Izuku had gone into town at the weekend to shop for his mother, but really it was a chance for him to test out the latest mystery his Quirk had pulled in: some kind of mental compass that guided him towards things.
By focusing on whatever he wanted, the compass tugged him towards the nearest shop selling it, but only some of the time. His mother's shopping list was by now thoroughly annotated with which items his Quirk worked with. Eggs, yes. Rice, yes. Fruit, no? Vegetables, mostly yes. Lightbulbs, yes. Toilet paper, no.
Having finished that chore, the boy headed to his favorite mall to investigate further. The sense worked in three dimensions but it gave him directions rather than a route; he had to double back and go up the escalator to reach the stationery shop for more coloring pens. Following it while trying hard not to think about anything in particular led him to a used bookstore, where he found a box full of old Hero magazines at a big discount which would be perfect collage material for art class.
As always, he eventually made his way to the Hero merchandise store. Intriguingly, his Quirk worked on All Might figures, but only some of them. Examining two packages side-by-side, the difference seemed to be that the one the compass pulled towards had to be assembled. Was the difference to do with making something with them? What about if he wanted to make something out of lots of pre-built All Might figures, like gluing them together into a human pyramid?
His mind recoiled at the thought of desecrating so many images of his Heroic savior like that. No, that wouldn't do. But what about the Clone Hero, Ectoplasm? Assembling a group pose of his figures would actually be a good way to showcase his self-duplication -
Guided by his Quirk, he reached behind the front row of boxes and pulled out a dusty, discounted, no-assembly-required figurine of Ectoplasm. Then another, and another.
-----
Izuku put down his phone and slumped over the counter with a sigh. He had been debating whether to buy the figures, and if so then how tall a pyramid he wanted to make, when Mr. Amakiir called him. Apparently a customer had just come in for a lengthy consultation in the back rooms, and he needed someone to man the front desk of Velvet and Iron in case anyone else visited.
Well, it had been three hours since he'd arrived at the shop and put on the (mercifully modern and modest) uniform left out for him by Mr. Amakiir, and nobody had come in. The first hour went quickly enough, as he tested his hypothesis of how the mental compass worked by thinking of different items and comparing the direction with his map app. Hammers and nails pointed towards the hardware store down the road. A bicycle by itself didn't work, but when he imagined using one to make a pedal-powered blender he was able to locate the bike shop on the other side of the mall.
The next hour, he started daydreaming about what he could buy with his cash to support his future career as a Hero. A costume was a must, but mom said he was still growing so he knew there wasn't much point buying a nice one now, as had been the case for most of his clothes growing up. He could get some weights for training, he had seen Bakugo's set at his house when he used to come over, back when he was less of a bully and more of a friend. Support equipment was usually commissioned to support a specific Hero's Quirk, hence the name, but that just drew his thoughts back to how he didn't have a proper Quirk to support.
Because of that, he had spent the third hour reading the online rumors about the notorious U.A. entrance exam with growing trepidation. It was only 9 months away, and he still didn't know how he could get in. The few Quirkless communities online skewed heavily towards the older generations, which made it hard to find anyone else's thoughts on applying to U.A. with a weak-to-nonexistent Quirk.
The creak of the fitting room door behind him snapped his attention back to his nominal job and he straightened up into a more attentive posture behind the desk. Mr. Amakiir's mystery customer walked out, waving goodbye over her shoulder as the door closed. She was a tall woman with glasses and a noticeable mole, dark hair done up in a ponytail, and was wearing what looked like a sweater but was presumably supposed to function as a dress.
"Thank you for your patronage ma'am," he blurted out, expecting her to leave. Instead, she leaned against the counter, looking right at him. Izuku stared back, paralysed.
"You're too anxious, boy. What are you, star-struck?"
Famous, tall, dark hair, willing to buy a costume at Iron and Velvet… his mouth moved as he put his thoughts together. "You're -"
The R-rated Hero, Midnight, interrupted him with a wink and a finger on her lips.
"Don't worry, Mid-ma'am, I won't say a word!"
"And here I thought I could have some fun teasing a fan. I have to know, what is it that could get you so hot and bothered apart from me?"
Izuku hesitated. His problems weren't really important enough to deserve a Pro Hero's attention, were they?
"Out with it, boy. You clearly need the catharsis and I have people to do, things to see."
"Um, I want to go to U.A. and be a Hero and help people but I don't know if I'm good enough! I barely understand my Quirk and can't get it to work and everyone else" - Bakugo's sneering face flashed up in his mind - "is so much stronger, and I don't know what to do, I don't know how I could even pass the entrance exam," he trailed off.
She tapped her lips with a finger thoughtfully. "You know, tests and trials go both ways. They're a way to show people how you perform under pressure, but also an opportunity for you to find your limits and push up against them. You're aiming for the Hero course, I assume?" Izuku nodded firmly. "You should consider the Support course as well. If you're good enough that Peron listens to your advice, you might just have what it takes, and costumes can make or break a Pro Hero's career. Can you think of any examples?"
Trying to ignore how Mr. Amakiir was on a first-name basis with his mom and now Midnight too, he considered the question. "Air Jet. His office used to be here, without his signature jetpack he wouldn't have been able to patrol the entire ward from the skies."
"Good boy. Tell Peron I'll see him at the munch."
Izuku barely listened as she exited the shop, pulling a spare notepad out of his uniform to note down everything she'd said. Just as he was putting pen to paper, his Quirk reached out again without him even trying.
[3.82 STRANGE FORMULA UNLOCKED - 100 STORED]
He opened his writing hand and out fluttered a crumpled page of dense handwritten notes like a cheat sheet for an exam. Smoothing it out, it looked to be for a chemistry exam specifically: a single lengthy chemical diagram, without any elaboration.
His mind whirled as he wrote down his conversation with Midnight on autopilot. Perhaps his Quirk responded to people with powerful Quirks, rather than the Quirk use? He had pulled in three objects so far, the key with Bakugo, the deed with All Might, and now a chemical formula after meeting Midnight. Could the items be connected to the people? If the chemical was Midnight's soporific gas… the key was sharp and spiky and kept coming back, like Bakugo? Could All Might have something to do with the shop? His costume was made by David Shields of I-Island, though, and he didn't even know if the Midnight connection was valid.
Mr. Kou, his chemistry teacher, had said he used to be a researcher, didn't he? For once in his life, Monday couldn't come soon enough for Midoriya.
-----
After another distracted day of middle school, he went to find Mr. Kou in his office.
"Mr. Kou, did you say you used to be a research chemist?"
"Huh? Mitoriya, was it? Yeah, that's right. A good one, too, until I got canned for not bothering with all the red tape around handling hazardous substances. What's the point of a Quirk like mine if you can't use it, huh?" He waved his fingers, each one a test tube or pipette which could suck up or deposit precise quantities of liquid.
Midoriya hummed a vague agreement. "I wanted to ask, how do you go about researching a new chemical?"
"You mean like a new element? I gave your class the periodic table talk already, there's no gaps left to fill."
"Sorry, I meant… Say you got handed a chemical formula, how would you work out what it does, or even make it?"
The bearded teacher rubbed his head, his glass fingertips making a squeaking noise against his bald scalp.
"That's more like the kind of work I used to do. See, a good chemist can tell a lot just from the formula. If there's lots of C, H, O, and N then it's probably organic and you have to hand it over to the biologists to find out what the hell it does. Fluorine is a bitch to work with - don't tell anyone I said that, kid - but it comes up a lot for polymers, coatings, anything you want to stick around for a while. Interpreting the structure is a whole organic chemistry degree right there. And so on, and so forth."
He nodded approvingly at the sight of his student making notes as he spoke.
"Once you got the ingredients and you know what the end result looks like, you gotta figure out a recipe for going from A to B. Usually via X, Y, Z and producing a whole load of crud you have to get rid of at the end as well. It's a good intellectual puzzle, maybe you should think about it as a career option once you give up on being a Hero."
Izuku frowned, but the teacher didn't notice as he started to ramble on about the high-end equipment needed to do proper chemical research. There were a lot of expensive instruments, each one tugging his internal compass in a different direction as he heard their names, and he doubted even his bloated coin bank would be able to foot the bill. Not to mention, how would he hide it from his mother? Most of the devices wouldn't fit in his bedroom by themselves.
"That's why nowadays it's all getting centralized, you'll have one big research lab in every prefecture capital or so, and everyone else mails in their orders for them to synthesize. Two guys in their garage don't stand a chance anymore, not like in the good old days."
Or he could just do that.
"Thanks Mr. Kou!" Izuku underlined 'research lab' three times and stood up. "That was really helpful."
-----
As he walked home, his enthusiasm waned. Would a research lab really take an order from a middle schooler? If it was all postal, they wouldn't know his age, but mom had warned against sending money in the mail so he wouldn't be able to pay with his cash. He still didn't know what the chemical did, which was the whole point of getting it synthesized, and it could even be dangerous. Quirks didn't tend to harm their users, but his one was hardly normal.
Mr. Kou had said a good chemist could tell a lot just from the formula, though. Maybe he could find someone to ask on the internet.
His first thread, "Can anyone tell me what this chemical is?" got one reply from a smartass who wrote out what the full name would be in chemical nomenclature instead of telling him anything useful (and, Izuku noticed, seemed to have got it wrong too), and then an administrator locked the thread because it wasn't in the homework help subforum.
His second thread, "Help! What does this mystery chemical do?" got him banned by the same admin but was viewed by a few dozen people who didn't reply before then. Frustrated, he made a fresh account on a new forum and reconsidered his approach.
"Check it out! I discovered a chemical panacea, formula below!" hit fifty replies telling him he was wrong in informative ways before a mod waded in. A few people said the chemical structure was impossible, before someone who posted a picture of their chemistry degree explained that it would be expensive, difficult to make, and definitely wouldn't be a panacea because that would be ridiculous: "if a single chemical could fix everything then our bodies would have evolved to produce it already." A botanist commented that it resembled the kind of compound produced by plants in regions with lots of heavy metals in the soil, and then the thread descended into what seemed to be memes about alternative medicine believers poisoning themselves by accident.
Izuku felt a bit bad about baiting people online, but he reassured himself that anyone gullible enough to believe in cure-alls they read about on the internet wouldn't be harmed by one more outlandish claim.
Repeating that thread on a third forum told him that it might be some kind of metabolite or enzyme, and making a thread titled "LOL look at the shape this enzyme makes" got him screenshots of the chemical from multiple angles, rendered in expensive folding simulation software by people complaining that it didn't look like anything interesting and asking what was so funny about it.
His posting spree ended once he had run out of chemistry forums he hadn't been banned from and mom called him for dinner. While waiting for replies he had also read up on Midnight's Quirk, generally agreed to be pheromone-based, which meant his own mystery chemical was probably something entirely different. A few creepy and possibly Villainous fans had written long poetic articles about how Midnight's Quirk smelled and what it felt like to be put to sleep by it, which could in theory contain useful information, but he wasn't desperate enough to read through them.
After washing up, he wrote an email to the nearest research laboratory. Nobody on the forums had said the chemical was obviously illegal or dangerous, and a big lab probably had lots of safety protocols like the ones which got Mr. Kou fired, so he felt like he could at least ask how much it would cost to make. The lab didn't need to know he was a middle-schooler who would be paying in cash just yet.
-----
Late that night he lay in bed with his hand above his head, watching the muscles and tendons move with each flex in the dim moonlight as he thought about what Midnight had said before he got distracted by the formula. He still wanted to be a Hero, to inspire others like the faces covering his walls inspired him, but applying to the Support course as well wouldn't detract from his chances of getting into the Hero course. If he failed after all, maybe that would be a sign he wasn't cut out for that life and should help people indirectly instead. He sighed.
[3.38 ENGINEER'S NOTES UNLOCKED - 150 STORED]
Then his Quirk reached out of its own accord again, and a stack of pages fell from his outstretched hand and smacked into his face with the sound of rustling paper. With a groan of frustration he gathered them up and stacked them on his bedside table to worry about in the morning.
-----
Word count: 2641/7962
A/N: I was pretty excited when the Erskine formula got rolled, but it's actually pretty limited as it's just a chemical formula which Izuku has no idea what to do with. Not only that, he'd need to know about vita radiation to avoid all the horrible side-effects of drinking it neat. Apologies to the actual chemists reading this for any mistake with the descriptions in this chapter!
I think Midnight has a lot of emotional intelligence, and her sultry persona helps to make people drop their guard and overlook that. The conversation with her was included because she seemed like an obvious customer for the Sexy Evil Tailor, but it also was a chance to lay some groundwork for a Support course Midoriya. I'm not sure if the story will go that way yet, but without OfA or some good rolls on the Forge it's hard to see him managing to get into the Hero Course.
Regarding the warehouse key, Izuku using it too early on would make it obvious to everyone else that he had a strange nonstandard Quirk, and I didn't want to change his characterization and upbringing that much. At the latest, he'll realize how it works when he gets a roll that affects the warehouse. That said, the idea of four-year-old Izuku opening the door to his workshop and making fiat-backed pasta art cracks me up. I might take a shot at a sidestory chapter on that what-if, if I want a break from the main story.
Strange Formula (MCU) (100): This chemical formula is the brainchild of the German scientist Dr. Erskine, and is directly responsible for the creation of Captain America. As is, this is only the formula, and you must make it yourself... but as a result it could possibly let you modify the serum for other uses. Beware its tendencies to amplify the personality traits of the user, or be prepared to find a way to fix that fact.
Engineer's Notes: Avvenire (ARIA) (50): A last set of documents that was kept in the archives – this copy was seems to have been fragmented into components, though as you compile more of it together it will become evidently that this details the specifics of the actual terraforming process, including the equipment and calculations involved in the process of creating Aqua. It does go to note that while the knowledge stored within this could help a new engineer tackle a different terraforming project, each planet presents its own challenges, and this information is better taken as a sample of notes rather than a hard guideline. Each time you take this option your own abilities at controlling the logistic and engineering elements of terraforming improves slightly, though with ten purchases you'll find that the documents will be complete – further purchases won't help you much...unless you had a different use for them.
