t give his own quirk a name, as far as we know. But even if he’s the one who named it, that still means only around twelve people ever knew what it was called. Fifteen, I suppose, after today.”
What Midoriya Hisashi had said was true: Torino Sorahiko had been out of the game for decades. Toshinori Yagi, by contrast, was still actively running a world-class hero agency more-or-less alone.
But whatever edge the elderly man had lost to time, he made up for in cunning and treachery.
You couldn’t teach at UA for ten years, with ‘the’ Nezu as your boss, without possessing both in spades.
Three counting fingers went down, and one accusatory finger pointed at those kill-a-tiger eyes.
“You’re lying,” Torino said flatly. “You have no right to know that name, no way you could have ever possibly uncovered it through mere observation. You are lying out of both sides of your mouth at the same time.”
The cigarette’s ember flared up as Hisashi breathed in. Whatever coldness had seeped out of his eyes as he spoke with All Might returned full force.
“You don’t get,” he said, enunciating every word as he tapped his cigarette into the ashtray. “Any points for repeating something I told you back to me.”
Torino’s eyes narrowed. “The hell do you-”
“I said,” the businessman continued, cutting the retired pro off, “That the simple truth, which you would not accept, is that we are here through unfortunate coincidence, and nothing more. Then I said that the real truth, you’re not cleared to hear. Nor, for that matter, do I think you would believe it even if I did share it. So I would compromise. For your sake. To hurry this little interrogation along to the parts that actually matter.”
Hisashi sat his half-burnt cigarette down on the side of the tray, and laced his fingers together over his knee. “I told you, up front, that I was going to lie to you. That I would hold something back. Do you want a treat for ‘figuring’ it out?”
Anger flashed in the old man’s eyes. “You-!”
“Gran,” Toshinori said quietly. The retired teacher stilled.
“Toshi, this is-”
“It’s fine,” the skeletal blonde said. Although he was speaking with his former mentor, he had locked eyes with the besuited man across from him, his gaze unwavering.
“I believe you,” the hero said. His words carried the weight of conviction. Even wasted away, there was a willpower behind those shaded eyes that wouldn’t lose to Hisashi’s. “I agree with Gran that you are obviously hiding how you know the name ‘One For All.’ You admit as much yourself. But I believe you have good intentions. I don’t think you’re an enemy. So I’m willing to let it go… on a condition.”
Hisashi quirked a dark eyebrow. “And that is?”
Toshinori Yagi clasped his large hands together. “I’m more than willing to believe there are things in this world that I shouldn’t know. That I have no right to know. But I’m still All Might. There aren’t very many doors that are closed to me. And I’m a lot less willing to believe any of those things in connection to my own quirk. You say I don’t have the clearance? To know why you would know secrets about my own abilities? I’d like an explanation. To the extent that you can give one. You say that these questions don’t matter to you, but they do to me.”
Hisashi sat for a long moment, looking at the skeletal blonde before him. Then he nodded, a flicker of amusem*nt and something else flashing across his face. “That’s fair.”
The businessman pulled the bottle of whiskey and a third shot glass out of the refrigerator, and sat it down on the island between them. “When you said you don’t drink anymore, is that a can’t, or a won’t?”
“Won’t,” Toshinori said softly. “I still have my liver, but with the medications I sometimes have to take, I try not to strain it.”
“A good policy,” Hisashi said, and then filled the third glass, before topping off his own. He didn’t bother offering any to Torino, as the man had yet to touch his.
All Might looked down at the shot glass that was clearly meant for him. He blinked. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand.”
“You will,” Hisashi said, the bottle clinking as it went back in the refrigerator. The man straightened back up in his seat, and then picked up his half-spent cigarette. He put it casually between his lips, and with a single pull, the end blazed, and the paper rolled back all the way to the filter, finishing the cigarette off in less than a second. He then casually discarded the calcified stick of ash into the tray, where it began to crumble.
Still, there wasn’t a wisp of smoke to be seen.
Toshinori was never particularly interested in other people’s quirks, it wasn’t a field he felt much attraction towards. But he had to admit, even he was starting to get curious. Wasn’t young Izuku’s father a fire breather? What kind of quirk did the younger man have, that let him blow through a cigarette in one shot like some sort of cartoon character?
“Have you ever heard of Refúgio Verde?” Hisashi asked, as he took a sip from his own glass. “Or the Projeto Floresta Saudade?”
The other two men glanced at each other, before shaking their heads.
“That’s not surprising,” Hisashi admitted. “They’re both pretty far out of your wheelhouse. Do you recall news articles about a huge forest fire in South America, around two and a half years ago?”
That got a reaction. Recognition flickered across Toshinori’s face, and Torino slowly nodded. “Yeah,” the old man admitted. “I remember something like that. It was a big deal internationally. A lot of people died. The WHA got involved in the relief effort.”
“We were involved before then,” Hisashi said, gesturing with his shot glass. “Refúgio Verde means Green Haven in Portuguese. It’s the name of one of four man-made rainforests that are part of an ongoing relief effort to create new habitats for wildlife, as well as zones for sustainable logging and rubber harvesting. They’re all run out of Novoporto.”
Torino knew that name, if nothing else. Some nations had survived the chaos of the Dawn. Others had not. Given human nature, It would be stranger if the maps had somehow remained unchanged. Many zones that were notorious for conflict or hostility with neighbors had changed hands, or otherwise redrawn their borders. In other places, entirely new nations had risen from the ashes of the old.
In response to aggression from Russia prior to the Dawn, the various nations on the Scandinavian peninsula had joined together under a single banner. Their identities were retained as independent states, but officially, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and the Faroe Islands were no longer nations. Instead, they were Skanesland, the United Confederation of Nords.
Military adventurism and government corruption had displaced millions of souls during the period immediately preceding the advent of quirks. Those that survived gathered in the ruined wake of the most violent clashes and fights, lost souls living in abandoned territory like rats hiding in the shadows of giants. From the ashes of the Balkans rose Otheon and Klayde, twin-nations with breathtaking scenery, rich cultural traditions, and a troubled past.
The United Kingdom died. An assembly of convenience and modern sensibilities, abandoned in the dirt when law and order broke down. No empire can survive if they cannot teach their own children to admire their flag; a harsh lesson learned by many during the Dawn. In the wake of it’s passing, as chaos once again gave way to order, Ireland, Whales, Scotland, and England reunified again. Under a different deal, and with a new royal family. A lesson had been learned, and a new crown had been forged. Beneath the symbol of the white dragon of England and the red dragon of Rome, Britannia was brought into being.
And then there was Novoporto, or ‘New Harbor’ in Portuguese.
South America had become a hell on earth during the Dawn. In some parts of the world, governments managed to cling to scraps of power. The lights may have gone out, but the water kept running. Or perhaps clean water was scarce, but the internet stayed up. Not so in South America. Chaos became anarchy, and then anarchy became bedlam. Quirks rang the death-knell, and over the span of three decades, nearly a dozen countries fell like a slow-motion scene of dominoes. The collapse of each worsening the conditions of it’s neighbors in turn, until finally the whole house of cards came down.
Those who did not die to famine or bullets were forced to contend with disease, as monsters long thought vanquished reappeared to haunt the world again. Polio and leprosy were common, as were tuberculosis and elephantiasis. It was a culling more cruel than any war. Only Chile clung to life, due to a combination of it’s wealth, immense coastline, and strong culture of independent fishermen. As the interior of the continent crumbled and burned, Chile and the surviving refugees congregated by the sea. As long as there was fish, salt, and rain, there was hope.
That had been the real killer, during the Dawn. Every UA teacher had to work at least one other subject besides Heroics, and Torino Sorahiko’s had been History. Society had this grand notion that the Dawn had been some huge procession of wars and uprisings. A great and monolithic parade of conflicts. Because that was an easy idea to understand.
But like most common misconceptions, it was a gross oversimplification. Humanity had entered the Dawn with just over 9 billion souls. They had left it with less than one. It was population shrinkage severe enough to affect the fossil record. Harsh enough to change the very climate of the planet. No war could ever account for that, not even a series of wars.
People had fought and died in wars and insurrections, yes. But the real killers had been time, starvation, and disease. With international trade dead in the water, first world medicine and food suddenly became a limited resource. Millions died fighting over basic necessities, or from simple and preventable causes like dysentery and dehydration. Then people began to die of old age, and the newer generations became smaller and smaller as fewer and fewer people had children at all.
The world could support billions of humans, if nations and infrastructure were carefully and thoughtfully designed. But ‘careful’ and ‘thoughtful’ were not words anyone, alive or dead, would have used to describe the pre-Dawn governments or their financial backers. And when the lights went out, the medicine stopped circulating, the taps stopped running, and the police stopped responding to calls… reality ensued, with all the impartial brutality nature is known for.
War hadn’t been the primary cause. It was famine, disease, and a flatlining birthrate over multiple generations. That was how, in the span of five generations, the grand tapestry of man shrank down to a tenth of what it had been.
Africa, India, China, and South America bore the brunt of it. And few places exemplified the near-total collapse the way South America did.
In the wake of the Dawn, new order was imposed over the ruins of the old. And in South America, that new order was called Novoporto. It was a unified effort between the Chilean government and Portuguese settlers, with significant financial aid from the newly reborn Britannia. Together, they created a new nation even larger than the old Brazil, and taking up much of the same territory.
In less than three generations, Novoporto had become a first world country. It was a success story, a feather in the cap of the Heroic Age. Held up by many as proof that humanity had truly evolved and become a better species.
Sorahiko Torino wasn’t convinced. Such grandiosity stank of hubris to the elderly pro, who had seen the worst of what society had to offer in his long career. He knew just how much of a lie all that ‘we’ve evolved’ rhetoric was.
Humanity had changed, yes. But the nature of man remained the same. War changes, but war never changes. Pride goeth before the fall. Haughty spirits always broke beneath the weight of their own ambitions.
The old man knew that one day, the arrogance that had become so prolific in the Heroic Age would end up biting them all in the ass. He just hoped everybody he cared about would be dead by then, so they didn’t have to see it.
Hisashi produced his cigarettes again, and deftly flicked one out before returning the box to his jacket.
“Projeto Floresta Saudade. Projeto and floresta mean forest project, but saudade doesn’t translate well out of Portuguese. It describes a form of melancholic longing or yearning, and is a feature of classic Portuguese literature. The closest translation would probably be mournful nostalgia.”
The businessman placed the fresh cigarette between his lips, but didn’t light it. “Project Forest Nostalgia is a pretty good name for an effort to recreate lost rainforests. But it was more than that. Floresta Saudade was also about making sure rainforests would never need to be exploited again. So each of the four major designated zones also included rubber plantations, agricultural development, rotating areas set aside for logging. And areas carefully selected to be kept clear for the sake of cattle and ranching.”
Hisashi picked up his glass of whiskey. “It was a billions in, billions out kind of program. Expensive, and difficult to get the ball rolling. But Novoporto could afford to foot the bill, and in the long term, each of the four zones would pay for their own existence, and then start turning a profit. It was a thumb in the eye of the old way of doing things. A clever and pragmatic plan: make the rainforests lucrative to keep around, more lucrative than simply bulldozing them for wood and cow pastures. The rainforests would pay for their own conservation efforts, and in fifty years they would pay off the debts Novoporto still owes to Britannia. The very nature they once exploited, liberating South America for a free future. It was all very poetic.”
Torino’s eyes narrowed. While interesting, this had nothing to do with heroics, and even less with big-dog international organizations like the WHA. What the hell was the elder Midoriya getting at?
“I’m sorry,” Toshinori said, vocalizing his old mentor’s thoughts, “but while interesting, I fail to see the point.”
“Cordyceps locustiphila,” Hisashi said, and the tip of his unlit cigarette finally glowed as he took a pull from it. “A rather unusual fungus that attacks insects, with the second part of its name denoting its chosen prey item. C. locustiphilia, as the latin implies, goes after locusts and grasshoppers; it is native to the region. The mold infects them, and modifies their behavior to suit its needs. It acts as a parasite, slowly killing the host and puppeting the body around before eventually blooming out. It’s obscure, and rare, but thanks to being something of a real life example of pop culture zombies, cordyceps has been popularized in science fiction serials and other various media.”
Hisashi pulled the cigarette out of his mouth, the end glowing red. His words were calm and friendly, but there was something ominous in them. “Our problems began in Refúgio Vergo, one of the four rainforest project zones. A quirked strain of C. locustiphila appeared.”
“That’s impossible,” Toshinori said with confidence. Gran looked at him questioningly.
“How do you know that?” the old hero asked.
The skeletal pro flushed slightly. “I’ve been taking courses to get my teaching license. We just covered the quirk science module last month, so I’m up to date.”
“The up-to-date data is a lie,” Hisashi said. “I know what research you’re referring to, on quirk origins. I’m the one who rubber stamped it for broader circulation. The most current and official theory is that only humans and animals can have quirks. That is a deeply untrue statement.”
“But why?” Toshinori asked. “Why lie? I don’t understand.”
‘No,’ Gran thought, ‘you wouldn’t.’ Toshinori wasn’t a tenth the fool he pretended to be, but he was still as straightforward as the day was long. He had never possessed that twisted bit inside of him that let people scheme.
Toshinori may not understand why they’d lie, but Gran did.
“You shouldn’t be surprised,” Hisashi stated offhandedly. “We lied about animals having quirks, too, for as long as we could get away with it. Nonhuman quirks work differently from human ones. Human quirks start out weak and simple, and get stronger over time as they travel down generations. Nonhuman quirks seem to work opposite to that. They start out powerful and complex, and then rapidly dilute down into nothing. Like a candle burning from both ends.”
“Right,” Torino supplied. “That’s why, for all their efforts, they can’t consistently breed cats and dogs with quirks. They’ve tried, due to demand, but quirked pets are freak outliers.”
“Monsters, you mean,” Hisashi said smoothly. “Nonhuman quirks inevitably create monsters. Which is the reason why we lie, for the sake of public order. A great deal of my job description could be summarized as resolving problems caused by monsters. Which brings me back to my story.” He took a pull from his cigarette.
“The quirk occurred in a strain of C. locustiphila. Like most of these incidents, we didn’t realize what was going on until casualties were already mounting. There were people behaving erratically, complaining about rashes and itching. The doctors who treated them had never seen anything like it, so the issue was escalated up to the WHA as a possible outbreak of something new.”
Hisashi tapped a bit of ash into the tray. “By the time we had boots on the ground, the trap had already been sprung. Natural human behavior is to take people into a city or urban area and have them treated in a central location. That was exactly what the fungus wanted us to do.”
“It was sentient?” Torino asked, shocked.
“No. Far worse than that. Sentience is the ability to feel and perceive, to experience emotions and be aware. Many animals qualify as sentient. Sapience is the capacity for intelligence and logic, it’s the ability to solve problems and learn. To exhibit cleverness. Far, far fewer things qualify as sapient, though some animals and all true AI do.”
The car passed through a tunnel briefly, darkening the compartment. The dull, smokeless ember on the end of Hisashi’s cigarette flared, a point of fire in the ominous shadow. “The fungus was sapio-sentient. Capable of experiencing emotions and solving problems. Anthropomorphic in the literal sense. Or you could just say it was intelligent.”
Toshinori’s hands flexed unconsciously. ‘Like Nezu,’ he thought.
“Cordyceps is a specialized organism,” Hisashi continued. “There’s always a specific species it adapts to take advantage of. In this case, the quirk had changed that prey-item. Instead of infecting and modifying the behavior of locusts, it went after humans instead. Cordyceps hom*ophilia, if you will. It’s quirk also exhibited a variety of other properties, including psychosomatic telepathy and the ability to manipulate human cells through the creation of specialized prions it produced, almost like a virus. The fungus operated as a hive mind of sorts, spreading itself across a population of humans like a net and coordinating between them.”
“Mold zombies,” Torino deadpanned. “You’re telling me they were evil, psychic mold zombies.”
“More or less, yes,” Hisashi said, tapping some ash into the tray. The calm, almost dismissive manner of the confession felt unnerving in the dim light of the car.
Torino’s comment had been barbed, but Hisashi’s cool grey eyes were like heavy clouds in a winter sky, still and undisturbed.
“By the time we arrived on the scene, all hell had broken loose. Top pros from around Novoporto were responding to the outbreak, but without realizing what they were dealing with, they simply ended up feeding themselves to it. Half of the top pros in the region were consumed before we were able to exercise our authority and quarantine everything off. Novoporto’s superheroes became weapons leveled against the very people they had sworn to protect. Assimilated into the hivemind.”
Hisashi pulled out a slim, modern-looking smartphone, and tapped away at the screen. “I’ll spare you the autopsies, but this should give you a fair idea of what we were dealing with.” He swiped upwards on his phone, and a detailed 2D picture appeared floating over the island table between them, translucent but still in full color.
Toshinori wished it was less detailed.
It was a picture of-
It was like something out of a nightmare.
A broken, twisted form was being hauled up out of the ash and rubble by mechanical equipment, chains and straps tied around it. Emergency personnel and armed guards were flitting around, frozen in the instant the snapshot had been taken. All of them wore heavy, reinforced hazmat gear, like something you’d use for dealing with hazardous chemicals or radiation.
You could only tell that the warped thing being pulled up had once been human because of the tattered scraps of clothes. It was, or had been, a man in a hero costume. A mutant of some sort. Huge chunks of his body had been ripped away, and then plastered over with some sort of sickening, scab-like ooze. Other body parts jutted out at wild angles, an arm here, a leg there. There were bulbous lumps that looked like heads bulging out of him, and other, more putrid things. Unidentifiable clumps of flesh and fungus, warped and oozing. Patches of eerie, pale fuzz, that made Toshinori’s palm’s itch unconsciously. Many of the details had been scarred over by fire and burns, but what little remained was still almost too much to bear looking at.
Worst of all, though, was that Toshinori recognized who he was looking at. He knew that hero. Knew that face.
“The mold was dangerous on its own, but the prion-based cellular manipulation was something else,” Hisashi explained. “The prions were capable of invading and changing human cells, shifting their type and purpose. Modifying the underlying mRNA directly through a process we still don’t understand. We fought several assimilated heroes multiple times, which is how we realized what it was capable of. When a puppet with a powerful quirk was killed, the mold could pull the body apart and recycle pieces of it into other zombies. If a specific part of a person’s body also happened to control their quirk? It could transplant that, too. We also realized something we ‘weren’t’ seeing during the operation, which was children. They all seemed to disappear.”
He leaned back in his seat, and the tip of his cigarette glowed. “Our current theory is that the elderly and the infirm were used to feed it’s biomass and breed out spores, while anyone below a certain age threshold was rendered down into stem cells that were used to repair the injured combat bodies. But since we never directly observed much of the mold’s behavior, it’s hard to be sure.”
Toshinori swallowed.
It had eaten the elderly, and used the children as glue. Glue and tape, to hold patchwork puppets together.
Not so different from him.
“The story about the forest fire was a coverup,” Torino said. “That was you.”
Hisashi nodded, a small, friendly smile on his lips. But those bitter steel eyes told a different story. “We burned down half of the Refúgio Verde rainforest, as well as eight entire districts in Novoporto’s capital city, Perene. A number of outlying communities also had to be completely razed to the ground. Between local law enforcement, responding heroes, and the WHA, we lost over a thousand personnel during the operation, but fortunately, further civilian casualties were contained. Anything less, and the mold might have escaped the quarantine zone.”
The businessman took a sip of his whiskey. “The official story was an out-of-control forest fire caused by unseasonably dry weather. We continued administering a co*cktail of antifungal and immunioboosting drugs to everyone in the region for over a year afterwards, under the guise of dispensing medicine to counteract smoke and chemical inhalation from the fires. So far, the anomaly hasn’t reappeared.”
The besuited father tapped his cigarette over the ashtray. “We got lucky. The fungus was intelligent, but it was also an idiot. A garden-variety sociopath, no different from the countless muggers and petty criminals that get picked up by law enforcement every day. Its tactics were almost nonexistent, and it wielded the heroes it assimilated like a club. It was easy to provoke, corral, and outmaneuver once we realized what we were dealing with.”
It was Torino who understood first. “You’re saying if it was more canny, it could have won.”
Hisashi took another sip of his whiskey. “If it had been smart enough to wait until it had spread out farther, if it had the mental acuity to put off short-term gratification for long term gains, it could have eaten the entire continent. Keeping it a secret would have been impossible, then.”
Toshinori flexed his hands, clenching them tightly. He had only half-heard the conversation, his eyes still locked on the picture floating in front of him.
Baron Tigre. That had been the name of that hero. It had taken him a minute to remember, he had met thousands of heroes throughout his career. But a few of them stood out, and the Baron had been one of them.
Out of all the people who suffered during the age of quirks, complex mutants, or ‘heteromorphics,’ typically had the worst lot. Strictly speaking, every quirk was a mutation of some sort, at least in the general sense. But not all of them radically altered the body in a significant way. Not all were ‘mutants.’
A heteromorphic, as the name implied, was someone whose quirk gave them a body that only tangibly resembled that of a human anymore. The definition was at times arbitrary, but common sense dictated that someone with seaweed for hair was a far cry from someone who was an ambulatory pile of clay.
Heteromorphics, or complex mutants, were the most likely out of all quirk types to be discriminated against. And they were also the most likely to turn to some sort of crime, either out of desperation or a desire for revenge.
But in Toshinori’s opinion, they also made outstanding heroes. Every heteromorphic pro that Toshinori knew was kind and empathetic, especially towards the criminals and villains they captured.
As Gang Orca, Japan’s number 10 hero, had once told him, being a complex mutant was not something that was conducive to inner-peace.
He was sure the giant orca-man would know.
Toshinori had met Baron Tigre years ago, during a charity festival. It was being held in Perene, Novoporto’s capital city. The Baron had stood out in his memory because of how exceptionally unusual the other hero was.
Most heteromorphics are not particularly good looking. To be frank, the majority of them resembled monsters. Many fell hard into the uncanny valley, eliciting an adverse reaction in others by sheer instinct alone.
But Baron Tigre… you couldn’t have made a more perfect complex mutant to serve as a pro hero, even if you had tried.
He was an anthropomorph, an animal man, with the abilities and corresponding body parts of large cats. He called himself Tigre, and even styled his costume in a black and orange theme, but he had traits from all of the members of the broader big cat family.
Tigre had been a classically handsome man. Instead of his mutation making him something freakish or strange, it had merely enhanced his natural good looks, giving him a roguish, almost exotic edge. He had bright, expressive eyes, high cheekbones, and a strong jawline, which paired well with his muscular build and broad shoulders. His nose and mouth protruded in a panther-like muzzle, but instead of looking unnatural, it blended smoothly with his human features. He had no trouble articulating his lips or showing recognizable human expressions, and his differently-shaped mouth didn’t impede his speech at all. If anything, it seemed to deepen his voice into a melodic purr. His body was covered in a coat of short, tawny fur, and the color contrasted well with his long, wavy black human hair that he kept tied back in a loose ponytail.
Most heteromorphics looked uncanny, or even frightening. Baron Tigre… you couldn’t have asked a sculptor to draft a better heteromorph. Instead of looking like some hodgepodge chimera, he appeared whole and complete. An artist’s idealized depiction of a mutant that had stepped off the page to fight crime with a smile on his face. He was born to be looked at, born to be a hero standing in the limelight.
Born to give hope to all the children who would never see a human face peering back at them when they looked in the mirror each morning.
Toshinori remembered standing backstage for the event, with various technicians, heroes, and government officials milling about. He remembered the cat man asking him for his autograph, a slightly nervous smile on his face.
Toshinori remembered laughing, and saying the same thing he always told other pro heroes who asked that.
Only if you give me yours, too.
He remembered going on patrol with the man afterwards. There was crime, of course, there was crime everywhere. But the streets of Perene were clean. The buildings were new. There were children running around the two of them, laughing. Toshinori remembered the younger hero picking up two of the children and carrying them on his shoulders as they walked down the street. The young fans had squealed and shrieked in glee.
Baron Tigre had been more than simply gifted with good looks. He had empathy. A kind and mighty heart. It was the thing Toshinori admired the most in other pros, and what he tried to embody every day as All Might. Baron may not have wielded the flashiest quirk, but with his strength and speed, as well as his kindness, Toshinori knew he was destined to climb all the way to the top.
Tigre had been born to shine. Born to give others hope. Leaping between tall buildings in a single bound, his metallic luchador mask glittering as his tiger-striped cape fluttered in the breeze.
In Toshinori’s imagination, the scene from his memories changed.
The city was gone. It was burning ruins, with trashed barricades and smashed police lines everywhere. A hazard response truck was turned over on its side. Ash and smoke drifted through the air, and something worse. Something stale, earthy and cloying.
Tigre was there, frozen in a moment in time. His claws fully extended, smashing all five hooked points through the chest of an emergency responder, shredding their hazmat suit and lifting them off the ground. The hero’s eyes were white and blind, scabbed over with fibrous webbing. His muzzle hung open and gaping, like his jaw had been broken, and a lion’s mane of fuzzy mold exploded out of his neck and the back of his head, releasing a trail of cloying, dusty spores in his wake as he moved.
The children had been used as glue, Hisashi had said. The heroes were just spare parts, and children had been used as glue to piece them back together.
That-
He heard the children, laughing as they ran through the streets around the legs of the two heroes.
This wasn’t-
‘Ola, hello! Ah, I know you must get this a lot. But… can I please get your autograph? You were my inspiration, growing up! Your fitness videos were the best, they always kept me coming back for more!”
That wasn’t how this story was supposed to end.
Toshinori reached down, picked up his shotglass, and downed it.
His hands didn’t shake, but it was a near thing.
Hisashi watched the skeletal pro-hero, a neutral expression on his face. There was coldness there, but also a hint of something else. Something sad, and almost resigned. A moment of silence passed before the businessman continued.
“This incident is shocking to you, I know. It would be to most people who work in the hero industry.”
There was a second, shorter pause. “But to certain divisions in the World Heroes Association, that situation was far from a surprise. Things like the Refúgio Verde Incident have happened before. They will, inevitably, happen again. I admit, the scope of it was unusual; typically we can intervene before things get so far out of hand. Losing even part of a major city was, logistically speaking, a catastrophe. But if you think quirked zombie mold is the biggest problem we’ve faced in the last twenty years, or even the last ten, you would be wrong. In terms of threat, it was middling at best.”
“What the hell does any of this have to do with how you know the name One For All?” Torino asked, though even the elderly pro’s typically prickly demeanor could not entirely hide his own disquiet at the information that had been shared.
Hisashi picked his cigarette back up, and rolled it idly between his fingers without putting it in his mouth.
“I chose to share the Refúgio Verde Incident because, scope aside, it is an excellent example of a situation in which the WHA is forced to handle a scenario sans heroes . Shocking as it may seem, there are, on occasion, problems where involving paramilitary law enforcement celebrities can cause more harm than good.”
Hisashi tapped a bit of the cold ash from his cigarette into the tray. “Quirks are getting more extreme all the time, and sometimes they cause problems superheroes can’t solve. Refúgio Verde was a prime example of this. Calling on heroes to assist would have just made everything ten times worse. Every hero who did respond before we could cordon off the area just escalated the situation. And of course, the watchword of this age is control. Of rejecting chaos in favor of order, by any means necessary. So the need for secrecy is paramount. Such threats cannot be publicly admitted to, for the same reason All For One’s existence was kept a secret.”
Both pros frowned at that. The sentiment was distasteful, but hard to disagree with. Neither hero was in favor of the wider world being aware of the existence of a supervillain who could give and take quirks in exchange for favors.
It was difficult to argue that man-eating fungus was less chaotic, in the grand scheme.
“Even so, I think the truth would be worth more than lies in the long run,” Toshinori commented, his voice still a bit unsteady.
“But whether or not the lie is worth maintaining isn’t really up for you or me to decide, now is it?” Hisashi parried. “And that brings us right back around. You want to know why I know the name One For All?”
He put the cigarette back between his lips. “It’s classified,” he said. “Something happened off the books. Involving people you don’t know, problems you would consider impossible, and a situation you’ve never heard of before. It wasn’t something on your side of the fence, in your world of arrest warrants and breaking news reports. It happened in mine. In my world, of coverups and secrets. Of monsters and anomalies and world-ending freaks of nature.”
The tip of Hisashi’s thus-far neglected cigarette finally blazed back to life, once again being relit by his quirk. “There are two kinds of problems in the world,” the businessman said, his calm smile back in place. “The kind we call heroes for, and the kind we don’t. But my job requires me to solve all of those problems anyway, to find a solution irrespective of whether or not people like the two of you receive a memo about it. I don’t get to enjoy the luxury of saying, that’s not my problem, that’s out of my wheelhouse. If there’s a disaster or threat somewhere, and a quirk caused it, it is my problem. It is my problem every single time. And I have learned many things in the course of doing my job. Strange things, secret things. Stranger things. The name ‘One For All’ is just another incident lost in the pile.”
The businessman leaned forwards slightly, and the large, square glasses on his face seemed to glint ominously in the light of the car, the lenses becoming empty sheets of reflected light. “Our ancestors used to draw dragons on the edges of the maps, as a warning to people who went off the beaten path. Beware, the captions would say. Here there be monsters. Well gentlemen, I assure you, the monsters are still there. We just don’t put them on the maps anymore.”
“That’s your job, then?” Toshinori said softly, his eyes still distant and seeing something other than the back of the car. “Dealing with monsters.”
Hisashi considered the emaciated man before him. “A hero,” he said, enunciating his words carefully. “Is fundamentally someone who deals with humans, and the problems caused by human quirks. You are a threat escalation for law enforcement and emergency response. You fight crime, specifically crimes committed with quirks. But my scope is not so defined. I deal with threats and disasters caused by quirks, and whether they are human in origin or not is irrelevant. So yes. In very simple terms, my job is dealing with monsters.”
“And who, exactly, gets to decide where that line begins and ends?” Torino challenged. “What measure is a human, exactly, in a world of quirks?”
Hisashi smiled sadly, and for the first time, there was no coldness or hostility from him. Even his professionalism seemed stripped away. The man didn’t look like he could kill a tiger with his bare hands.
He just looked tired.
For Toshinori, it was like catching a glimpse of himself in his bathroom mirror, wrestling with an endless march of pills and problems.
“That is indeed the question, isn’t it?” Hisashi said, though it felt more like he was talking to himself than answering Torino’s question.
“I find that the truth always tends to be stranger than fiction, gentlemen. And this world is filled with stranger things. What is a man, in a world of quirks?”
The ember on the end of his cigarette flickered.
“I couldn’t tell you. Maybe it’s just man all the way down.”
Time ran away from the two teens in the basem*nt of the World Heroes Association building. For once, Izuku was being encouraged to ask every question he could think of, and with a hero willing to take his requests and experiment, he wasn’t running out anytime soon. Melissa, by comparison, was simply thrilled with being able to spend time with her idol, and bombarded Cathleen Bates with questions of a different sort. The blonde teen was fascinated with how the heroics industry worked in her birthplace of mainland America, and eager to hear what stories the huge woman could share about being a top pro.
So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the next break they had was enforced on them from an outside source.
More specifically, it was Star and Stripe who pulled them away.
One downside to the giant facility was that, while it was indeed an island, it lacked many of the features that one would traditionally associate with island life. It was hard to fish, though there were places you could. It was even harder to take a boat out recreationally.
And, given the shape and structure of the facility itself, there were no true beaches, either.
But there were artificial ones.
Most were on the surface, long stretches of sand artificially built up around the edges of the freshwater lakes. Some neighbored small boardwalks and piers, while others were situated across from the scattered wetland habitats on the island, giving a view of nature and the island’s wetland ecosystems.
But as the scenery painted on the walls of The Four Seasons proved, some people still craved a saltwater beach. It was hard to live your life always smelling the sea air, but never seeing the shore.
And while most of the beaches were above ground and on the surface, a few were not.
As one might expect, a giant science facility out at sea had areas dedicated to the study of marine life and the various oceans of the world.
Apparently, some corporation or another had decided to ask; if we already have these enormous reservoirs of water, why don’t we put a beach on one of them?
And someone else, presumably with far more money than common sense, fired back: why don’t we put a beach under one of them?
And that was exactly what they had done.
Izuku had never seen anything like the space they now found themselves in.
For all intents and purposes, it was a fishbowl submerged upside down in a much larger tank. It was a huge stretch of beach with sugar-white sand and crystal clear seawater. There were palm trees and pampas bushes, rolling dunes and a boardwalk. A line of open-air bars and restaurants were tucked away in a dense tropical treeline near the elevators leading up, their wooden patios offering a sweeping panoramic view.
But on all sides of the horizon, and far above them, were huge, thick walls, holding back enormous amounts of water. Countless fish and larger marine life could be seen on the other side of the glass. For a moment, Izuku swore he caught a glimpse of what looked like a pod of whales.
It was an aquarium beach. It was a beach, inside and underneath, an aquarium the size of several city blocks. It was like someone had taken an entire tropical cove, and replaced the sky with scenes from beneath its own bay.
For the sake of his own sanity, Izuku chose to believe that this was the most extravagant and advanced beach I-Island had.
He could scarcely imagine one that managed to outshine it.
“If you think it’s pretty now, you should see what it looks like at night,” Melissa supplied cheerfully. “They turn the artificial sun way down, so it becomes a fake moon, and the scattered lights on the inside of the big tank make little specks that look like stars shining through the water. It’s like something out of a dream.”
Izuku did his very best to keep the hysteria out of his laugh.
Right. A dream. Sure.
No wonder the island employed an army of robots as janitors. Who on earth would want to go diving in the big tank to scoop out the whale poop?
Somewhere between dinner with the Shields and doing a consultation on America’s number 1 superhero, a screw might have gotten knocked loose somewhere. Izuku was pretty sure he should be more impressed than he was. Watching whales swim through the sky on the shores of a tropical beach really did look like a dream.
Just, somebody else’s dream. Not his.
He knew what his dream looked like. It looked like a world where he didn’t have to tell Melissa Shield about One For All.
Somehow it ruined the mood, when a part of him was evaluating the scenery based on whether it would mitigate the impact of confessing there, or just make things worse.
Yeah, cool underwater beach, Melissa. By the way, I’m getting a quirk. From your uncle. Just thought you should know. No, sorry, I don’t have the faintest clue why he didn’t give it to you. Just bad luck, I guess?
Izuku’s fists clenched, and then his shoulders sagged.
This was…
He didn’t know what to do .
Further up the beach, the grinning blonde who was the architect of this excursion was watching gleefully as Melissa Shield grabbed Izuku by the arm, and started dragging him down the shore to look at things.
If the giant woman were honest, this had been her plan from the start.
Dr. Shield was a real troublemaker, telling her that she needed to bribe him with more footage of the kids if she wanted a copy of that dinner confession!
Well, two could play at that game. She could be sneaky! She had been trained by ‘the’ Gran Torino! And All Might! She had been a personal student of one of the greatest masters of sneaking in the world! And the fact that nobody knew about it was proof of how sneaky it was!
Unfortunately for her, while Cathleen Bates was extraordinarily talented in a wide variety of fields, stealth…
Stealth was not one of them..
Not even close.
Societies in the Age of Heroes had to deal with many logistical problems, and clothing certainly topped the list of day-to-day issues. Just about anything could be custom ordered or fitted to a certain preference, with the only real limiting factor being time, money, and sometimes government assistance. This was not a luxury, but rather a requirement of the world’s new quirked reality.
Even so, her violently American themed but otherwise fairly conservative one-piece swimsuit was fighting for it’s life, and unintentionally revealing far more than it was ever intended to.
Cathleen Bates was over six feet tall before she powered up. The bathing suit made for mutants never stood a chance of fitting her correctly. Because she was a high-ranking pro hero, she was only used to buying clothes for herself in her ‘other’ size. She had support techs and a dedicated costume department to deal with her transformed state.
While quite clever in her own way, Cathy wasn’t really thinking when she picked this swimsuit off the rack. And being so used to skintight spandex, she was oblivious to how ill-fitting it actually was.
Quite frankly, she wasn’t even entirely certain what her own measurements were when she powered up.
The lifeguard who literally could not tear his eyes away from the sight of her attempting to sneak down the beach could probably make an educated guess, though. Provided he didn’t pass out first.
“Is that Star and Stripe over there?” Melissa asked, glancing back. The hulking mass of blonde on the other side of the dunes was about as inconspicuous as a German invasion of the French countryside.
“She’s probably just keeping an eye on us,” Izuku replied, trying to keep his whirling thoughts straight. The scenery was beautiful, this beach was incredible. Not so many years ago, a tableau like this would have been called CGI, or accused of being AI generated. It was a marvel of engineering and ambition, befitting the Age of Heroes.
On any other day, he would be over the moon to be here, but today-
Today was today. And Izuku just hoped he would still have a friend by the time the sun set.
Melissa Shield grabbed Izuku by the arm, ignoring his flinch, and pointed down the beach towards an isolated cove, talking eagerly about the sea life that was housed here.
On the other side of the dunes, a barely-decent Star And Stripe let out a quiet squeal of glee, and followed after them, phone in hand. Conspicuously.
Very, very conspicuously.
It was probably a good thing that Gran Torino was locked in a moving armored vehicle on the other side of the island.
“Not many people come all the way down here to this cove with the rocks!” Melissa said cheerfully, as she lead Izuku around the far edge of the beach to a more secluded spot that wasn’t directly in line-of-sight of the bars and restaurants. “It’s like a cool little secret!”
Izuku felt a stab of guilt, and only barely avoided flinching. He smiled shakily at her words, doing his best to follow along as she talked about I-Island.
It’s simple. Just tell Melissa about One For All.
There was some selfish and irrational part of Izuku that wanted to rebel. That wanted to spit back in Torino’s face.
But… this wasn’t about Torino. And Izuku knew that.
Did he owe the blonde teen an explanation, or didn’t he?
It would be easy to say he didn’t. After all, what was he supposed to do, explain himself to every quirkless person he ever met? He wasn’t even sure he wanted to explain this to his parents, although some small part of him knew that was probably an inevitability.
He wasn’t the only quirkless teenager out there. He doubted he was the only quirkless who had dreamed about becoming a hero, either. What was he supposed to do, tell them all?
. . .
. . . but it’s different with her, isn’t it?
But it was different, with her.
Melissa wasn’t just anybody.
Why? Isn’t she? Shouldn’t she be?
Izuku couldn’t say. It didn’t make sense. Maybe it wasn’t supposed to.
Maybe none of this was supposed to make sense. Izuku couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
But, beyond what Torino had asked of him. Beyond what All Might had said to him. Beyond all the rational thinking and circular trails every should-he shouldn’t-he argument drew, chasing after each other.
Beyond all that, some inner instinct pushed him towards it. As though some unconscious part of him knew this was a fight that needed to be fought.
Izuku didn’t know if he would have the strength, to tell her that he held the dream she had always wanted in the palm of his hand.
A part of him was terrified if she would ask him to give it to her.
Could he? Would he?
Yes.
He didn’t know.
He knew.
She wouldn’t.
They all would, and you know it. They would all ask, if they knew.
All of them would want to know, why you? Why not them?
And they’re right .
Izuku closed his eyes slowly and sighed softly, before opening them again.
Melissa needed help. She deserved to know the truth. His mother had always told him, over and over again, to treat others the way he would want to be treated. And he-
And he would want to know, if it was him.
“Your probes into the records of my wife weren’t as subtle as you likely intended them to be,” Hisashi said. “And even if they had been, you tripped a few alarms by looking into me. So go ahead. Ask your questions.”
Scenery flickered by outside the sedan as they drove across an elevated highway that wound through the treetops of an artificial forest. The tops of the pine trees were tall, but the road still cleared them, giving the illusion that they were surfing on a shifting green sea. The central tower of I-Island was visible in the near-distance, towering over the landscape like some vast monolith.
Toshinori and Torino both had questions about the Midoriyas. They had also agreed ahead of time that Torino would do most of the talking.
Neither of them had expected to have the One For All bomb dropped in their laps. They also hadn’t foreseen this level of coldness and veiled hostility, either.
Then again, Torino had his own suspicions about that.
“She’s in witness protection, according to the Japanese government,” Torino said. “Her records are sealed. From my experience, it looks like the sort of job they do to people who are related to villains. But that doesn’t make sense, because she’s not in hiding. Care to explain?”
The tip of Hisashi’s cigarette glowed red before fading. “Truthfully, no, not really,” he said, that friendly half smile of his omnipresent. “I don’t think my family’s history is any of your business. Your only concern with my son should be training him to accept One For All, and if you weren’t willing to pass on the quirk to anybody with potential issues, then All Might himself was a rather poor choice.” Cold eyes glanced over at Toshinori for a moment before flicking back to Torino. “Then again, I did lie to you about One For All. So I suppose a few truths wouldn’t be uncalled for.”
Hisashi held up three fingers. “There are three major secrets the Japanese government is keeping.” He paused for a moment. “Well, technically four I suppose, but One For All is more your secret, isn’t it? The government isn’t really involved.”
“And this has to do with one of them, I’m guessing?” Torino asked, looking unimpressed.
Hisashi smiled coldly. “It certainly does. So, how many of those three are you aware of?”
“I know about All For One,” Toshinori said, taking a sip of his water.
“Ah,” the businessman said. “Sorry, my mistake. I don’t count that demon as one of the three. He’s more of an,,, international problem, in my opinion. Not really a Japanese one.”
Toshinori frowned. “Then… I guess I don’t know any?”
Hisashi co*cked an eyebrow, and there was a flicker of suppressed emotion behind his cold, placid eyes. “Really? You don’t know of any? And what about you, Lone Star?”
Torino cut eyes across at the skeletal blonde, who was looking at him with curiosity, before sighing and squaring his shoulders. “I know of two.”
Hisashi nodded. “I had thought so.”
He picked up the glass bottle of whisky and refreshed his own glass before setting it back down. “The three secrets of the Japanese government and their Hero Public Safety Commission are King Beast, the Mist People, and the so-called ‘Peerless Thief,’ Oji Harima. There’s a story behind each one, and the people who stand behind the power in Japan would do an awful lot to keep the truths of those matters a secret.”
Hisashi sipped his whisky, a small half-smile on his face, before pinning Torino with a look. “So. Which of the two do you know about?”
There was a moment of silence. For the first time, Torino looked tempted to take a drink of his own alcohol, and not out of thirst. “...I don’t know of any particular reason the HPSC would care about Harima Oji,” he finally admitted. “The Bandit King has been dead for over a century at least, probably longer. I can’t think of why he would still be a problem.”
Toshinori didn’t understand why Torino would be reluctant to admit that. But there clearly must have been a reason, because Hisashi narrowed his eyes, and it felt like the temperature in the car dropped by several degrees.
Any thoughts that he had been imagining or misreading Midoriya senior’s hostility and cold demeanor vanished. Hisashi seemed… upset felt like too mild a word.
“Did you have something to do with the Mist People incident?” Hisashi asked. His voice was calm, his half-smile was still there, but his eyes were glacial. The question felt like a naked sword being drawn across silk.
Torino’s face twisted in anger. “Did I have something to do with- what kind of person do you take me for?”
Toshinori would have sworn on his life someone had turned on the air conditioning. He could feel the chill pass through the cabin.
“The kind of person who would pawn an unstable and dangerous weapon off on a child behind their parent’s backs,” Hisashi replied blithely. “But don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a minute when it’s my turn to ask questions.”
Torino started to speak again, but Hisashi cut him off. “I don’t care what you think. I care about why you know. There are dead bodies buried in unmarked graves over the Mist People. Why. Do you. Know?”
There was another moment of silence. Toshinori glanced between the businessman and his former mentor, open concern on his face. A conversation was taking place that he had absolutely no context for. But whatever it was, he had rarely seen Gran Torino so rattled.
The retired hero's face contorted, like he was sucking on a lemon. “...It was because of Nana,” he finally admitted after clearly struggling with how to answer. “Nana was trying to rescue a little girl. Her involvement was accidental. There were no secrets between the two of us, so she told me everything right after she got out of the meeting where she was threatened into silence.”
There was a second, longer moment of silence. Slowly, the tension in the air seemed to fade. “That does make a certain amount of sense,” Hisashi finally said, and for the first time, his eyes didn’t seem like they were sharp, or even present, but somewhere far away. “Updraft would have been in the right place at the wrong time, wouldn’t she? How very like her.”
“I’m sorry,” Toshinori said, “But what are the-”
“Don’t!” Torino barked, cutting across the unasked question. “Just, don’t. That’s a secret worth more than your life. If you’re half as smart as I know you are, you’ll forget you ever heard anything.”
Toshinori looked at his old teacher, unable to keep the incredulity off of his face. “I’m a hero, Gran,” he said. “Sticking my nose where it isn’t wanted is part of my job.”
“There were no heroes involved during the Mist People incident,” Hisashi said evenly, his eyes back again in the here and now.
Torino muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like ‘ain’t that the truth.’
Toshinori frowned, but decided to let it drop, at least for now.
Almost as though he could sense his former student’s belligerence, Gran sighed. “Just accept that sometimes, there are people we can’t save. Let it go, Toshi.”
He wasn’t going to. And his mentor probably knew that. But Toshinori hadn’t become All Might by ignoring discretion as the better part of valor.
“Did they really never tell you anything about King Beast?” Hisashi asked All Might. There was curiosity mixed with a hint of incredulity in his voice. “Did they give you no warnings, or special instructions on how to handle unusually powerful mutants if you encountered them?”
Toshinori frowned for a moment. “I was made aware that there was a classified issue within the mutant community in Japan, and I might be called in one day to fight something dangerous.”
“And they gave you no more details than that?” Hisashi asked. Toshinori shook his head. Beside him, Torino also had a surprised look on his face, though the elderly hero hid it well.
“How amusing. Maybe you offended them with all of your quirkless charities.” The friendly smile that didn’t reach the businessman's eyes was back, though Toshinori didn’t feel like the hostility was directed towards either of them.
“That story starts with Destro,” Hisashi explained, trading his half-empty shot glass for the cigarette balanced on the ashtray. “His original revolutionary army was something of a big tent affair, politically speaking. It incorporated several smaller groups of political and ideological dissidents at the time. The leaders of those groups were given the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Meta Liberation Army, which was second in authority only to Destro’s own rank of Supreme Commander. Most of those groups weren’t the sort of people who would have gotten along with each other, like the Creature Rejection Clan and the Abhuman Supremacists. Mutant haters, standing alongside mutant supremacists. But in Destro they had a common goal: the free use of quirks in broader society. So they set aside their differences to fight the Japanese government.”
“I was aware of some of this,” Toshinori said, “Though I’ll admit, I’m more knowledgeable about American Dawn history than Japanese.”
“It’s not something the Japanese government is proud of,” Hisashi replied. “So the details aren’t exactly taught in schools. They did almost lose, after all. But back to the point, one of those commanders was a man known by his villain name; King Beast.”
“I’ve heard that name before, from certain criminals,” Toshinori admitted. “Who was he?”
It wasn’t Hisashi who answered.
“He was a monster,” Torino replied. “This was almost two centuries ago, but King Beast would have probably been labeled a high A-Class villain today, if not an S-Class. His mutant quirk was unnatural in its strength. He was a freak among freaks. The strongest mutant of his generation by a margin so wide second place may as well have not existed. After Destro was arrested, none of his lieutenants went quietly. Most of them made some sort of last stand. It took a whole army to bring down Beast.”
Hisashi smiled, and his eyes remained cold. “More specifically, it took four divisions of the JGSDF, one of which was armored, approximately fifty mercenary vigilantes who answered the call to fight Destro, an unknown number of local vigilantes, and the French Foreign Legion.”
Torino snorted. “Yeah, what he said.”
Toshinori blinked slowly as he processed that information. He knew the basics about Destro’s defeat, everyone who goes through a school in Japan would. But he had never heard much about the man’s immediate subordinates.
Quirks were getting stronger and more complex all the time. It happens every generation. Sometimes they stagnated or stalled out, due to bad quirk compatibility, or there being more quirkless than quirked in the marriage pool. Progress was, on occasion, halted or sidetracked. But there was never any regression. Quirks were like a river, or balls rolling down a hill. They moved one way; forwards.
Destro’s revolution had been staged almost two centuries ago, just a few decades prior to the formal end of the Dawn. A generation was between 20 and 30 years, however long it took for children to grow up and have children of their own. So that was around 7 generations in the past, give or take.
There were modern heroes Toshinori knew, top class pros, who couldn’t fight that kind of firepower.
“What was he?” the strongest hero in the world asked, confusion and trepidation in his voice.
“An outlier,” Hisashi replied. “And a problem that continues to haunt us to this very day. Because the various mutant supremacist groups have always lived by a code of survival of the fittest, of ruling by might and taking whatever you want by force. And King Beast was… notoriously prolific. Far more mutants in the broader Pacific area are related to him than you might guess. King Beast made his last stand in the Japanese forest of Haiboro Woods, but the problems he caused had far-reaching consequences that are still felt today.”
The tip of Hisashi’s cigarette glowed before fading away. “It’s always been understood that there’s soft eugenics happening with quirks. Quirk marriages, people judging spouses based on their abilities. And like-marrying-like to prevent complications, children being born with self-harming powers. But King Beast’s bloodline is particularly unstable.”
In the background, Torino was nodding. Toshinori’s eyes narrowed. “How unstable?”
“The statistical average for a quirk evolution, or a quirk that spontaneously grows and changes due to stress or some other factor, is around one in a million, give or take,” Hisashi replied. “In people related to King Beast? It’s closer to one in five. His power was also chimeric in nature, possessing the abilities of multiple completely different animal species, both predator and prey. His… instability, tends to appear even more aggressively in his descendants who have children outside of their own quirk type niche. Who cross the streams with their spouse, so to speak. Especially between predator and prey animal mutations. The more radical the difference in parents, the more dangerous the manifestation will be if it appears.”
Hisashi tapped a bit of ash into the tray. “Which is why there’s a list. The Japanese government maintains a list, with the cooperation of Australia, Korea, and the United States, of every descendant of King Beast that we know of. It’s an attempt to head problems off at the pass. China is also involved, rather begrudgingly, but they don’t like telling outsiders anything if they can help it.”
“There’s a list?” Torino asked, scowling. “I knew about his bloodline being dangerous, but I didn’t know they were keeping tabs on people.”
“That’s illegal,” Toshinori noted quietly.
“Oh, extremely,” Hisashi said, with his icy eyes and I’m-your-friend smile. “It is very, very illegal. It trespasses on a number of national laws regarding surveillance on civilians and the medical privacy of quirks.”
His lips twitched slightly, clearly somewhat amused in spite of his coldness. “That’s why it’s a secret.”
Toshinori understood, then. He had never been well-liked by the Japanese government, for all of his fame and popularity with the people. He avoided taking direct orders from the Public Safety Commission whenever possible, which didn’t endear him, and most of the charities he created and funded weren’t the sort of thing that wins brownie points with professional politicians.
Most top pros put together gifted programs, to help talented kids become heroes themselves, or excel in a field related to that hero’s theme. All Might gave money to the quirkless, to underfunded hospitals, to disaster relief. Many other heroes also did this, but it was against the grain for a pro as high-profile as him to make that his primary source of charity. And perhaps more importantly, it wasn’t something the political class of Japan could readily use for their own personal ends, either.
It was hard for nepotism to take advantage of a soup line.
Japanese bureaucrats had needed All Might as a counter to potential disaster in the mutant community. But they hadn’t trusted him enough to tell him the details. Now that situation made far more sense
How it must have rankled them, to have to rely on his strength as All Might even as they tried to keep him out of the loop.
“I knew that some criminal mutants fought each other over the name King Beast, but I never realized there was such a history behind it,” Toshinori confessed.
“Those are the remnants of the old Abhuman Vanguard and Inhuman Supremacy parties,” Gran Torino replied. “They consider the name a crown. Only the strongest mutant gets to call themselves King Beast. They’ll kill each other for the privilege.”
The old man turned to gaze at the enigmatic businessman sitting across from them. “The current one is still in jail, right?”
Hisashi smiled that gentle, cold smile and nodded. “Yes, the current King Beast is still entombed a hundred feet below the bottom of the Sea of Japan. Tartarus Prison Level -10. The Ultramax block.”
He leaned back in his seat. “I doubt it was that monster the Japanese government were worried about. The old Abhuman movements are a dying breed. That’s what happens, when you constantly kill each other over the right to lead,” Hisashi said, gesturing dismissively with his cigarette. “I think the bureaucrats and politicians were more concerned about something that might happen in the future.”
Toshinori’s hands involuntarily clenched. No, he didn’t think they were concerned about the current King Beast, either.
Tartarus was a prison built out at sea, with most of it situated underwater. It was one of the three great supervillain prisons of the world, each custom built to contain quirked criminals. The levels in Tartarus started at 100 and counted backwards to 1. The lower the number, the deeper the level. Officially, level 1 was as low as it went.
But every Japanese hero in the top 50 knew differently. There were ten more levels, counting down to negative 10. That was the Ultramax block.
The top 50 had to know, because they were the ones who would be called in a hypothetical House On Fire incident to deal with a prison break.
No, the government wouldn’t be worried about the current King Beast, whoever they were. Not if they were sealed away in the Ultramax.
They had wanted Toshinori on standby to put down what would, in all likelihood, probably be a kid. Some teenager or young adult, who wouldn’t even know what was happening to them. Who wouldn’t understand. Who was having the worst day of their life, scared out of their mind by their own quirk.
Due to his low alcohol resistance from going years without, the one shot had made him feel a bit warm. But there was a coldness now in his stomach that wouldn’t go away.
No wonder they hadn’t wanted to give him details.
“There’s no way in hell any of you are mixed up in the Mist People,” Torino said. “And telekinesis and fire breathing don’t feel very big-fish mutant, either.”
Hisashi smiled. “So by process of elimination, your question has something to do with the third problem? Is that your guess?”
But Torino looked like he was done playing games. “I’m not guessing a damn thing. Every kid in Japan knows the story of Harima Oji. The Legendary Burglar, the Peerless Thief. The Bandit King of Kansai. He lived around the time Destro fell, but he was never a friend of the revolution. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor, each heist more daring than the last. No estate or corporation was beyond his reach. And then one day he just disappeared, never to be heard from again. Popular opinion being that he got away clean and retired, since it was doubtful the people he stole from wouldn’t brag about catching him if they had.”
Torino’s eyes narrowed. “It’s not uncommon for relatives of villains to be put in witness protection, to keep them safe and to cut ties. But Harima was dead, buried, and a bedtime story before I was ever born. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he has living relatives still knocking around somewhere, and I’d be willing to believe you or your wife were among them. But that doesn’t explain a damn thing about your paperwork. Harima is ancient history, he shouldn’t matter at all!”
“Unless, of course, Oji Harima was never real,” Hisashi said, with a calm smile that belied the gravity of his statement.
Torino blinked. Even Toshinori seemed taken aback, as he too had been raised on stories of the vigilante-cum-villain and gentleman thief.
“Not real?” Torino said incredulously. “He stole the largest cut emerald that’s ever existed, there’s a damn documentary about it! Of course he was real! Bank vaults don’t stand up and walk away on their own!”
Hisashi chuckled, and the tip of his cigarette glowed briefly before he took it out of his mouth and balanced it between two fingers. “As far as bank vaults walking away on their own goes, you may be surprised,” he said, “But you’re misunderstanding me. The heists and crimes were very real. But Oji Harima was not. Tell me, did either of you ever see The Princess Bride ?”
There was a beat, and the two heroes shared a look with each other before shaking their heads. “I think I’ve seen part of it before,” Toshinori replied, “But that was a long time ago. I don’t know anything about it.”
“Pity,” Hisashi said. “It’s a pre-Dawn movie, a cult classic. Based off of a book. I imagine you saw the remake, but it wasn’t very popular.”
Hisashi’s lips twitched, as though he were fighting back a smile. “I blame the bad CGI, personally. The rodents were unusually ugly.”
The businessman leaned back in his seat. “In The Princess Bride , there is a character called The Dread Pirate Roberts. During the course of the story, it is revealed that Roberts isn’t actually one person, but is a mantle that various people have assumed, to propagate the legend of an undying pirate lord.” The tip of Hisashi’s cigarette glowed briefly. “That is what Oji Harima is. There was never just one ‘Peerless Thief.’ There were several. A whole family of them, in fact. A collection of people with similar quirks, related by ideals and occasionally blood, who set out on a crusade to right what they saw as a great wrong in their society. They attributed all of their successes to a single, mostly fictional individual, while working together to cover up their failures and mistakes. They believed that creating a figurehead that was just an idea would make a longer-lasting impression on society than Destro’s desire to simply seize control by force.”
“That’s absurd,” Torino grunted. “You can’t possibly expect anyone to believe that.” Then after a moment, the old man’s frown softened slightly “Though it would explain why Harima never sided with Destro. There was always debate, about why he never became one of Destro’s Lieutenants, even if it was just for the sake of convenience. This would be the why, then?”
Hisashi nodded, and gestured in a circular motion with his cigarette. “More or less, yes. But, that’s not the end of the story. If it was, it wouldn’t be a very interesting conspiracy, now would it?” He leaned forwards in his seat, his cold eyes twinkling slightly in spite of himself. “In fact, Oji Harima’s disappearance is actually just the beginning.”
In that moment, both Toshinori and Torino could see where Izuku got it from. Even in spite of the coldness, the hostility, and the tension, there was a glimmer of the sunshine they saw every time they saw Izuku talking passionately.
“The Japanese government found out about the ruse,” Hisashi explained, taking a pull from his cigarette. “They made an attempt to arrest the entire family, and everyone associated with them. The sting failed, but a child was killed in the crossfire. It was someone too young to have been involved in anything the group was doing. That was one of the first major blunders of the HPSC as an organization. They had only just been formed, they were fresh out of the gate. And they not only failed to catch the thieves, they got someone killed in the process. For a so-called ‘Safety Commission,’ it’s not a very good look.”
Torino’s lips thinned, and Toshinori coughed slightly into his hand, a small fleck of blood appearing on his knuckles.
“After that, things got dirty. Instead of committing heists and acts of charity to bolster their figurehead, the Harima troupe began targeting the government. They went after politicians, bankers, the landed elite. I’ve been led to understand that at the time, there was a serious fear that they might even attempt to break Destro out of prison and let him loose as an act of revenge, which was a factor in some of the policies the Japanese government made at that time.”
Hisashi leaned back in his seat, and the light in the car darkened slightly as they went under an overpass. “The Harimas built their strategy on the idea that the government would be too afraid to admit the truth to the public, especially after nearly losing the war with Destro. So they could bleed their enemies dry, safe in the knowledge that they would never be confronted with a full-blown dead-or-alive manhunt. And they were right… to a point.”
“They pushed too far,” Torino said. It wasn’t phrased as a question.
Hisashi’s smile showed a hint of white teeth. “They did. Their estimation of the corrupt moral character of the provisional government was accurate, but they underestimated how frightening they themselves looked from the outside. Bluffs only work until someone works up the nerve to call them, and if there’s one universal axiom in the governments of today, it’s this: the people in charge will do anything to avoid another collapse like the Dawn. Nothing frightens them more than that. They believed that if they didn’t stop the Harima clan, Japan would be plunged back into anarchy again. There is no dirty laundry they wouldn’t be willing to air to prevent that. They were prepared to admit to murdering a child.”
Gran Torino leaned back in his own seat slightly. Both of his hands were clasped on the top of his walking stick. “So the government called the Harima’s bluff. But the story can’t have ended there. I don’t ever recall hearing anything about a manhunt for a clan of thieves.”
“There was third party interference,” Hisashi said. “Some suspect the Quirk Boogeyman, All For One. Others think it was the vigilante information broker, Crow. But whoever it was, they gave the Harimas something extraordinary. Something that forced the Japanese government into a ceasefire.”
“What was it?” Toshinori asked, fascinated by this aspect of Japanese history that he had never known about.
Hisashi shrugged. “The WHA doesn’t know,” he said. “If you want a real answer, you’d need to convince the government to tell you. But I doubt you’ll have much luck there.”
Torino’s eyes narrowed. That was a… curiously specific denial.
Hisashi’s cold eyes flicked over to Torino’s own for a moment, a ghost of amusem*nt in them. “Whatever it was, it was a big enough threat to make them think twice. So instead of going through with their original plans, the HPSC, with the blessing of the Japanese Diet, made the Harimas an offer.”
Toshinori’s mind immediately went to all of the television shows he had seen in America about gangsters, and the daytime Korean soaps he watched about the triads.
Maybe it didn’t say anything good, that he would associate such things with his own government.
“An offer?” Torino’s voice was gruff, but it couldn’t hide his curiosity.
“Yes,” Hisashi said. “They cease all illegal activity immediately and going forwards into the future. In exchange, the government agrees to put the manhunt on hold indefinitely, and not publically label the family as terrorists.”
“With the caveat that if anyone in the family ever steps out of line again, the hammer comes down?” Torino asked, understanding the situation. Hisashi nodded, and the retired hero snorted. “I’d give a lot to know what loaded gun the thieves were handed to force the government to negotiate.”
Hisashi smiled, his clean white teeth not looking even remotely like those of someone with a smoking habit. “You and a great many other people.”
It was Toshinori who asked the hanging question.
“Is your wife a Harima?”
“Is she?” Hisashi asked, sounding nonplussed. “I don’t know. This was Lone Star’s theory we were discussing, after all. He’s the one who thinks it couldn’t involve King Beast or the Mist People, so according to his logic, it must be the Harimas.”
Hisashi smiled softly, a glint of cold humor in his eyes. “Unless, of course, I lied to you. But then, we seem to be working on the assumption that I’m trustworthy. At least according to you, All Might.”
“Cut the sh*t!” Torino spat, pointing a finger. A great deal of his gruffness was something he put on for the sake of convenience; it was an old glove that fit him well. But he was starting to become genuinely irritated.
“Your wife is in witness protection, but she’s not trying to hide at all! Anyone with ill intent could plug her name into a search engine, pull her work address, tail her home, and then kill her and your son in the span of a few minutes!”
Hisashi chuckled. “I don’t think it would be quite as easy as you think, but please, continue.”
“Anyone who wanted to find your family, could. Anyone who wanted to hurt your family, could-”
“And they would regret it immensely, but again, please continue.”
“-and that doesn’t make any f*ckING sense!” Torino said, jabbing his finger into the palm of his other hand. “She can’t be related to any living villain with a grudge, or she’d be a sitting duck! That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact!”
“True,” Hisashi said, again sounding nonplussed.
“There are still freaks running around to this day with King Beast’s blood in them, killing each other for the privilege of wearing their grandpappy’s name like some villainous overlord cape. If she was related to him, the C-lister heroes assigned to that precinct would be dealing with an endless parade of goons in clown makeup looking to collect!”
Hisashi huffed slightly in a suppressed laugh, but didn’t say anything.
“And this can’t have anything to do with the Mist People! It wouldn’t be safe for her to be in Japan at all if it did! And no, shut the hell up, Toshi!” the older man said, jabbing a finger at the skeletal blonde next to him.
“I wasn’t going to say anything!” the strongest hero in the world said, holding his hands up defensively.
Torino didn’t bother looking at his former student, but snorted, clearly not believing a word the younger man said.
“Well then,” Hisashi said, folding his own fingers together over one of his knees. “It sounds to me like you’re very sure of your theory, then.” He closed his eyes and smiled. “Good job!”
Gran Torino made a sour-looking face.
“... I stand on calling you a son of a bitch at the start,” the old man finally said. “You missed your calling, brat. You belong in an interrogation room dismantling punks and wannabe mafiosos, not filing paperwork for the WHA.”
“These days, I mostly pay other people to handle the paperwork for me,” Hisashi said brightly. “Also, I don’t really see how you can complain about my chosen profession, when you’ve openly poached my son for yours.” The businessman’s eyes narrowed, and there was a dangerous glint behind the teasing tone. “From where I’m sitting, you’re getting the better end of the deal.”
“It doesn’t really matter, though,” Toshinori said, speaking up. The skeletal blonde had a contemplative look on his face, his dark eyes thoughtful. “The ‘why,’ I mean.”
Hisashi raised an eyebrow, a more genuine smile on his face. “Oh? And what makes you say that?”
Toshinori blinked, before settling back, adjusting himself in the seat that only barely fit him.
“Well, the exact backstory doesn’t matter, is what I’m saying. You’re obviously reluctant to give precise details. When asked a question, you painted these broad narratives of secrets and conspiracies, instead of just outright stating it. Maybe the truth is somewhere in what you told us, and maybe it isn’t. But I don’t really think it matters, because at the end of the day, it seems pretty clear that the witness protection is to keep tabs on Mrs. Midoriya, isn’t it? It’s not really about keeping you or your family safe at all.”
Hisashi smiled and said nothing for a long moment, his smoldering cigarette balanced between two fingers. “The greatest hero agency in the world. An unprecedented number of criminal incidents solved. I can’t help but wonder, how much of what Sir Nighteye became was because of what you taught him, All Might?”
The skeletal man coughed into his fist, a small fleck of blood landing on the back of his thumb. “Very little, I’m afraid. Sparrow always had it in him to become Sir Nighteye. Truthfully I had nothing to do with it.”
Hisashi hummed disbelievingly. “As you say, Detective Yagi.”
Torino’s eyes narrowed. “None of that explains your own records being so aggressively redacted. Are you also the descendent of a villain, then?”
The businessman chuckled softly.
“Am I the descendent of a villain? That is a funny question to ask, although you wouldn’t know why.” There was a moment’s pause.
“No. ‘I’ am not the descendant of a villain. It would be stranger if I were, all things considered.”
Torino narrowed his eyes at that.
Hisashi sat his cigarette down in the ashtray and folded his hand together.
“As All Might has succinctly summarized, the government does not trust my wife. This is due entirely to the circ*mstances of her birth. She was never trusted, and I imagine they would prefer for her to quietly drop dead in a ditch somewhere and be forgotten. Especially considering her chosen career is holding their most public-facing lackeys accountable for gross misuses of power.”
Hisashi fixed his eyes on Torino.
“Likewise, the government also does not trust me, for similar reasons. The feeling is mutual, as at no point in my life have I ever had any faith in the Japanese government. I owed no allegiance to them from the start, and I’ve seen far too much of what those sorts of people really are to ever trust them in the future. They would keep tabs on me if they were able, but much to their own regret, I am beyond their reach.”
“Because of the World Heroes Organization,” Toshinori supplied.
Hisashi made a vague circular motion with his cigarette. “Among other reasons.”
Hisashi took a sip of his half-empty whisky glass, before setting it and the cigarette back down.
“As far as the Japanese government is concerned, I am a liability and so is my wife. But I don’t concern myself terribly much with what they think. My family is all that matters to me. It is all that has ever mattered.”
Izuku was used to being awed on his trip to I-Island.
But if you had asked him before he came to the island what he expected to see while he was there, this room would have been it.
It was two stories tall, with the walls made of broad white plates, either hard plastic or some sort of lacquered metal. Seamlessly integrated into the walls were towering bookshelves of the same material that took full advantage of the vaulted height of the room. Large ladders of varnished wood were propped up against them, the four ends of their legs on rotating wheels, and a spiral stairway of wrought iron led up to a catwalk on the second floor, which allowed for easier access to the high books. Like the ladders, the catwalks were also made of heavy polished wood, and together they matched the large desk near the far wall.
There were almost no right angles or harsh edges in the room, the whole affair having a smoothed over, bubble-like design reminiscent of the tomorrowland aesthetic seen elsewhere on the island. The clean white plastic, polished wood, and twisted wrought-iron had an organic sense to them, a feeling that was accentuated by a number of potted plants and scattered pieces of laboratory equipment.
But as nice as the room was, half office and half library, what really drew the eye was the broad, blank space that dominated one wall, and the projector hanging from the ceiling that cast a huge holographic display onto it.
It was the stereotypical chalkboard of a research lab, filled with scribbled equations and notations made in different languages and types of shorthand. But instead of being tied to a physical board, it was a projected interactive image. Something a dozen hands from around the world could interact with, without ever once needing to be in the same room.
“Ms. Shield!” a masculine voice called out, with a faint Russian accent. “And her esteemed guest as well. I’m glad you could both find the time to visit me.”
Melissa curtsied. “Of course, professor.” Izuku also sketched a hasty bow.
The man standing before them resembled the room he was situated in. If Izuku had been asked to guess who he would meet on the giant floating research facility, this is the picture that would have come to mind.
.It was an older man, tall and heavy-set, with wide shoulders and large hands. His hair was thick, unkempt, and as white as snow, as were his bushy eyebrows and rough-trimmed beard. He wore reddish-brown dress pants, a clay colored vest, and comfortable leather shoes. A well-worn labcoat hung from his shoulders, and he wore a rumpled, slightly eccentric tie; the same sky blue as his eyes, with scattered white polka dots.
The plastic nametag that hung from his labcoat matched the brass plaque on the front of his desk.
“D-Doctor Asher Gallas!” Izuku said, only stuttering slightly. “It’s a pleasure to m-meet you!”
The older man smiled warmly, and shook the teen’s hand. The doctor’s hand dwarfed his own. “The pleasure is all mine, young man. I suspect you're aware, but rumors of you have already made the rounds. Dr. Shield couldn’t stop talking about the paper you wrote on his old armor designs.”
Izuku flushed as red as a tomato.
“Yes, quite the man of the hour. And of course, we cannot forget Ms. Shield, one of the star pupils of the institution. I assume you’ve heard, but I will be replacing Dr. Niemand as the professor of the Physics courses at the start of the new school year.”
“Yes, professor, I’m looking forward to it!” Melissa said cheerfully. “The University of Moscow is renowned for it’s contributions to physics and engineering! I’m sure we’ll learn a lot from you next year!”
The scientist waved a hand slightly dismissively. “They made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. It’s a common story, from what I hear. They certainly do like collecting the best.”
“Your office is amazing!” Izuku blurted out, his eyes on the holographic whiteboard.
The white-haired man chuckled. “It certainly is nicer than the ones I had in Prague or Moscow. Out here, people actually have money to spare on their budgets. It is a strange feeling.”
His kind gaze turned to the greenette. “And how about you, young man? I understand the dean has already spoken to you, has he not?” He put a large hand next to his bearded mouth, and loudly whispered. “Did he succeed in poaching you?”
Izuku flushed again before shaking his head. “Ah, n-no sir! Sorry.”
Dr. Gallas laughed. “No need to apologize, young man! I heard you were born in Japan, so I imagine your heart is set on UA, yes? They ‘are’ the best in the world, after all. There’s no shame in aiming for the top. That just means we’ll have to try harder to steal you in the future.”
The elderly man clapped a friendly hand on Izuku’s shoulder. “Never be afraid to ask for what you’re worth. If I-Island wants you, young man, be sure to make them pay for the privilege.”
Izuku reddened again before nodding.
This time, it wasn’t Izuku who asked the question, but Melissa.
“If you don’t mind, professor, could you tell me about the project you’re working on right now? I’ve heard some rumors about it, and I was wondering what was true!”
The white-haired man smiled. “You can just call me doctor or Mr. Gallas, young lady. I’m not your professor yet. And certainly! I’d love to share, though I’m afraid you may find it boring.”
The scientist pulled something that looked like a marker for a whiteboard out of his pocket. But when he twisted the black cap off, it didn’t have a wedge of sponge with ink on it, but instead a hard rubber nib.
It’s purpose was immediately revealed when the white-haired doctor reached out and tapped the huge holographic display with it.. Parts of the enormous simulated board resized themselves, becoming larger while others shrank and moved into the background.
It was a stylus for manipulating the hologram.
“In simple terms, our project is attempting to find a means to block teleportation, warp jumping, and other effects generated by trans-spatial superpowers,” the older man explained. “This project is nearly a decade old at this point, and it has a lot of very wealthy and influential backers behind it. The very existence of teleportation quirks is a colossal security risk for, well. Nearly everything, quite frankly. And unsurprisingly, the people who are most vocal about finding a solution to it are also the people with the most resources to spend. Because they also have the most to lose.”
Izuku leaned forwards, fascinated. Melissa smiled. “That’s really cool, Dr. Gallas!” the blond exclaimed.
The old man smiled. “I’m glad you think so. These days, it just feels like a source of headaches for me. I’ve been a part of the initial team since the beginning, when our think tank was formed in Prague. In all that time, we’ve completely failed to accomplish our core objective. We aren’t even close, and likely never will be.”
Melissa frowned. She had far more experience with these sorts of things, living and growing up on I-Island. What the doctor had just said seemed wrong.
“I’m sorry to hear that you haven’t been able to produce results, sir,” she said, looking confused. “But if the objective is so obviously impossible, why did they keep the tank open for so long, then?”
The bearded man chuckled. “Ah, but that’s just it. I didn’t say we produced no results. I said we had failed our core objective, which was blocking teleportation.”
He reached out with the stylus, and tapped the edge of the simulated whiteboard. A side window slid out, and he tapped through several folders to an .AR5 file. With a flick, he tossed the file onto the main board, and suddenly a large window opened as the footage began to play.
The Augmented Reality 5 file was short, only about fifteen seconds long. It showed an empty room with a complex device set up on a table. It resembled a tower of small metal pipes, with an ordinary baseball secured on the top via mechanical claw. The base of the tower was surrounded by much more complex looking machinery that Melissa couldn’t even begin to identify.
Someone announced the beginning of the test, and a loud mechanical hum could be heard as something switched on. A pool of soft, rippling light appeared in the center of the machinery at the base of the tower. Another voice counted down from five, and then the claw opened, dropping the baseball.
It fell, but instead of hitting the pile of components on the table and bouncing off, it vanished instantly the moment it touched the pool of light.
There was suddenly an enormous rush of noise as a dozen voices began shouting and yelling offscreen. Someone was cheering, and then the footage ended abruptly.
“That,” Dr. Gallas said, “is footage from two years ago, recorded in a remote facility in Siberia. And what you just witnessed was the first successful test of an artificial teleportation effect, created not with a quirk, but with science alone.”
Both teens stood there in shock, overwhelmed at what they had just heard.
Dr. Gallas was part of a team that had teleported something? Without a quirk!?
“It’s a total failure, unfortunately,” the man continued. “Eight years worth of research on teleportation effects, trying to learn how to block them. Trying to learn how to make the world safe from the spatial superpowers being misused. And the only thing we figured out was how to make the problem a thousand times more commonplace.”
“But-” Izuku started to say. However, he wasn’t the only one who had a distracted groove he could get caught in, because Dr. Gallas seemed to not even hear him, absorbed as he was in his own analysis of their research.
“What’s worse, even that didn’t work out properly, because our version of it is completely inaccurate. We ran a hundred simulated tests before committing to a real one, of course. Folding space into a needle and then threading it into itself is no mean feat. But the reason we set up the test in Siberia was because all of our math predicted that the output would be totally uncontrollable. And unfortunately, the live experiments proved that correct. The devices we made can be programmed with output coordinates, but what we send through never ends up in the place we want it to go. The math can vary by multiple orders of magnitude one way or the other. In our first test, the baseball we sent through ended up ten kilometers off from the target, embedded in the side of a tree. If we hadn’t put a tracker inside of it, we never would have found it.”
The older man sighed. “Conceptually, the entire tank is a failure on almost every possible level. Commercialization of such imprecise teleportation is impossible. We can’t teleport people or goods when they’re just as liable to end up a hundred yards underground or embedded in a wall six buildings over. And worse, the only thing our research has done is prove fairly definitively that our original goal is almost certainly impossible.”
Izuku couldn’t contain himself, but it was Melissa who exploded first.
“BUT PROFESSOR!” she exclaimed. “It’s- this is unprecedented! This will make history when you publish it! This is- this is practically only a step away from making a spacecraft that could travel between stars!”
Izuku shared her wavelength, he couldn’t help but agree. “This is unbelievable, sir!” he said, his voice hoarse and cracking slightly. “Of all the quirk effects you could manage to replicate, teleportation… It’s teleportation! It’s like a miracle!”
Dr. Asher Gallas looked at the two teenagers in front of him, radiating enthusiasm, and slowly sighed.
This wasn’t really how he had wanted this to go, but perhaps it was better than they heard it from him, here and now.
They would have to learn, eventually.
“Technological development is not geometric, exponential, or even linear. It is step-based, occurring in leaps and bounds,” the scientist explained, leaning slightly on his desk.
“We will experience long periods of stagnation, our progress will plateau. Then a breakthrough will occur and we will rapidly advance until we hit new walls and barriers. This was true even before the advent of quirks, and it is certainly true today. So much of our progress now hinges on dissecting and understanding exotic quirk effects, sometimes it really does feel like we’re just waiting around for the next great quirk to solve our problems for us.”
The scientist turned to regard the giant board of equations and pictures with exasperated fondness. “You are quite right: what we have achieved here is nothing less than a scientific miracle. We have isolated and reproduced a quirk-based teleportation effect. We will likely win some sort of award for our contributions to the fields of physics and quirk science. But all of that,” he said, waving a hand at the board, “is as far as we can take it for now. To produce a viable form of commercial or private teleportation travel will require other breakthroughs and advances that are beyond the scope of our research. Likewise, it will take five or six other, completely different miracles to turn this into something that could be called a science fiction FTL drive. If the effect is this inaccurate over short ranges, it certainly would never work when stellar distances are involved.”
The white-haired scientist smiled somewhat sadly down at Melissa Shield and her teenage friend. “And, perhaps worst of all, we have wholly failed at our original goal of inventing a way to block or baffle teleportation quirks. That was the original goal of this think tank, and unfortunately, we are no closer to that than we were when we started. If anything, our divergent research here has simply reinforced the difficulty of blocking people with trans-spatial superpowers. As far as we can tell, the only method that exists is to use quirk-cancelling quirks. Which are the rarest of all unicorns.”
“And like healing quirks, have never been replicated successfully,” Izuku added absently.
The white-haired scientist nodded. “Quite right. Our investors agreed to fund us for ten years because there is a very strong interest in all sectors, both public and private, to find a way to block teleportation. As it stands, the only two life paths for trans-spatial quirk holders are either obtaining a provisional quirk license of some sort through the heroics system, or living the rest of their lives on parole with a monitor attached to them. It is inhumane on it’s face, and also not a sustainable policy. Society cannot perpetually treat all warpers as villains-in-potentia. A counter to criminal teleportation must be found. But so far, we have failed to solve the problem.”
With a gesture of his stylus, the scientist banished the video window, and various parts of the whiteboard resized themselves and shifted their positions, filling the space back in.
“There was talk of granting us an extension, on the grounds of further refining the teleportation technology we incidentally developed,” Dr. Gallas continued. “But without a way to stop unwanted teleportation, our backers were not eager to fund the creation of something that would make teleportation a thousand times more of a problem than it already is. If you will permit me a metaphor, we were brought together for the purpose of inventing bulletproof vests. We instead created a means of putting a gun in the hands of every living creature on the planet. So unfortunately, our findings will be patented and then locked away. Mothballed for the foreseeable future. Perhaps one day, someone will invent something that will be able to make use of what we have found. But it will not be us.”
“So it’s not really that different from the Arc Reactor, then,” Izuku said softly, a bit of sadness in his voice. “It’s just a tech demo, not something anyone can use.”
The scientist smiled, feeling not a small amount of relief. He had no desire to crush the optimism out of either teen, and was glad of the topic change. “Ah yes, the Arc Reactor. Quite the interesting display of oddball physics. Your father is a visionary, Ms. Shield. If the two of you find such things interesting, you may want to look into the work of a man by the name of T.Y. Minovsky. He’s an adjunct who is currently associated with the University of Moscow. He’s been accomplishing some truly miraculous things with nuclear fission and it’s relation to the fields of advanced particle physics. I will likely die before those seeds bare fruit, but the two of you may witness cold fusion in your lifetimes.”
Both teens brightened at the mention of cold fusion, and Dr. Gallas laughed as he navigated through the holographic whiteboard to show them more things.
It was true, unfortunately. The teams working with I-Island made miracles every day, and nine times out of ten, they were abandoned due to having no practical use or monetary value.
But hope sprang eternal. And just as he stood on the shoulders of giants to reach as far as he had in his long career, Dr. Asher Gallas knew that one day, a new generation would clamber over top of him to attain even greater heights. His own legacy, and all it contained, would be burned as fuel for the journey onwards.
The future belonged to youths like Ms. Shield and Mr. Midoriya. His discarded miracles were not destined to be forgotten; but would become the building blocks of their own great works.
So he smiled, with cheer in his heart. Because that’s the kind of scientist he was.
“If you don’t mind my asking, sir, what is your quirk?”
Dr. Gallas smiled. “Given your penchant for analysis, I’m not surprised at the question, young man. Though unfortunately, I’m afraid my own quirk is far from interesting.”
Suddenly and without fanfare, every hair on the scientist’s head turned a vivid, neon orange.
Melissa giggled, and Izuku choked down a laugh. “I-I’m sorry sir!”
“Sorry for what?” the older man said, with a deadpan expression on his face, as his hair suddenly matched his tie, turning sky blue with huge white circles evenly spaced across it.
All three burst out laughing, and the elderly doctor raked a large hand through his hair almost as a reflex, as it turned back to the snowy white from before.
“I quite enjoyed making my hair look ridiculous, back in the day,” he confessed. “My mother always scolded me by saying I would go bald if I kept playing games. Eventually, I stopped caring so much about shocking people. But when the first gray hair appeared, I decided to just hurry things along. My hair’s been white ever since.”
“Do you think someone without a useful or powerful quirk could ever become a hero, sir?”
Melissa spun to stare at Izuku with wide eyes, but Izuku remained firm.
Dr. Gallas was quiet for a moment, thinking. Then, after a long pause, he spoke.
“You seem rather well-versed in hero trivia, young man,” the doctor said. “Tell me, do you know the average number of people a professional superhero can expect to save over the course of their career?”
Izuku frowned slightly. “That’s a complicated question,” the green-haired teen replied. “There’s a pretty big disparity in save counts between heroes, depending on their specialization and where they’re located.”
Dr. Gallas nodded, fishing his digital stylus back out of his pocket. “Yes. And the strength of their own quirk is also a factor. Many heroes could go their whole careers and never save as many people as a top hero with a powerful quirk might save over the course of a single disaster.”
“Like the Tokyo Sky Egg incident in Japan, with All Might!” Izuku supplied.
“Correct,” the doctor said, nodding. “Or the rescue of the Royal Gigantic cruise liner by Captain Celebrity some years ago.”
Using his stylus, Dr. Asher drew a horizontal line on a clear space at the bottom of his holographic whiteboard. Then capped each end with a small vertical dash.
“Mathematically, the average is always the exact middle on a line between your numbers,” the scientist explained, drawing a small notch in the center of his line. “However, if we take into account the huge disparity in save counts, a more accurate visual representation of the average would be something like this,” he said, drawing a second notch that was almost touching the far end.
His intention was clear: top pros around the world skewed the stats so badly the stats themselves almost didn’t matter.
“So as you say young man, it’s a complicated question. But if you break the math down, as we have done here on I-Island, you’ll find that the numbers work out somewhat like this.”
He used his stylus to draw the number 20, followed by a ‘k.’
“Twenty thousand people, is the amount of lives your typical street activist hero could expect to save over the course of their whole career.”
Then he drew a 100 followed by a ‘k.’
“An exceptional hero in a major metropolis might be able to save one hundred thousand.”
Then he drew 750 followed by a ‘k.’
“And at the very upper end, a top superhero of a first world nation might end up somewhere in the upper six digits, though again, this number fluctuates wildly from one hero to the next.”
“Which is the reason why Japan, America, and Europe track hero successes by incidents resolved, and not people saved!” Izuku supplied enthusiastically.
Dr. Asher nodded in agreement. “Yes, quite right. And then, of course, there is the mythical-”
He drew a 1 on the holographic board, followed by a lowercase ‘m.’
“One million,” Melissa whispered.
“It is a high water mark that few have reached,” Dr. Asher supplied, slipping the cap back on his stylus with a firm click. “It is also one of the only reasons most hero fans bother with keeping track of headcounts in the first place. Lives saved may not matter, but actually achieving the one million is seen as a crown, of sorts.”
“What’s the highest?” Melissa asked. “That we know of, I mean.”
Two voices answered her simultaneously.
“Three million-” “Three million.”
Izuku flushed, and Dr. Asher looked at the young man with a rueful but approving smile. “Perhaps it will not shock you to hear this, Ms. Shield, but it is your adopted uncle who holds the uncontested record. A hat trick of legendary proportions.”
“Three million,” she whispered, a bit of awe in her voice.
“Three million souls,” Dr. Asher affirmed. “Not all superheroes have a secondary moniker, it’s more common in the newer generations. But while All Might has no official hero title, he does hold two unofficial ones. The Invincible Hero, and the Thrice-Crowned Hero. It is not difficult to understand why some might refer to him as such. For a man who has been a professional superhero for over 40 years, he has effectively averaged 200 people saved per day, every day, for his entire career. It is heroism that borders on absurdity. An outlandish feat that none are likely to match in any of our lifetimes.”
Slowly, the scientist slipped his stylus back into the breast pocket of his labcoat. “And, unfortunately, I think that is rather the problem.”
Melissa Shield blinked. Izuku also looked confused. “What do you mean, professor?” the blonde girl asked.
Dr. Asher Gallas looked at the two teens, his lips pressed into a thin line. There was worry in his eyes, and a deep sadness.
“You are both far too clever to be lied to. Nor do I think it would be fair even if I could. Earlier, you asked me if I believed someone with a useless quirk could become a hero.” He paused. “Or, no quirk, as the question rather implied.”
Izuku swallowed, and Melissa imperceptibly flinched.
Dr. Asher sighed. “The only truthful response I could give to such a question… is why would you want to be one? Obviously, such a thing is the dream of everyone your age. I am not disparaging that, but-”
Unconsciously, he ran his old fingers through his snow-white hair, and for an instant, it flickered pink.
“In our conversations earlier, you said that you wanted to help people. That it was deeply important to you. A sentiment I am proud to say I share, young man. But facts are facts. Even if you defied every expectation, surpassed all logic and reason, and somehow managed to crown yourself with a wreath of glory… that’s a million lives saved at best.”
The old man reached out, and with the back of his hand, rapped a knuckle against the huge blank wall of his office, his fingers phasing through the hologram and causing a faint distortion in the display.
“Meanwhile, we achieve scientific breakthroughs here every year that save the lives of millions by proxy, and improve the lives of millions more. Whoever solves the problems on this board alone will save more people in that one moment than All Might has saved in his entire career. How many die in disasters or criminal incidents because help could not reach them in time? How much suffering would be averted, if the code for replicable teleportation were cracked? Ambulances would become outdated in an instant; we would simply teleport the injured directly into hospital beds and operating theaters. The potential is limitless. And that is just one project among thousands on I-Island.”
The white-haired scientist leaned slightly against his desk, one hand pressed flat on its surface. “I wish I could tell you to chase after that dream, I truly do. To watch people struggle against great odds, to overcome adversity and defy fate. There has always been something great about that, something profound. It is a feature in all of the most beautiful stories. But that is the terrible thing about dreams, you see. They can lead us astray. They can make us lose sight of the present, of the here and now. They can make us lose sight of ourselves.”
He looked up at the two teens. “I also dreamed of being a hero, once. I ran after that, chasing it. And while I was away from home, thinking only of myself, my mother died.”
Izuku swallowed, and Melissa put a hand up to her mouth.
“I don’t even remember what the last words I said to her were, I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in months. I didn’t even know she was ill.” He laughed humorlessly.
“I will always regret how callous I was back then, to her and my father. How I took their money and time and squandered it, without ever thanking them for all that they did for me. By the time I realized everything they had sacrificed to help me chase after my dreams, it was already too late to say anything. The only way I could spend time with my mother was by visiting her grave in Novgorod. The dead don’t hear the apologies of the living.”
Asher Gallas sighed. “My dreams made me lose sight of what was important in my life. Money doesn’t matter. People matter. Time matters. Because no matter how much money you make, you’ll never be able to buy back your time. And neither fame nor glory can resurrect the dead.”
Two old and heavy hands patted each teenager on the shoulder.
“The man who invented penicillin saved more lives in a day than every hero this age has ever produced. It’s okay to dream, young man, young lady. Dream of great and wonderful things. But don’t ever lose sight of what really matters in your lives. Because one day, it will be gone.”
“It’s my turn.”
Glass clinked on glass in the silence of the armored car. Hisashi returned the whisky bottle to the refrigerator and leaned back in his seat, his hands folded.
He stared at the two men in front of him for a long moment, eyes cold and contemplative.
“I could ask a lot of things,” he finally said, breaking the silence. “But, in truth, most of it I don’t really care much about.”
There was another beat, and Toshinori coughed quietly into his hand.
“But there are a few questions, I think, that I’d like to hear the answer to,” Hisashi continued.
The tip of his cigarette glowed, then faded. He breathed out slowly, and not a wisp of smoke escaped his lips.
“Were you ever going to tell me or my wife about One For All? Or did you intend to keep it a secret?”
There was a long, pregnant moment in the back of the car. Torino’s lips pressed together. Finally, Toshinori spoke.
“Truthfully… no. I wasn’t planning on telling you.”
There was a moment of silence. Torino gritted his teeth at his pupil’s lack of tact.
“Are you sure that’s the answer you want to go with?” Hisashi asked, smiling. “I can pretend I didn’t hear you the first time.”
But Toshinori shook his head.
“I don’t really like lying,” he said. “The idea of informing you and your wife had crossed my mind… but I felt like that wasn’t a good idea”
“Oh?” Hisashi said. “And why is that?”
“Because this secret has killed people,” Toshinori said simply, the long fingers of his huge hands tangling together. “People have died for it. Nana died for it. I can understand why someone could interpret this poorly, but quite frankly, I felt like not only was telling you both a bad idea, but also that it wasn’t truly my place. If young Midoriya wanted to tell his parents, that would be his choice. But it shouldn’t be mine. I was afraid it would just create more danger, not less.”
“Do I seem like the sort of person who would be put in danger by a secret?” Hisashi asked, quirking an eyebrow.
“No,” Toshinori said. “But, respectfully, I didn’t know anything about you until today. I had assumed you were what your paperwork made you out to be.”
“I see,” Hisashi hummed. There was a brief pause, then he nodded. “That’s about what I had thought, but I wanted to be sure.”
Toshinori coughed in surprise. “You- you expected that answer?”
“Of course,” Hisashi replied, gesturing dismissively with his cigarette. “If I had genuinely believed you were going to tell me, I would have never bothered tipping my hand from the start. It would have benefitted me far more to play dumb. I certainly wouldn’t have needed to talk so much today.”
Toshinori flinched slightly, and Torino sighed.
They had walked right into that.
“Your intent was clear from the outset,” Hisashi leveled. “I just wanted to hear your reasoning in your own words.”
There was another pause, and Toshinori coughed slightly into his own fist. “Are you upset?” the blonde asked.
“Am I upset?” Hisashi repeated, seeming to mull the words over. “Given my jobs, it would be rather hypocritical of me to be upset over the idea of keeping something a secret in the name of safety.”
His words were light and dismissive, almost playful. But his eyes were cold.
“Then again, I’ve also never claimed to not be a hypocrite, either. And I rather think every parent is entitled to some hypocrisy when it comes to their own children.”
Cold grey eyes cut across the way to meet Torino’s brown. “You’ve gotten sloppy in your old age, Lone Star. Just because every past wielder was a legal adult, doesn’t mean you can treat my son as though he is.”
“As Toshinori said, this secret has killed people,” the old man rebutted. “Nobody would have complained if the kid had wanted to tell you, but if it’s going to be his secret, then he needs to be the one to choose. Not us. We can’t make that call for him.”
“Wise and logical,” Hisashi demurred. Then that friendly smile of his gained a faintly mocking edge. “At this rate, though, you definitely won’t be beating the child soldier allegations. I’m not sure the trade is worth it, personally.”
Then it clicked.
Torino realized what was happening. The veiled threat, the coldness, the subtle probing and tests. Replying with a list of conspiracies and dirty government laundry when probed about his own past, never quite giving a straight answer. This entire conversation, from the very beginning, suddenly made sense.
“I know who you are,” the old man said, while Hisashi took a sip of his whiskey. “You’re not a spook. You’re King Spook. You’re the poor bastard they’ve conned into trying to cancel the apocalypse.”
Hisashi sat his glass down and looked at the elderly hero impassively. “And?”
“And my ass,” Torino said, but there was no heat in it. “The kid’s analytical and technical skills. I had thought it was strange, when I first saw it. I know what raw genius looks like, I’ve taught those kids before. But there’s a limit to how much self-teaching can do. A glass ceiling, a hard cut-off. At some point, talent needs to be actively fostered before it can grow any further. You need a mentor figure that knows what they’re doing, a teacher to guide them. And the kid is past that stage, he’s way past it.”
Gran Torino pointed a finger at the besuited man sitting across from him. “It was you. You’re the one who taught him how to do what he does.”
“My son was fascinated by quirks from the beginning,” Hisashi said. “I had nothing to do with that.”
That was a deflection if the old man had ever heard one. But the more he thought about it, the more certain he was.
Midoriya Izuku’s insight was like a gemstone that was still being cut down and polished up. But the finished product was sitting across the aisle from them, and to the old man’s eyes, suddenly the resemblance was uncanny.
If you took all the sunshine brightness away from the kid, dressed him up in a 3-piece suit, and made him about ten thousand percent more cynical, he’d be the spitting image of his father.
Whether it had been a joke in poor taste or a legitimate threat, Torino still had to admit that the play with the sealed compartment was genius. Hisashi put them both in a position of complete disadvantage without either of them even realizing it. It’s exactly the kind of trick he wanted the kid to get comfortable pulling.
And if dealing with freak quirks and civilization-ending disasters was Hisashi’s job, then the obvious conclusion was-
“You were training young Izuku to be your replacement,” Toshinori said, having arrived at the same conclusion Gran had. “You wanted him to take your place.”
“‘Replacement’ is a loaded word,” Hisashi demurred, taking a pull from his cigarette. “You replace a lightbulb. You replace a missing set of keys. My son was never my replacement.”
“You say that,” Torino snarked. “But you certainly didn’t seem very keen on pushing him into heroics.”
“Because my son would never become a professional superhero, no matter what he did,” Hisashi replied evenly. “It was, quite frankly, an impossible dream from the start.”
“That’s rather pessimistic,” Toshinori replied, well aware of his own hypocrisy on the issue. “I would have liked his chances.”
“It’s not pessimism,” the salaryman rebutted, “It is realism. The watchword of the age is fear, and the password into the halls of power is control. The world fears what quirks are capable of, and while controlling the quirks is impossible, controlling the people who have them is much simpler. The chosen few who stand at the top of this society are utterly terrified of losing control again, the same way control was lost during the Dawn. They will do absolutely anything to stop that from happening. No matter the cost, or what sacrifices they have to make. Whatever price has to be paid, they will pay it.”
Hisashi’s cigarette burned, a point of red in the shade of the backseat.
“Fundamentally, every change society has made to itself since the Age of Heroes began was based on a single issue. Does a person have the right to self-defense? And on a fundamental level, every single government in the world has collectively decided to say no, you don’t. Every rule they’ve made, every law they’ve passed, it all stems back to this singular decision. If someone attacks you, with their quirk, do you have the right to respond? Society says no. You don’t. Your duty is to retreat, and wait for the police or heroes to intervene. It was not a popular decision then. It still is not now. Many nations fought a war over this, several more than one. Destro is the poster child of that era. But that decision still stands today. Everything flows downstream from it.”
“I used to teach history,” Torino grunted. “You’re preaching to the choir.”
“Am I?” Hisashi drawled. The glowing ember hanging from his lips was reflected twice in the lenses of his glasses.
“A quirkless professional hero would inspire the people to believe that they can defend themselves, that they can deal with their own problems. A fact the various governments of the world are well aware of. The Japanese Hero Public Safety Commission would have never granted my son a license. Neither would the Russian Hero Commissariat, the Britannian Union of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or the American Department of Homeland Heroics. There is no superhero overseeing organization in the world that would rubber stamp the license of a quirkless hero. It goes against every message they are trying to sell, every narrative they want the people to believe.”
Slowly, the businessman reached up and took the cigarette out of his mouth. “We are beyond the 20th and 21st centuries. Far beyond them. Propaganda is no longer in vogue. Now, the focus is on creating context.”
Hisashi shifted his crossed legs from one side to the other.
“My son was never going to become a hero, because the very system itself would have never permitted it. No amount of pretty speeches from you or any other hero can change that.”
“So you think it was ridiculous then,” Torino said, pushing. “A stupid idea.”
“Yes, it was a ridiculous dream!” Hisashi spat back, anger visible in his eyes. “It was always a ridiculous dream from the start!”
And as quickly as it had appeared, that fiery blaze of emotion vanished. “But you don’t say that to him,” he said softly. “You don’t ever say something like that to your child, even if it’s true. Because boys are allowed to dream.”
The salaryman shifted in his seat, folding his hands carefully over his crossed knee. “Everyone in this world dreamed ridiculous dreams when they were young. Children dream of being astronauts and firefighters, they dream of being doctors and wizards and superheroes. They have imaginary friends and fairytale weddings, they tell their parents that they traveled through time and have a secret castle hidden in their closet.”
He narrowed his eyes. “But the world isn’t full of astronauts and wizards, is it? It’s full of salarymen and construction workers. It’s full of cooks and janitors and train conductors. The very industry we collectively represent is a boulevard of broken dreams, is it not? For every successful hero who makes their debut, how many wash out, fail, or switch careers?”
Hisashi focused his gaze directly on Torino. “What job field contains the largest number of people who entered the system as prospective heroes? You should know the answer to that question, Lone Star.”
The old man did. “The police,” he grunted. Toshinori turned to look at the older man in surprise. It wasn’t heroics?
“And the second?” the dark-haired man challenged.
“Private security.”
“Is heroics in the top five fields?”
“No, it isn’t,” Torino replied. “Though last I checked, it is hanging on in the top ten.”
“By the skin of it’s teeth,” Hisashi commented dryly. Toshinori was shocked.
Heroics was barely in the top ten of final destinations for hero prospects?
“Boys are allowed to dream,” Hisashi repeated, and there was a note of melancholy in his voice now. “And when they dream, they should be encouraged and cheered on. That is simply common decency. But everyone knows those dreams aren’t realistic.”
Toshinori couldn’t fully hide his flinch, but if Hisashi noticed, he didn’t show it. “Society has debated endlessly, for thousands of years, what masculinity is. What defines the line between boy and man. Some societies had rituals or coming-of-age ceremonies, others had laws or arbitrary rules. But the truth is, a boy becomes a man the day he puts away his childish things of his own accord. Because he knows there is something more important that he needs to do with his time.”
The tip of Hisashi’s cigarette glowed. “For some men, accepting that responsibility comes late. For others, it is tragically early.”
“And some never do,” Toshinori voiced.
Hisashi nodded. “And some remain children forever. Never growing up or accepting any responsibility for themselves or their own actions. Never putting anything else ahead of their own personal desires and petty feelings. Society has invented many words and terms for such individuals, but the root cause is all the same. As pro heroes, the two of you deal with the consequences of that selfishness every day.”
Toshinori frowned. “Is that what heroics is to you? Childish? A toy that needs to be put away?”
“For my son? Absolutely. His obsession with heroes is a cry for help, his adoration of them is born out of envy and hope. What he truly loves is quirks, and I encouraged the habit. But superheroes? Nothing good will ever come from that long term.”
Toshinori was shaking his head, frowning. “But he doesn’t have to be a hero to act like one. I would know, that was my plan before I met Nana. I’m not so sure about the government never granting him a license, but even if that were true, does it really matter? As a quirkless, he doesn’t need one. Half the laws on the books today don’t even apply to him! It wouldn’t be glamorous, but he could have still chased that dream.”
Hisashi’s eyes hardened. “Did you not,” he said, pushing the tip of his cigarette into the ashtray “listen to a single thing I’ve told you? I surely wasn’t speaking for my own health. I just finished regaling you with a story about how the HPSC was prepared to own up to murdering a child in cold blood, out of fear of what the Harimas would do if they were not stopped.”
Cold grey eyes flicked over to Torino, then back to Toshinori. “Whether you believe my story is the truth or a lie, believe me when I say there is nothing the governments of the world won’t do, if something is a threat to their definition of public order. Either my son would have failed and died a dog’s death, or he would have lived long enough to be the reason they changed the laws, and been rewarded with a witch hunt for his trouble.”
The abused cigarette went back to Hisashi’s lips. “This is my son we are talking about. Neither of those things will ever be an acceptable outcome. Not to me.”
Toshinori couldn’t argue with that logic. But…
He couldn’t shake the image of those bright, teary eyes that looked up at him on that rooftop, begging to know if he could be a hero too.
‘Sorry, kid. Not without a quirk.’
“He deserves the right to try.”
“Even if it kills him?” Hisashi shot back without hesitation. Toshinori couldn’t hide his flinch. The businessman narrowed his eyes.
“I know what the endgame is, for that dream. Broken hearts, broken promises. Broken lives. And a broken son. I never discouraged him, not once. But don’t you dare sit here and try to judge me for not encouraging him. He never would have been happy, chasing capes. It was a childish dream, one doomed to fail from the start through no fault of his own. Eventually, he would have realized that for himself. He would have grown up.”
Hisashi locked gazes with Toshinori. “Tell me the truth. Where would you be, if Shimura had never adopted you and taken you under her wing? What would have happened to you, if you hadn’t been given One For All?”
Large hands clenched shut, before slowly relaxing. “I’d be dead,” Toshinori confessed. “I would have died.”
“Yes,” Hisashi said, nodding. “Updraft saved your life, in more ways than one. Without her, you would be dead. And no one would have cared, because you were a quirkless orphan.”
He leaned back in his seat. “My son is not an orphan. ‘I’ care. He has someone batting for his team, even if he doesn’t know it.”
The tip of Hisashi’s cigarette glowed. “My son deserves better than scrounging around in the gutter, beating up purse snatchers and begging the society that disdained him for whatever crumbs of validation they can spare. Which is what his fate would have been, if he had kept chasing that dream.”
“That won’t happen,” Toshinori said, his own voice becoming firm. Torino was surprised he didn’t spontaneously turn back into his muscular form. He had never heard that tone come from the younger man when he wasn’t on duty. When he wasn’t All Might. “That is not something that will happen to young Izuku.”
“No, it won’t,” Hisashi blithely agreed. “But only because I would not have allowed it.”
Sorahiko Torino had been in the back of the car with his former student and the enigmatic businessman for several hours now. And this was the first time he had seen the elder Midoriya so-
Emotionally compromised wasn’t the right word, because it implied too much. But he sensed a crack, in that cold man’s glacial nerves and calm disposition. A weakness.
Perhaps it was to be expected. Midoriya was a Firebreather, allegedly. And it was an infamous truth that people with fire quirks had hot tempers. If anything, Hisashi’s cold, steely resolve was all the more impressive for it. The old man wished some of his former students with heat quirks had this kind of control.
But that flicker of anger was something. A seam in that wall of icy metal. A chink in an otherwise flawless demeanor. And Torino still had questions he wanted answered, problems he had no resolution for. He still didn’t feel as though he had met the ‘real’ Hisashi Midoriya.
So he did what any good investigator would do.
He pushed.
“So that’s all this ever was to you, then? Just a big waiting game? You were waiting on your son to give up on being a hero on his own? That feels pretty negligent to me.”
Hisashi’s eyes narrowed dangerously, and for an instant, Torino could have sworn he saw a flicker of something red in them. A small, almost invisible curl of smoke wisped out of the corner of the businessman’s mouth.
“You have a lot of nerve, implying I’ve been negligent as a father. You’ve taken my son aside and are using his childhood dreams to attempt to pawn off an unstable and profoundly dangerous weapon onto him. A weapon more powerful than any nuclear bomb and which has, with one exception, directly or indirectly killed everyone who ever held it. And you haven’t willingly disclosed any of this to either of his legal guardians. You would not have told me, had I not already known your secrets and guessed your intent.”
This time, Torino was certain something red had flickered in the businessman’s eyes.
“The only reason transferring a quirk to a minor isn’t illegal is because the world does not currently believe such a thing is even possible. Do not try and look down at me from some high horse, Lone Star. I know what you are.”
This time, it was Torino’s turn to be angry, as his own brows furrowed and his lip curled.
“Are you trying to imply that we’re grooming your kid, or something!?”
Hisashi leaned back in his seat and folded his hands together. “That depends,” he said coolly. “Are you trying to imply that I’m a poor father for not explicitly encouraging a self-destructive, suicidal dream in my son?”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. Futuristic buildings of smooth chrome and bubbled glass rolled by in the windows, occasionally broken up by dense patches of trees and other greenery. Toshinori coughed, the sound rough and wet. Before he could reach his own mouth, however, Hisashi was holding out a cloth handkerchief.
The skeletal blonde hesitated for only a moment before taking it gratefully and using it to cover his mouth.
“Don’t get it twisted, Lone Star,” Hisashi said softly, the wisp of smoke and the strange flicker of light in his eyes long gone. “As hard of a decision as it was, it was better for him to be hurt a little now and be whole later, than to push him into something that I knew would break him. Dreams should uplift and inspire boys. Not destroy them.”
Hisashi’s gaze met Torino’s own for a long moment, then he turned to face Toshinori.
“Let me make my position on this perfectly clear. I am sure that many of your… ‘colleagues,’ and past acquaintances, would consider your quirk to be wasted on my son. Especially if they were made aware of the whole truth of the matter.”
Hisashi’s eyes narrowed. “As far as I’m concerned, it is my son that is wasted on your quirk.”
“That’s an awful lot of faith you’ve got in a quirkless kid, no matter how smart he is.”
If Torino had been hoping to needle Hisashi again, he was disappointed, as his comment was met with a dry chuckle and a half smile.
“Heroes and villains are delicate things,” Hisashi murmured, almost to himself. “My son is not. Ironic, given the society that rejected him chooses to treat him like he is made of glass.”
Something still wasn’t adding up for Torino. Midoriya Hisashi mostly made sense in his head, but…
Somehow the man had absolute faith in his son, but little to no faith in the system itself. A strange stance for someone with a quirkless child, and an even stranger stance for someone with Hisashi’s job.
There was something the old man was missing. He was holding a puzzle piece that didn’t fit anywhere he could see.
So he did what he knew. He kept pushing.
“First the quip about child soldiers, now calling heroes and villains fragile,” the old man noted idly. “Some of this sounds awfully close to a villain monologue. Especially for a government employee.”
Hisashi didn’t take the bait. Whatever crack Torino had glimpsed for a moment was smoothed over. That spark of fiery anger was gone. Only a blank cold wall remained.
“I’m not a government employee,” Hisashi said with a wry smile. “The WHA is an NGO, thankfully. I do have some dignity, please respect it. As for villain monologues, I fear you’ve been spoiled on that front, given your long history with All For One.”
Hisashi put his cigarette back in his mouth, and the ember glowed again. “All of the best villains mix some truth with their lies. Eventually, the truth will start sounding evil by association. But I would argue that is the Japanese government’s fault, not mine.”
Toshinori took a sip of his bottled water. “What do you mean, heroes and villains are fragile? In what way?”
“They are defined by legalities, raised up or cut low by legislation.” Hisashi explained. “A law could be passed today stripping half the world’s pros of their licenses. Another could be passed tomorrow, emptying out the great prisons and vindicating the actions of their former inmates.”
Hisashi took a sip of his whisky, and balanced the glass between his fingers. “My son is better than that. Better than that system. To you, he exists outside of it. To me, he exists beyond it. Society dares to call him flimsy and weak, when their own defined reality hinges upon slips of plastic and ink on paper.”
Hisashi smiled suddenly, and it showed a lot of teeth. “Heroes and villains are fragile things, All Might. My son is invincible.”
He leaned back in his seat. “As you train him, you will come to understand that yourself. Provided you bother to pay attention.”
“I already understand how strong young Midoriya is,” Toshinori said, folding his own hands together. “On the very first day I met him, he was having the worst day of his life. He still behaved heroically. His conduct was not merely admirable, it was beyond reproach. It put a dozen heroes on the scene to shame, myself included.”
Toshinori stood up straighter, and suddenly he looked far more like All Might, even though he remained deflated. “That is precisely why I disagree with you. He was strong enough to achieve his dream, no matter what stood in his way. I am not giving him some free ticket to herodom. One For All will do nothing more than speed him along. That path was already set, he chose it for himself. And nothing you or I have ever said or done has swayed him from that.”
“My son could not have become a hero. The HPSC would have never allowed it. Not even if he became their dog.”
But the blonde man shook his head. Midoriya Hisashi wasn’t arguing with Toshinori Yagi anymore. He was debating All Might.
“Your son is already a hero. And if I had to bet on the HPSC against him in a fight, I know where I would put my money. It wouldn’t be on them.”
There was a long, quiet moment where the two men locked gazes. Hisashi’s eyes were as cold and grey as ever, the strange hint of red light having vanished into the wintery abyss. Toshinori’s blue eyes were bruised and dark, deep lines of exhaustion and trauma having been pressed into them. But his irises were bright and clear. Unchanged from when Shimura Nana had fished him out of a dumpster half a century earlier.
Finally, Hisashi nodded.
“You’ll do.”
Toshinori blinked. “...it was a test?”
“Society doesn’t care about Izuku’s future. So I have to.”
The skeletal blonde breathed a slow sigh of relief. “So do I have your consent then, to train young Midoriya to inherit One For All?”
“Am I granting you permission to give my son a nuclear bomb, and train him to become an employee of the very government that threw him in the trash? Of course not. The very idea is absurd.”
The man pulled his finally spent cigarette out of his mouth, and discarded it into the tray.
“But boys should be allowed to dream.”
Toshinori smiled.
“-which is why I’m passing my vote on to my wife,” Hisashi continued, a gleam of cold humor in his eyes. “You will need to explain all of this to her, and get her permission. She will have the final say.”
The blonde’s smile slowly slipped away.
Hisashi’s grin widened to show teeth. “Consider it petty revenge for trying to keep it a secret from us. You are quite fortunate, my wife is far more lenient than I am when it comes to such things. I’ll even be generous and give you until the entrance exams next year. That’s plenty of time to get your story straight.”
There was a clink of glass, and Hisashi refilled his whisky.
“It should be easy enough to check. My wife knows nothing about any of this, so whatever I happen to hear from her, will be exactly the information you gave. It all ties up very neatly, doesn’t it?”
Toshinori swallowed.
Petty revenge, the man said. Whether she was lenient or not, Midoriya Inko was part of a legal firm that specialized in prosecuting heroes that broke the law. If anyone in this whole affair was liable to take ire with them over this, it would be her.
The only reason transferring a quirk to a minor isn’t illegal is because the world does not currently believe such a thing is even possible.
But then, for all that he disagreed with some of Hisashi’s sentiments, he couldn’t say this wasn’t fair. In fact, it was more than fair.
Gran had been right. They really had walked right into a trap.
Toshinori sighed, and steeled his nerves. “I still have a few more questions I would like to ask,” he said.
“As do I,” Hisashi replied.
So they talked.
And the diminutive old man sitting next to them watched, and listened.
