It all began in China, Qingqing City.
There was news that a baby that gave off light was born...
There was news that a baby that gave off light was born...
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You probably didn't need those organs - BnHA quest
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Prologue 0.01
- Location
- Somewhere cold
The moment you accidentally swallowed a wasp was the most joyous moment of your admittedly short life. No, you were not some strange, four-and-a-half year old masochist that actually enjoyed the sensation of a wasp repeatedly stinging your stomach lining. You were excited mainly because you had just disabled the nociceptors in your stomach lining, reduced the wasp to its base proteins, and absorbed them.
Of course you were a four year old, not a biology teacher with self confidence issues, so you understood the process in a few simpler terms. To reiterate: you were excited because you'd turned off the bits that lit up and told you you were hurting and made the wasp like the other parts of you and now you were the best hero ever!
Or something to that effect.
To add context to the excited squealing that was starting to worry the daycare minder, one must understand the specific brand of existential dread that the past version of you had been experiencing for the last year or so. Normally it would be unthinkable for a child to have an emotional range greater than 'happy', 'sad', and 'murderous rage', but in a society in which the idolisation of heroes, the fact that you too had the chance to grow up to be a shining beacon of hope to the world, is so ingrained? Your parents' generation would read their children the achievements of real people rather than the stories they grew up on, matching and in many cases surpassing their offspring in unrealistic expectations. Your grandparents, as quirkless as the majority of their age group, would punctuate each visit with reminders of how lucky you were to be part of the 'next generation of heroes'. Even the education system was not immune, convinced that they would be known as the teacher of the the next All Might. Such a society could never last, but in a rapidly changing world, for those short years it seemed like anything was possible.
And so, for a product of that society, the revelation that one is quirkless would be something similar to finding out that Santa isn't real because he was eaten by a giant spider created from the accidentally viewed sex between the sentient manifestation of your family's secret hatred for you and a dead puppy.
You had been dreading this seemingly inescapable fact since you were three, when all the other neighborhood children had begun undergoing what was commonly referred to as 'super puberty', in which children with developing quirks gain the biological changes required to support their quirks, such as an increase in bone density so that they don't break their own arms from the force of a point blank nitroglycerin explosion, or an extra section of the brain dedicated to processing whichever of the various mental based powers they have - to say nothing of the aesthetic changes that occasionally happen for no discernible reason. It is so named only in part due to the superpower aspect; because puberty seems like a medium difficulty yoga exercise compared to the pain of having your skull reshape itself to accommodate a ten foot long tongue.
Worldbuilding aside; your parents were convinced that you were a late bloomer, and were not overly concerned. However, this was little comfort to you, as by this point the other children in the daycare had almost fully developed their quirks, and many were enjoying their newfound power over the weaker children. You were part of the latter category.
And all thanks to one little shove at one lucky moment, your life changed forever.
Well, that, and every action following it. Life changes, the above cliche statement doesn't make much sense if you think about it - but you weren't thinking about it, you were squealing excitedly over your newfound quirk.
After noticing the expression on the daycare minder, you internalised it, and tried to understand your quirk: you could… 'feel' everything happening in your body, and instinctively knew that you could change it in innumerable ways. As for what those ways were though, you'd just have to experiment.
Main action:
[ ] You think about how the wasp activated your quirk; it wasn't part of you, but somehow it was… you try and find out what specifically about it let you affect it by attempting to change other not-really-you things inside and outside your body.
[ ] You think about how the wasp activated your quirk; it wasn't part of you, but somehow it - hey! Is that a grass snake over there? It looks about the right size...
[ ] You wait before attempting anything, intending to ask your parents for advice later. Your dad has a quirk, so maybe he'll be able to help.
Additional action(s):
[ ] Write-in
---
AN: Regarding the non-canon parts, I just had to fill in some of the annoying gaps that don't make sense as best as I could. I will probably regret this later.
As for frog waifu, google red bellied woodpecker skulls. That's got to hurt.
Of course you were a four year old, not a biology teacher with self confidence issues, so you understood the process in a few simpler terms. To reiterate: you were excited because you'd turned off the bits that lit up and told you you were hurting and made the wasp like the other parts of you and now you were the best hero ever!
Or something to that effect.
To add context to the excited squealing that was starting to worry the daycare minder, one must understand the specific brand of existential dread that the past version of you had been experiencing for the last year or so. Normally it would be unthinkable for a child to have an emotional range greater than 'happy', 'sad', and 'murderous rage', but in a society in which the idolisation of heroes, the fact that you too had the chance to grow up to be a shining beacon of hope to the world, is so ingrained? Your parents' generation would read their children the achievements of real people rather than the stories they grew up on, matching and in many cases surpassing their offspring in unrealistic expectations. Your grandparents, as quirkless as the majority of their age group, would punctuate each visit with reminders of how lucky you were to be part of the 'next generation of heroes'. Even the education system was not immune, convinced that they would be known as the teacher of the the next All Might. Such a society could never last, but in a rapidly changing world, for those short years it seemed like anything was possible.
And so, for a product of that society, the revelation that one is quirkless would be something similar to finding out that Santa isn't real because he was eaten by a giant spider created from the accidentally viewed sex between the sentient manifestation of your family's secret hatred for you and a dead puppy.
You had been dreading this seemingly inescapable fact since you were three, when all the other neighborhood children had begun undergoing what was commonly referred to as 'super puberty', in which children with developing quirks gain the biological changes required to support their quirks, such as an increase in bone density so that they don't break their own arms from the force of a point blank nitroglycerin explosion, or an extra section of the brain dedicated to processing whichever of the various mental based powers they have - to say nothing of the aesthetic changes that occasionally happen for no discernible reason. It is so named only in part due to the superpower aspect; because puberty seems like a medium difficulty yoga exercise compared to the pain of having your skull reshape itself to accommodate a ten foot long tongue.
Worldbuilding aside; your parents were convinced that you were a late bloomer, and were not overly concerned. However, this was little comfort to you, as by this point the other children in the daycare had almost fully developed their quirks, and many were enjoying their newfound power over the weaker children. You were part of the latter category.
And all thanks to one little shove at one lucky moment, your life changed forever.
Well, that, and every action following it. Life changes, the above cliche statement doesn't make much sense if you think about it - but you weren't thinking about it, you were squealing excitedly over your newfound quirk.
After noticing the expression on the daycare minder, you internalised it, and tried to understand your quirk: you could… 'feel' everything happening in your body, and instinctively knew that you could change it in innumerable ways. As for what those ways were though, you'd just have to experiment.
Main action:
[ ] You think about how the wasp activated your quirk; it wasn't part of you, but somehow it was… you try and find out what specifically about it let you affect it by attempting to change other not-really-you things inside and outside your body.
[ ] You think about how the wasp activated your quirk; it wasn't part of you, but somehow it - hey! Is that a grass snake over there? It looks about the right size...
[ ] You wait before attempting anything, intending to ask your parents for advice later. Your dad has a quirk, so maybe he'll be able to help.
Additional action(s):
[ ] Write-in
---
AN: Regarding the non-canon parts, I just had to fill in some of the annoying gaps that don't make sense as best as I could. I will probably regret this later.
As for frog waifu, google red bellied woodpecker skulls. That's got to hurt.
Last edited:
Prologue 0.02
- Location
- Somewhere cold
[X] What a delicious looking snake
A shrill squawk caught your attention - one of the other children had just spotted the cutest little snake by his foot and you love reptiles and you - oh. You just ate it. The other child screamed even louder.
It flailed all the way down, until it reached your stomach and became you-but-not. Your eyes lit up; this was so much more interesting than the wasp - so many different parts that you didn't even know where to begin! Wait, now you did.
Unlike the mostly harmless grass snakes of other countries, Japanese grass snakes, locally known as yamakagashi, are not only venomous, but poisonous to boot. You would later reflect on this fact with the conviction that whoever named for them must have had a sick sense of humour, but you were currently preoccupied by the fact that the adorable widdle snakey had just caused internal bleeding. You frowned, attempting to disconnect the stretchy bits that made it move, and failing, which was strange, as you had thought that you could do that. You tried it with your left arm, and succeeded. Oh, it was probably because the snake parts felt different: the snake wasn't really you, so you couldn't change it as much. You were great at this deduction stuff!
As much as you wanted to play with the snake, now dubbed Nidhogg, you had to deal with the bleeding first. However, you were not one to let a little pesky haemorrhaging stop you - calling on the skills earned through the countless hours of gameplay sacrificed to the merciless gods of Low Battery, you scrambled for a way to save your data.
Tuning out the panicked daycare minder, you pored through the snake's coding, until you discovered, nestled inside its spinal cord, tiny pieces practically singing with [potential]. Spurred on by the concerning movements the choking snake was making, you [pulled] one of the fragments into yourself, and set about letting poor Nidhogg out.
---
By that point the daycare minder was crying; he was a good person, right? What had he done to deserve this? But now that weird little kid was going to die and the ambulance wouldn't get here on time and they were so going to get sued for this. At least they had managed to get the rest of the children to come inside, although they, like himself, were viewing the scene with mixed levels of dread and anticipation from the other side of the sliding glass doors. This was a choice they would regret. Particularly around the point when the now shirtless child put their right arm through the side of their own chest.
---
Once you got the hang of it, moving your organs around was easy: just keep your hand away from the arteries, blocking off smaller blood vessels and repairing tissue damage as you go. The secret is to lie down so that nonessential processes can be temporarily shut down in order to focus on more pressing matters, such as the hand in your chest cavity.
Fixing the damage to your stomach hadn't been too difficult, even with the snake venom complicating things, as you had previously closed off circulation around the bite area once you realised what had happened. Then it was simply a matter of [moving] the weird bad stuff the snake put in you and the lumpy blood from around where it touched out of the area, spitting it out, and [focusing] on the damaged area to accelerate the healing process.
Saying goodbye to Nidhogg had been difficult, but it was for the best; as you watched his bloodied form slither off into the undergrowth, you consoled yourself with the knowledge that he would find someone better than you, who would give him more from a relationship than you ever could.
But when it came to getting dried blood out of bedsheets?
You gave up, flopping back down onto the soaked hospital bed. It had seemed like a logical decision at the time; the doctor wouldn't let you leave without a parent because of some stupid reasons like "you've lost a lot of blood" and "you don't even know your own address" - you're nearly four-and-three-quarters, you don't need her opinion! Anyway, you'd had nothing to do after she took the potted plant you kept attempting to force down your throat, and so had come up with the bright idea of adding a second mouth, to avoid getting caught again.
One thing led to another, and you were soon in the process of deciding which organs you could merge into a larger stomach.
'What is that? It doesn't even do anything!? Don't need it. Those don't do anything yet, but I'm completely fine, so it's probably not important. What do those blobby tubes do?
Eventually, you were the proud owner of a greatly expanded stomach, as well as the proud recycler of your appendix, intestines (which turned out to be redundant, due to the fact that after a little practice using the snacks the doctor left you, you found that could do everything they were supposed to manually anyway), and undeveloped reproductive organs. There had been a bit of a problem when part of it had started dying for no apparent reason, but it worked fine after you had the idea of attaching more of the bleedy strings to it. Thankfully, the doctor had set up a blood transfusion before she left, inadvertently saving your life, not that you were aware of it.
Your secondary mouth connected directly to this, and took the form of a highly visible, vertical slit running from just beneath your ribcage to your pelvis. It had no complex mechanism behind it, no purpose to it being visible other than aesthetics; you would simply split the skin along the indent and shove your victim in by hand.
You'd wanted to add teeth, but you didn't have enough of whatever your teeth were made of to do it.
Unfortunately, you were now lying in a pool of your own blood from where your concentration had slipped earlier, causing one of the big bleedy strings to realise that it wasn't currently attached to anything for a second. This irritated you greatly, as you had been planning on not getting caught. The fact that the doctor would definitely notice your new mouth regardless of mess eluded you.
Oh well, at least you killed a few hours.
"Thank you for signing, your child is right through here"
"Hi, mom!"
You learned a lot of new swear words that day.
---
After the initial shock, your family were ecstatic that their little Kaede's quirk had finally manifested, disregarding how unusual it was that it didn't follow any of the established patterns that quirks did. This was mainly because you, being far from eloquent, lacked the vocabulary to properly communicate what you knew of it, and as a result, they were under the impression that your quirk was centred around eating potted plants while being unintentionally terrifying. Your grandfather was pleased. He'd bet some money on the quirk being related to the latter aspect.
Eating a plant was actually an incredibly disappointing experience. You'd assumed that you'd get to sense many more interesting parts from something so different to another animal, but all your preparation was for nought. No matter how many plants you tried, they all felt more like regular food than the snake or wasp: just a vague awareness of what it was made of. With fresh plants, there was a slight stronger sense of 'like you', but it was like the difference between trying to swim in a hurricane and trying to swim in a hurricane with a headache.
Your quirk was picky that way. What makes something 'like-you', anyway? You didn't know how to test it, and had no idea how to go about asking someone for help.
When the initial excitement of discovering your quirk began to fade, a whole week later, you realised that you had no idea what you wanted to do with it. On the same level that other children knew how far their joints could bend, you understood that you could change yourself in far more ways than you already had.
And you still had Nidhogg's 'save data' lying around...
You felt a little disappointed at your lack of creativity; you couldn't become a hero with just the ability to eat people, after all. What to do, though? You decided to look for inspiration.
Main action:
[ ] You watch [blue documentary], and thought about how you could replicate what you saw...
[ ] You read the start of [book about a different world of superhumans that is definitely not intended for your age range], and thought about how you could replicate what you read...
[ ] You watched [drilling oriented anime], and thought about how you could replicate what you saw…
Additional action(s):
[ ] Write-in
---
AN: Well, that escalated far quicker than I intended. Hospitals in that universe probably have to deal with a lot of weird shit, seeing as it's canon that small children are generally left to learn how to use their potentially dangerous abilities by themselves with little to no professional oversight.
To reiterate what you know of your quirk: you can 'change' yourself using a surgeon's tools, things like wasps and snakes with a hammer, and plants and food using only threatening glares. You can't switch tools.
Don't get used to getting automatic upgrades like this, though. Or such little input in what happens, it's just for the first few parts. That would just be boring.
A shrill squawk caught your attention - one of the other children had just spotted the cutest little snake by his foot and you love reptiles and you - oh. You just ate it. The other child screamed even louder.
It flailed all the way down, until it reached your stomach and became you-but-not. Your eyes lit up; this was so much more interesting than the wasp - so many different parts that you didn't even know where to begin! Wait, now you did.
Unlike the mostly harmless grass snakes of other countries, Japanese grass snakes, locally known as yamakagashi, are not only venomous, but poisonous to boot. You would later reflect on this fact with the conviction that whoever named for them must have had a sick sense of humour, but you were currently preoccupied by the fact that the adorable widdle snakey had just caused internal bleeding. You frowned, attempting to disconnect the stretchy bits that made it move, and failing, which was strange, as you had thought that you could do that. You tried it with your left arm, and succeeded. Oh, it was probably because the snake parts felt different: the snake wasn't really you, so you couldn't change it as much. You were great at this deduction stuff!
As much as you wanted to play with the snake, now dubbed Nidhogg, you had to deal with the bleeding first. However, you were not one to let a little pesky haemorrhaging stop you - calling on the skills earned through the countless hours of gameplay sacrificed to the merciless gods of Low Battery, you scrambled for a way to save your data.
Tuning out the panicked daycare minder, you pored through the snake's coding, until you discovered, nestled inside its spinal cord, tiny pieces practically singing with [potential]. Spurred on by the concerning movements the choking snake was making, you [pulled] one of the fragments into yourself, and set about letting poor Nidhogg out.
---
By that point the daycare minder was crying; he was a good person, right? What had he done to deserve this? But now that weird little kid was going to die and the ambulance wouldn't get here on time and they were so going to get sued for this. At least they had managed to get the rest of the children to come inside, although they, like himself, were viewing the scene with mixed levels of dread and anticipation from the other side of the sliding glass doors. This was a choice they would regret. Particularly around the point when the now shirtless child put their right arm through the side of their own chest.
---
Once you got the hang of it, moving your organs around was easy: just keep your hand away from the arteries, blocking off smaller blood vessels and repairing tissue damage as you go. The secret is to lie down so that nonessential processes can be temporarily shut down in order to focus on more pressing matters, such as the hand in your chest cavity.
Fixing the damage to your stomach hadn't been too difficult, even with the snake venom complicating things, as you had previously closed off circulation around the bite area once you realised what had happened. Then it was simply a matter of [moving] the weird bad stuff the snake put in you and the lumpy blood from around where it touched out of the area, spitting it out, and [focusing] on the damaged area to accelerate the healing process.
Saying goodbye to Nidhogg had been difficult, but it was for the best; as you watched his bloodied form slither off into the undergrowth, you consoled yourself with the knowledge that he would find someone better than you, who would give him more from a relationship than you ever could.
But when it came to getting dried blood out of bedsheets?
You gave up, flopping back down onto the soaked hospital bed. It had seemed like a logical decision at the time; the doctor wouldn't let you leave without a parent because of some stupid reasons like "you've lost a lot of blood" and "you don't even know your own address" - you're nearly four-and-three-quarters, you don't need her opinion! Anyway, you'd had nothing to do after she took the potted plant you kept attempting to force down your throat, and so had come up with the bright idea of adding a second mouth, to avoid getting caught again.
One thing led to another, and you were soon in the process of deciding which organs you could merge into a larger stomach.
'What is that? It doesn't even do anything!? Don't need it. Those don't do anything yet, but I'm completely fine, so it's probably not important. What do those blobby tubes do?
Eventually, you were the proud owner of a greatly expanded stomach, as well as the proud recycler of your appendix, intestines (which turned out to be redundant, due to the fact that after a little practice using the snacks the doctor left you, you found that could do everything they were supposed to manually anyway), and undeveloped reproductive organs. There had been a bit of a problem when part of it had started dying for no apparent reason, but it worked fine after you had the idea of attaching more of the bleedy strings to it. Thankfully, the doctor had set up a blood transfusion before she left, inadvertently saving your life, not that you were aware of it.
Your secondary mouth connected directly to this, and took the form of a highly visible, vertical slit running from just beneath your ribcage to your pelvis. It had no complex mechanism behind it, no purpose to it being visible other than aesthetics; you would simply split the skin along the indent and shove your victim in by hand.
You'd wanted to add teeth, but you didn't have enough of whatever your teeth were made of to do it.
Unfortunately, you were now lying in a pool of your own blood from where your concentration had slipped earlier, causing one of the big bleedy strings to realise that it wasn't currently attached to anything for a second. This irritated you greatly, as you had been planning on not getting caught. The fact that the doctor would definitely notice your new mouth regardless of mess eluded you.
Oh well, at least you killed a few hours.
"Thank you for signing, your child is right through here"
"Hi, mom!"
You learned a lot of new swear words that day.
---
After the initial shock, your family were ecstatic that their little Kaede's quirk had finally manifested, disregarding how unusual it was that it didn't follow any of the established patterns that quirks did. This was mainly because you, being far from eloquent, lacked the vocabulary to properly communicate what you knew of it, and as a result, they were under the impression that your quirk was centred around eating potted plants while being unintentionally terrifying. Your grandfather was pleased. He'd bet some money on the quirk being related to the latter aspect.
Eating a plant was actually an incredibly disappointing experience. You'd assumed that you'd get to sense many more interesting parts from something so different to another animal, but all your preparation was for nought. No matter how many plants you tried, they all felt more like regular food than the snake or wasp: just a vague awareness of what it was made of. With fresh plants, there was a slight stronger sense of 'like you', but it was like the difference between trying to swim in a hurricane and trying to swim in a hurricane with a headache.
Your quirk was picky that way. What makes something 'like-you', anyway? You didn't know how to test it, and had no idea how to go about asking someone for help.
When the initial excitement of discovering your quirk began to fade, a whole week later, you realised that you had no idea what you wanted to do with it. On the same level that other children knew how far their joints could bend, you understood that you could change yourself in far more ways than you already had.
And you still had Nidhogg's 'save data' lying around...
You felt a little disappointed at your lack of creativity; you couldn't become a hero with just the ability to eat people, after all. What to do, though? You decided to look for inspiration.
Main action:
[ ] You watch [blue documentary], and thought about how you could replicate what you saw...
[ ] You read the start of [book about a different world of superhumans that is definitely not intended for your age range], and thought about how you could replicate what you read...
[ ] You watched [drilling oriented anime], and thought about how you could replicate what you saw…
Additional action(s):
[ ] Write-in
---
AN: Well, that escalated far quicker than I intended. Hospitals in that universe probably have to deal with a lot of weird shit, seeing as it's canon that small children are generally left to learn how to use their potentially dangerous abilities by themselves with little to no professional oversight.
To reiterate what you know of your quirk: you can 'change' yourself using a surgeon's tools, things like wasps and snakes with a hammer, and plants and food using only threatening glares. You can't switch tools.
Don't get used to getting automatic upgrades like this, though. Or such little input in what happens, it's just for the first few parts. That would just be boring.
Last edited:
Prologue 0.03
- Location
- Somewhere cold
[X] Your drill is the drill that will GO BEYOND!
Although you weren't expecting to get much from watching it, you put in the DVD, a forgotten birthday present from your estranged relatives in Australia, and watched the first episode.
And the next episode.
And the next.
In fact, you got halfway through episode six before your mom came in, took one look at the naked man on the TV, and promptly confiscated the entire box.
In its place, she put on a lovely film about cats and lilies in space, if the title was anything to go by. Animation was only for children, after all, so that DVD must have just been some kind of weird porn, right?
You didn't mind too much - the kitty was cute, at least.
---
Not even a week later, you found yourself in hospital once again, suffering from severe combined immune deficiency.
In hindsight, ignoring Nidhogg's 'save data' had been a bad idea, as you woke up one morning to find your body's immune system attempting to destroy it. Naturally, after checking to see if it did anything useful, you shut off the automatic aspect of the process in favour of manually coordinating white blood cells, AKA big angry blood bits.
This soon proved to be a mistake, as the invasive microorganisms you'd brushed off as insignificant caused a surprising amount of damage while you were asleep, leaving you with a rapidly advancing ear infection, and no idea how to fix it besides [focusing] on the area and hoping for the best. That mistake had the opposite effect of speeding up the damage, to the hospital staffs' consternation.
You restored the original system pretty quickly after that, finding that you could preserve Nidhogg's 'data' by wrapping it in a layer of your own tissue.
It was following this event that you resolved to learn more about how the human body worked. How could you have ever hoped to be the hero that saves everyone if you weren't even capable of looking after yourself? It was this determination that drove you to crack open the heaviest textbook on human anatomy in the library, intent on spending the rest of your day poring over each minute detail. Said drive for independence proceeded to bite you in the ass when you realised that, being five, you couldn't understand a word in the textbook, and you had to waste the remainder of the day working up the courage to ask your mom for help.
And so, after the initial barrage of questions regarding your sudden interest, Story Time became The Biology Primer Slash Medical Terminology Learning Fusion Hour.
---
You loved your dad's quirk; it wasn't the flashiest, or the most versatile, and was in many ways more of an impediment than a power, but you loved it all the same. However, you would freely admit that it made situations like this... difficult, to say the least.
"Kaede…"
You struggled not to look him in the eye as he began.
"I know you're just trying to do research, but this is taking it a bit too far. You need to learn to respect other people's opinion. If they'd wanted you to eat their pet, they would have said so earlier."
As a self important five year old, you do not yet have the experience required to read people. You have even less experience with reading your father, who throws even the basics of facial cues out of the window by being a lizardman.
Your dad was famous, if in an unconventional way: when his quirk, which as far as you were aware was simply being a giant lizard person, began to manifest, somebody uploaded a picture and the internet exploded. Conspiracy theorists screamed their validation, deniers screamed back, and the despairing neutral faction silently wished for the apocalypse to bring an end their suffering. The stock market fluctuated wildly, entire businesses going bankrupt for their alleged views on the matter - there were even rumours of a secret cult forming around him. Not one bit of the event was officially covered by reliable news sources, either because they didn't want to be seen to take sides, or because they didn't want to acknowledge the worldwide bout of insanity.
This continued for several days, until things started to taper off. That did not necessarily mean that people had gotten over it and moved on - far from it: people only stopped because they realised that there was no purpose to openly declaring their allegiance for the oncoming war.
You had been told about this for your own safety, as time had not brought an end to the silent conflict. It was evident in the way that certain passersby would glance over at your dad for just slightly longer than necessary or socially acceptable. Even today, you could spot two conspicuously hooded figures observing your father from a nearby alley.
Speaking of your dad, the frills by the side of his neck were slightly raised, which wasn't usually a good sign. Ah, you'd just completely ignored his speech, and now he was annoyed. He rose from his previous position, making you crane your neck to look at him.
Now that you thought about it, you should find a way to get tall like your dad, maybe if you -
"Kaede, give me the cat. Now."
You reluctantly spat out the neighbors' beloved furball. Much to their relief, it was unharmed, but unwilling to do anything but screech at them and run off, likely to perform some genocidal form of stress relief on the local bird population. After the obligatory 'I'm very sorry's and 'I promise not to do it again's were done with, you immediately ran to your room and blocked the door. A manic grin took over your face, as you began pulling your supplies out from their various hiding places. Two bags of raw meat snatched from the freezer were emptied straight into your mouth, as were three out of four full sized chocolate bars, the last you saved as a treat for later. You'd found that eating high energy foods would let you make changes faster, and what you were about to do was going to take a while.
You'd got what you needed from the cat, several pieces of [potential] taken from various sections of its body. It would have helped to have the cat with you for this, but even the best heroes have to deal with setbacks.
The food took about two hours to break down and add itself to 'you', sped along by your [focusing]. It was painfully boring, but you kept your end goal in mind and persevered. Once the process was complete, you directed your attention to the cat pieces, and let the [possibilities] fill your mind.
You'd recently made a breakthrough in your research: you had your own tiny [potential]s, which acted as blueprints for the various parts of your body. You didn't know how you'd overlooked them before, but you think it related to how things that weren't fully 'you' stood out to you as if they were rainbow coloured horses. Now that you knew what they were for, you'd decided to abandon your previous attempts to make something from scratch, and move onto the next phase.
You could instinctively 'feel' what each piece could become; the pieces that were necessary were set in place, the rest left alone. The flesh around your midsection distorted as the you [focused] once more. Slowly, a shape began to emerge, growing outwards like a mushroom under timelapse. Several hours later, long after your parents gave up on calling you for dinner, it was complete.
It vaguely resembled a cat. A hairless, eyeless cat with no legs, that connected to your side where its tail would otherwise be located. There had been enough meat to make the majority of it, although you'd had to skimp on the bone density so as not to detract too much from your own. It felt like an extension of your body, and you could change it to the same extent, if you wanted to. Just one final check to make sure everything in the closed off system functioned correctly, and you were ready for the real test. Anticipation growing with every second, you began to break down the connecting tissue.
There - it was fully separated.
…
…
...Nothing happened.
...
You poked the cat. Still nothing.
Beginning to panic, you swallowed it. Despite the fact that it had quite literally been an extension of your body a minute ago, it was now somehow less 'you' than the original animal! Every organ you'd created was inactive, and the feeling of 'not-you' was growing in intensity with every passing second.
You put your head in your hands, and began breaking down your creation. You didn't have enough fluids left over to cry.
With the disappointing results bearing down on. you, you looked to the picture decorating the headboard of your bed. Your artistic talents were lacking, to say the least, but the idea was there: a skyline, sun and moon taking their places at opposite ends of the horizon, and every colour you could paint filling the void between the two. The ground was a lopsided curve of grey, and white paint spatters formed both the stars and the lights of the city below. It wasn't the most faithful reproduction, but you'd put your heart into it. Not literally, like your first attempt. Metaphors confused you sometimes.
That one scene from episode one had stuck in your mind, long after you forgot the rest of the show; it rattled around inside your head, manifesting in half remembered dreams of flying, of seeing it all for yourself. It was your end goal.
However, you didn't want to have to change yourself every time you wanted to go up, or stay flight capable permanently - fighting villains with big, fluffy targets on your back just sounded like a recipe for disaster. That meant that you needed a mount, and that meant that the stupid cat who couldn't even be bothered to stay alive was ruining everything! You knew that you could make living creatures, but there was just something missing from the end result that you couldn't place.
You needed to learn more about how bodies work, but there was only so much new information your brain could take in per day...
---
By the age of six, you understood enough about your body to make basic changes without landing yourself in hospital, such as growing some teeth for your secondary mouth. You loved how pretty the ziplike teeth made you look, and preferred to show them off whenever possible. While no progress had been made on your long term project, you could at least improve the speed of your [focusing] a bit by locating a few more nonessential processes to suspend.
You also knew just enough medical jargon to vaguely explain what you could do with your quirk. Your parents had been a mixture of relieved and furious that you were responsible for the dramatic rise in their health insurance premiums, rather than some mystery genetic disorder. Despite their initial reactions, they had been supportive of your drive to learn more about your capabilities, your mother even offering some advice.
Yuuko Shima, unlike many others in her position, chose to use her quirklessness as a double edged sword. On one hand, she was part of a rapidly diminishing minority that was societally treated as disabled. On the other, she was free to choose her future rather than be pressured into whichever her hypothetical quirk made her most useful for, she knew the laws pertaining to quirk based discrimination like the back of her hand qualified, and most importantly, she was fully qualified to give an outsider's perspective on quirks, and the problems they can cause in heroes. By attempting to learn about and diversify your capabilities, you had so far avoided falling prey to the 'have hammer, see only nails' mentality that many succumb to; however, she would take no chances with you making any other of the common mistakes.
"What do you mean, 'I can't tell anyone about my quirk'? I-is there something wrong with it?"
"Sweetie, no, no, don't be upset. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just that people might like it too much, and that might make them do… dumb things.
Her tone was reassuring, even if the words made no sense to you. The stinging sensation that had been building up in your eyes stopped.
"Look, you're going to be a hero, aren't you? That means you're going to be fighting a lot of bad people. If you let everyone know what you can do, then that puts you at a serious… It means they get to cheat."
You could understand that logic, except for one part:
"But all the villains are useless! There's new ones all the time, but none of them can even do anything!"
She smiled softly, patting you on the head.
"Not all bad guys are villains, Kaede".
---
You were nearly seven, and despite your protests, you would be starting school soon. You were not handling it well - what were you going to do? What if they picked on you? Were you really going to be required to wear a shirt?
Wait. What do you even do at school?
The best coping mechanism you could think of was to play with your quirk, maybe try adding something to make you a bit less cute.
Main action:
[ ] It is a proven fact that cat ears are intimidating. The fact that it would simultaneously enable you to eavesdrop and serve as a homage to the early supervillain Don Fluffles is merely a bonus.
[ ] A tail would help with your balance, and would also, as your father so expertly demonstrates, increase your defenestrating capabilities by 350%.
[ ] Then again, the cuter you look, the easier to get them off guard, and therefore into your mouth. You're thinking of getting some of those cute-yet-functional slitted eyes.
Additional action(s):
[ ] Write-in
---
AN: I don't have enough faith in humanity to say that I'm certain that we wouldn't be that stupid.
Sorry to everyone who voted for the other options. Is it some consolation that it had some different than expected results?
Also, this action has more important repercussions than you might think… I could be less vague about it, but I think I enjoy making people worry. Just assume if it's in here for seemingly no, it will probably be relevant after this prologue bit is over. Probably.
Although you weren't expecting to get much from watching it, you put in the DVD, a forgotten birthday present from your estranged relatives in Australia, and watched the first episode.
And the next episode.
And the next.
In fact, you got halfway through episode six before your mom came in, took one look at the naked man on the TV, and promptly confiscated the entire box.
In its place, she put on a lovely film about cats and lilies in space, if the title was anything to go by. Animation was only for children, after all, so that DVD must have just been some kind of weird porn, right?
You didn't mind too much - the kitty was cute, at least.
---
Not even a week later, you found yourself in hospital once again, suffering from severe combined immune deficiency.
In hindsight, ignoring Nidhogg's 'save data' had been a bad idea, as you woke up one morning to find your body's immune system attempting to destroy it. Naturally, after checking to see if it did anything useful, you shut off the automatic aspect of the process in favour of manually coordinating white blood cells, AKA big angry blood bits.
This soon proved to be a mistake, as the invasive microorganisms you'd brushed off as insignificant caused a surprising amount of damage while you were asleep, leaving you with a rapidly advancing ear infection, and no idea how to fix it besides [focusing] on the area and hoping for the best. That mistake had the opposite effect of speeding up the damage, to the hospital staffs' consternation.
You restored the original system pretty quickly after that, finding that you could preserve Nidhogg's 'data' by wrapping it in a layer of your own tissue.
It was following this event that you resolved to learn more about how the human body worked. How could you have ever hoped to be the hero that saves everyone if you weren't even capable of looking after yourself? It was this determination that drove you to crack open the heaviest textbook on human anatomy in the library, intent on spending the rest of your day poring over each minute detail. Said drive for independence proceeded to bite you in the ass when you realised that, being five, you couldn't understand a word in the textbook, and you had to waste the remainder of the day working up the courage to ask your mom for help.
And so, after the initial barrage of questions regarding your sudden interest, Story Time became The Biology Primer Slash Medical Terminology Learning Fusion Hour.
---
You loved your dad's quirk; it wasn't the flashiest, or the most versatile, and was in many ways more of an impediment than a power, but you loved it all the same. However, you would freely admit that it made situations like this... difficult, to say the least.
"Kaede…"
You struggled not to look him in the eye as he began.
"I know you're just trying to do research, but this is taking it a bit too far. You need to learn to respect other people's opinion. If they'd wanted you to eat their pet, they would have said so earlier."
As a self important five year old, you do not yet have the experience required to read people. You have even less experience with reading your father, who throws even the basics of facial cues out of the window by being a lizardman.
Your dad was famous, if in an unconventional way: when his quirk, which as far as you were aware was simply being a giant lizard person, began to manifest, somebody uploaded a picture and the internet exploded. Conspiracy theorists screamed their validation, deniers screamed back, and the despairing neutral faction silently wished for the apocalypse to bring an end their suffering. The stock market fluctuated wildly, entire businesses going bankrupt for their alleged views on the matter - there were even rumours of a secret cult forming around him. Not one bit of the event was officially covered by reliable news sources, either because they didn't want to be seen to take sides, or because they didn't want to acknowledge the worldwide bout of insanity.
This continued for several days, until things started to taper off. That did not necessarily mean that people had gotten over it and moved on - far from it: people only stopped because they realised that there was no purpose to openly declaring their allegiance for the oncoming war.
You had been told about this for your own safety, as time had not brought an end to the silent conflict. It was evident in the way that certain passersby would glance over at your dad for just slightly longer than necessary or socially acceptable. Even today, you could spot two conspicuously hooded figures observing your father from a nearby alley.
Speaking of your dad, the frills by the side of his neck were slightly raised, which wasn't usually a good sign. Ah, you'd just completely ignored his speech, and now he was annoyed. He rose from his previous position, making you crane your neck to look at him.
Now that you thought about it, you should find a way to get tall like your dad, maybe if you -
"Kaede, give me the cat. Now."
You reluctantly spat out the neighbors' beloved furball. Much to their relief, it was unharmed, but unwilling to do anything but screech at them and run off, likely to perform some genocidal form of stress relief on the local bird population. After the obligatory 'I'm very sorry's and 'I promise not to do it again's were done with, you immediately ran to your room and blocked the door. A manic grin took over your face, as you began pulling your supplies out from their various hiding places. Two bags of raw meat snatched from the freezer were emptied straight into your mouth, as were three out of four full sized chocolate bars, the last you saved as a treat for later. You'd found that eating high energy foods would let you make changes faster, and what you were about to do was going to take a while.
You'd got what you needed from the cat, several pieces of [potential] taken from various sections of its body. It would have helped to have the cat with you for this, but even the best heroes have to deal with setbacks.
The food took about two hours to break down and add itself to 'you', sped along by your [focusing]. It was painfully boring, but you kept your end goal in mind and persevered. Once the process was complete, you directed your attention to the cat pieces, and let the [possibilities] fill your mind.
You'd recently made a breakthrough in your research: you had your own tiny [potential]s, which acted as blueprints for the various parts of your body. You didn't know how you'd overlooked them before, but you think it related to how things that weren't fully 'you' stood out to you as if they were rainbow coloured horses. Now that you knew what they were for, you'd decided to abandon your previous attempts to make something from scratch, and move onto the next phase.
You could instinctively 'feel' what each piece could become; the pieces that were necessary were set in place, the rest left alone. The flesh around your midsection distorted as the you [focused] once more. Slowly, a shape began to emerge, growing outwards like a mushroom under timelapse. Several hours later, long after your parents gave up on calling you for dinner, it was complete.
It vaguely resembled a cat. A hairless, eyeless cat with no legs, that connected to your side where its tail would otherwise be located. There had been enough meat to make the majority of it, although you'd had to skimp on the bone density so as not to detract too much from your own. It felt like an extension of your body, and you could change it to the same extent, if you wanted to. Just one final check to make sure everything in the closed off system functioned correctly, and you were ready for the real test. Anticipation growing with every second, you began to break down the connecting tissue.
There - it was fully separated.
…
…
...Nothing happened.
...
You poked the cat. Still nothing.
Beginning to panic, you swallowed it. Despite the fact that it had quite literally been an extension of your body a minute ago, it was now somehow less 'you' than the original animal! Every organ you'd created was inactive, and the feeling of 'not-you' was growing in intensity with every passing second.
You put your head in your hands, and began breaking down your creation. You didn't have enough fluids left over to cry.
With the disappointing results bearing down on. you, you looked to the picture decorating the headboard of your bed. Your artistic talents were lacking, to say the least, but the idea was there: a skyline, sun and moon taking their places at opposite ends of the horizon, and every colour you could paint filling the void between the two. The ground was a lopsided curve of grey, and white paint spatters formed both the stars and the lights of the city below. It wasn't the most faithful reproduction, but you'd put your heart into it. Not literally, like your first attempt. Metaphors confused you sometimes.
That one scene from episode one had stuck in your mind, long after you forgot the rest of the show; it rattled around inside your head, manifesting in half remembered dreams of flying, of seeing it all for yourself. It was your end goal.
However, you didn't want to have to change yourself every time you wanted to go up, or stay flight capable permanently - fighting villains with big, fluffy targets on your back just sounded like a recipe for disaster. That meant that you needed a mount, and that meant that the stupid cat who couldn't even be bothered to stay alive was ruining everything! You knew that you could make living creatures, but there was just something missing from the end result that you couldn't place.
You needed to learn more about how bodies work, but there was only so much new information your brain could take in per day...
---
By the age of six, you understood enough about your body to make basic changes without landing yourself in hospital, such as growing some teeth for your secondary mouth. You loved how pretty the ziplike teeth made you look, and preferred to show them off whenever possible. While no progress had been made on your long term project, you could at least improve the speed of your [focusing] a bit by locating a few more nonessential processes to suspend.
You also knew just enough medical jargon to vaguely explain what you could do with your quirk. Your parents had been a mixture of relieved and furious that you were responsible for the dramatic rise in their health insurance premiums, rather than some mystery genetic disorder. Despite their initial reactions, they had been supportive of your drive to learn more about your capabilities, your mother even offering some advice.
Yuuko Shima, unlike many others in her position, chose to use her quirklessness as a double edged sword. On one hand, she was part of a rapidly diminishing minority that was societally treated as disabled. On the other, she was free to choose her future rather than be pressured into whichever her hypothetical quirk made her most useful for, she knew the laws pertaining to quirk based discrimination like the back of her hand qualified, and most importantly, she was fully qualified to give an outsider's perspective on quirks, and the problems they can cause in heroes. By attempting to learn about and diversify your capabilities, you had so far avoided falling prey to the 'have hammer, see only nails' mentality that many succumb to; however, she would take no chances with you making any other of the common mistakes.
"What do you mean, 'I can't tell anyone about my quirk'? I-is there something wrong with it?"
"Sweetie, no, no, don't be upset. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just that people might like it too much, and that might make them do… dumb things.
Her tone was reassuring, even if the words made no sense to you. The stinging sensation that had been building up in your eyes stopped.
"Look, you're going to be a hero, aren't you? That means you're going to be fighting a lot of bad people. If you let everyone know what you can do, then that puts you at a serious… It means they get to cheat."
You could understand that logic, except for one part:
"But all the villains are useless! There's new ones all the time, but none of them can even do anything!"
She smiled softly, patting you on the head.
"Not all bad guys are villains, Kaede".
---
You were nearly seven, and despite your protests, you would be starting school soon. You were not handling it well - what were you going to do? What if they picked on you? Were you really going to be required to wear a shirt?
Wait. What do you even do at school?
The best coping mechanism you could think of was to play with your quirk, maybe try adding something to make you a bit less cute.
Main action:
[ ] It is a proven fact that cat ears are intimidating. The fact that it would simultaneously enable you to eavesdrop and serve as a homage to the early supervillain Don Fluffles is merely a bonus.
[ ] A tail would help with your balance, and would also, as your father so expertly demonstrates, increase your defenestrating capabilities by 350%.
[ ] Then again, the cuter you look, the easier to get them off guard, and therefore into your mouth. You're thinking of getting some of those cute-yet-functional slitted eyes.
Additional action(s):
[ ] Write-in
---
AN: I don't have enough faith in humanity to say that I'm certain that we wouldn't be that stupid.
Sorry to everyone who voted for the other options. Is it some consolation that it had some different than expected results?
Also, this action has more important repercussions than you might think… I could be less vague about it, but I think I enjoy making people worry. Just assume if it's in here for seemingly no, it will probably be relevant after this prologue bit is over. Probably.
Prologue 0.04
- Location
- Somewhere cold
[X] Meow? Mrrooow.
Creating functional ears was a challenge, albeit a fun one. You'd had to first grow a reference set on your leg, so you could work out how to scale up to your size, then reshape your skull to accommodate for the new weapons of intimidation; both of which were new procedures for you. While you'd wanted to keep your original ears too for double the hearing power, having double the holes in your skull would just be asking for trouble, even by your standards.
You worked from the inside out, forming the inner middle and inner ear underneath a protective growth of flesh, but left out the Eustachian tube. You didn't know it was called that, but you did know that if it didn't connect to an air supply, the air pressure inside your ear couldn't match the outside, causing the closest thing you'd felt to pain in years: mild discomfort.
Turns out that even if you lacked pain receptors, you were not invincible against distracting stimuli.
Anyway, your new ears were located next to several veins, so you could manually transfer oxygen to the middle ear in place of air when necessary; it would also serve as an alarm clock if something weird happened while you were unconscious or sleeping. Something exclusively relating to rapid shifts in air pressure. It's not paranoia if the maybe existing cultists really might be out to get you..?
In addition to this benefit, your new semicircular canals (which, from what you could tell from the nauseating few seconds between the absorption of your last pair and the new pairs' formation, handled your sense of balance), were much more developed and consequently would help you be less clumsy than normal.
From there it was comparatively simple to finalise the outer ear and various attached muscles. You were glad you'd eaten before, as the cartilage and hair took a lot of energy to relocate and synthesise.
But after all that time and effort, they were complete: a pair of kitty ears were now yours, along with all of the auditory benefits that came with them. Now to become the most intimidating primary school student the world has ever known!
---
As you had been banned from the only daycare your father trusted not to let conspiracy theories interfere with your care, you had not spent much time outside your or your relatives' properties, and especially not with other children.
But even if meeting so many new people was a shock, you really should have known better than to introduce yourself by asking if you could eat your classmates.
It was after your parents had drilled it into you that even if it would be interesting to see how other people's quirks worked, and even if the strange, grape-headed boy had said yes, you still couldn't swallow people in public that you were allowed into a different primary school.
Unfortunately, you guessed wrong that the tortoise in the glass tank at the back had been for you. The 'save data' had been worth the terrified screaming of your classmates, though.
Otoronu Primary School was your third attempt. To your parents' relief, you avoided any expulsion worthy behaviour where the teachers could see you, and thoroughly enjoyed your time there. There was so much to learn - although it did eat up the time you were previously free to experiment in.
In your opinion, the best thing about school was most definitely the bathrooms. You didn't need to use them, considering it a waste of recyclable materials, but after meeting its inhabitants, it became your favourite place to frequent between lessons. You had been chasing one of the not-for-eating mice, figuring that seeing as how it had mysteriously escaped confinement, definitely through no fault of your own, that it was fair game. The mouse had been been surprisingly fast, but you managed to corner it in the stall of a disused shower. You grinned with both mouths as it began a futile attempt to fit between the metal bars of the drain, and closed in.
It was just within your reach when your new best friend appeared - a sinuous, red-brown tape, just under the size of your maths ruler, shot out of the drain and wrapped itself around the frantically squeaking mouse. You watched in stunned silence as it latched its head onto the mouse's throat and began to chew.
Mukade, or Red Headed centipedes, are common pests in Japan, and are culturally regarded as a symbol of evil. They like to hide in people's beds, shoes, and clothing. They also tend to climb onto the ceiling, and drop onto unsuspecting victims, because why not. They are terrifying, and the ballsy little demons know it.
You named him Omu.
---
After that, you made a point to visit Omu every school day, the centipede always happy to give your fingers a hug whenever you pulled off the drain to pick him up. The venom he injected into your bloodstream every time was stored where one of your redundant kidneys was previously located. You could have created a gland to create it for you from Omu's save data, or even synthesise it manually, provided you ate the right materials, but the little mukade was always so enthusiastic to gift you with some… You had no idea what you were storing it for, but maybe you could incorporate it into the next addition to your physiology.
Your dad was away again on a 'business trip' in (he actually just wanted to visit his parents without upsetting your mom, so that was the official excuse - she did not get along with them for some reason), and would be returning the night before his birthday.
You had decided that you wanted to surprise him by growing a tail, in order to look more like him. Your mom had initially protested, but, after realising the futility of attempting to dissuade you, agreed that your dad would appreciate the gesture.
You repeated the same basic method you'd used for your ears, creating a reference from the cat's data, then scaling up. The finished tail couldn't be too long, only about three feet or your current heart started to tear itself from exertion, and required the depletion of an entire freezer's worth of meat to create the required muscle mass, but it was so worth it. Until you fell over backward and crushed the majority of the bones inside it. You'd had to skimp on the density to make it light enough to lift, which was fine when the tail was suspended, but too much uneven pressure and you had to waste time [focusing] to repair the damage.
Maybe this was why reptiles had scales? You examined the sole piece of Nidhogg's 'data' and there was no way you were going to waste so much time repairing each individual part! Something like Omu's armor would be more efficient, as it wouldn't spread your concentration too thinly when [focusing]; you combined the material of your bitey friend's carapace with the structure of a tortoise's, in order to account for the size increase, to create some thin dermal plating along the thicker sections of your tail, using up several bags of sugar in the process.
You tested this improvement immediately by accidentally falling over again, and while the bones didn't break to the same extent as the previous time… well, you were glad you couldn't feel pain. Although the damage could be fixed in a fraction of the previous time, you really needed to fix that balance problem; the root lay in your legs, which were unsurprisingly not suited to compensating for the additional weight of an armoured tail.
You checked the clock, one in the morning, plenty of time to have some fun - this time, you took a different option with your legs. They were relatively simple to edit: slowly transfer the preexisting materials around to the different sections of your leg, test, heal, repeat.
Adding joints was pointless; digitigrade was definitely the best way to go.
Test, heal, repeat, change, test, heal, repeat, change, test.
Got it.
---
After returning from winter break one year, you discovered that you may have made a mistake in assuming that Omu was male. You'd reached down the drain as usual, intending on saying hi and making sure that was getting enough food, and pulled out an angry ball. An angry ball of cuteness that was curled around a clutch of eggs.
After squealing excitedly for a minute, they were all placed inside your mouth - gently, so as not to damage any, and you made another discovery.
'Save data' usually contained plans for a few parts of the whole organism; it was why you couldn't make a full replica of Nidhogg for whatever reason you'd want a dead snake. But this stuff… It had everything.
While there was no difference besides quantity between the [potential] in the eggs' data and that of Omu's, you felt that this would be an important clue in identifying what exactly 'save data' was...
---
As all your friends lived inside you, there was no need to be upset about your graduation into junior high. And anyway, there were so many new things to learn! So many new people to accidentally scar for life!
However, there was one thing that you simply could not tolerate about junior high school, and that was the uniform: trousers simply did not accommodate for your tail or your legs, so you couldn't walk in them without tearing. A skirt worked in theory, but your tail was attached through a bulky section of muscle trailing up your back, not magic, so skirts just rode up to somewhere around your ribs. Blazers and ties were pointlessly restricting accessories, so you refused to wear them on principle. Shirts were your worst enemy, concealing your secondary mouth in a futile attempt to bring your cuteness down to the level of a mere mortal. Plus, the buttons kept getting stuck between your teeth.
What was even the point? You lacked any of the useless parts that others had to cover up, being the owner of a vastly less wasteful digestive system that could even break down metal if given enough time and acid. That had been awkward to explain to the doctors. Hell, if they wanted to colour coordinate, you could just dye your skin black and white by changing the levels of melanin - if you added a few flaps of skin around your wrists and ankles, nobody would be able to tell the difference!
Due to your obstinacy, the only local option available to you was Orudera Junior High, a school so desperate to for a graduate to go into the acclaimed 'hero academy', UA, that they would overlook pretty much any inappropriate quirk usage. It had not occurred to the faculty that it was possibly their graduates' resulting lack of discipline regarding their quirks that cost them their entrance exams.
Yes, please continue using your potentially lethal quirks with little to no regard to civilian casualties - it's precisely what we look for in a hero.
You didn't complain; they let you walk around effectively naked.
Junior high was a lot more intense than primary school, not just because of the increased workload. You were infinitely grateful that you'd followed your mother's advice on underselling your quirk, because to many of the students, the UA entrance exams were the final round of a year gauntlet of grade sabotage and physical violence. While it was only the most competitive of students who instigated it, targeting anyone with a quirk they believed could pose a threat to their chances of getting in, the apathy of the faculty left victims with a choice between retaliation and giving up on their dreams. You mostly avoided the conflict, as popular belief was that your quirk let you eat animals and add the best parts to yourself, a 'relatively useless power' for combating villains. They were thirteen year olds, not zoologists.
Very rude thirteen year olds.
For that reason, you avoided socialising almost entirely until the day you decided to follow the blond from your physics class during break. While you refused to even think of attempting to copy quirks, because you were going to be a hero through your own power not someone else's damn it, you would allow research into their required physical changes in order to improve your own body - such as how Explody McAngermanagementissues's hands didn't break or burn from the use of his quirk. You needed the former so that your legs would stop breaking so often, and the latter because branching into explosives sounded like a Really Good Idea that would definitely not end badly for you. Or your health insurance provider.
You'd successfully tailed him and the rest of his friends (?) to an empty classroom, when upon following them inside, you spotted Bakusomething verbally abusing what appeared to be a sentient shrub in a uniform. You couldn't see the victim's face, as they had their back to you, but what you could see resembled a small bush, at least.
Oh dear. Blondie was raising his voice. This could easily develop into a fight. Wait - grass types are weak against fire!
You have to do something to interrupt them...
Main Action:
[ ] Screw Bakuxxx and his harem (?), heroes don't stand by and watch! It is time to unleash your lizard heritage.
[ ] Break the ice by introducing them to your friends.
[ ] Break the ice by nomming the blond one.
Additional actions: Write-in
---
AN: And so the canon derailment begins. I can almost hear the screams from here.
The following parts definitely won't be as long as this, sorry. I just wanted to write both options. Plus, I greatly underestimated how long Japanese primary school lasts when planning this, and only one major upgrade in years is a bit… Oh well… it's only really a basic aspect of one area of your quirk. Once the prologue's over, improvements are only coming from additional actions. As in, do X and try to Y. Unless I get bored and give you another free basic aspect. I reserve my right to be indecisive.
Giant centipedes will eat anything they're large enough to. If I don't post ever again, it's because I've been arrested for all the weird shit in my browsing history from researching this part.
Unrelated, but I once saw a group of thirteen year olds call a tapir a baby elephant. And not as a joke.
Creating functional ears was a challenge, albeit a fun one. You'd had to first grow a reference set on your leg, so you could work out how to scale up to your size, then reshape your skull to accommodate for the new weapons of intimidation; both of which were new procedures for you. While you'd wanted to keep your original ears too for double the hearing power, having double the holes in your skull would just be asking for trouble, even by your standards.
You worked from the inside out, forming the inner middle and inner ear underneath a protective growth of flesh, but left out the Eustachian tube. You didn't know it was called that, but you did know that if it didn't connect to an air supply, the air pressure inside your ear couldn't match the outside, causing the closest thing you'd felt to pain in years: mild discomfort.
Turns out that even if you lacked pain receptors, you were not invincible against distracting stimuli.
Anyway, your new ears were located next to several veins, so you could manually transfer oxygen to the middle ear in place of air when necessary; it would also serve as an alarm clock if something weird happened while you were unconscious or sleeping. Something exclusively relating to rapid shifts in air pressure. It's not paranoia if the maybe existing cultists really might be out to get you..?
In addition to this benefit, your new semicircular canals (which, from what you could tell from the nauseating few seconds between the absorption of your last pair and the new pairs' formation, handled your sense of balance), were much more developed and consequently would help you be less clumsy than normal.
From there it was comparatively simple to finalise the outer ear and various attached muscles. You were glad you'd eaten before, as the cartilage and hair took a lot of energy to relocate and synthesise.
But after all that time and effort, they were complete: a pair of kitty ears were now yours, along with all of the auditory benefits that came with them. Now to become the most intimidating primary school student the world has ever known!
---
As you had been banned from the only daycare your father trusted not to let conspiracy theories interfere with your care, you had not spent much time outside your or your relatives' properties, and especially not with other children.
But even if meeting so many new people was a shock, you really should have known better than to introduce yourself by asking if you could eat your classmates.
It was after your parents had drilled it into you that even if it would be interesting to see how other people's quirks worked, and even if the strange, grape-headed boy had said yes, you still couldn't swallow people in public that you were allowed into a different primary school.
Unfortunately, you guessed wrong that the tortoise in the glass tank at the back had been for you. The 'save data' had been worth the terrified screaming of your classmates, though.
Otoronu Primary School was your third attempt. To your parents' relief, you avoided any expulsion worthy behaviour where the teachers could see you, and thoroughly enjoyed your time there. There was so much to learn - although it did eat up the time you were previously free to experiment in.
In your opinion, the best thing about school was most definitely the bathrooms. You didn't need to use them, considering it a waste of recyclable materials, but after meeting its inhabitants, it became your favourite place to frequent between lessons. You had been chasing one of the not-for-eating mice, figuring that seeing as how it had mysteriously escaped confinement, definitely through no fault of your own, that it was fair game. The mouse had been been surprisingly fast, but you managed to corner it in the stall of a disused shower. You grinned with both mouths as it began a futile attempt to fit between the metal bars of the drain, and closed in.
It was just within your reach when your new best friend appeared - a sinuous, red-brown tape, just under the size of your maths ruler, shot out of the drain and wrapped itself around the frantically squeaking mouse. You watched in stunned silence as it latched its head onto the mouse's throat and began to chew.
Mukade, or Red Headed centipedes, are common pests in Japan, and are culturally regarded as a symbol of evil. They like to hide in people's beds, shoes, and clothing. They also tend to climb onto the ceiling, and drop onto unsuspecting victims, because why not. They are terrifying, and the ballsy little demons know it.
You named him Omu.
---
After that, you made a point to visit Omu every school day, the centipede always happy to give your fingers a hug whenever you pulled off the drain to pick him up. The venom he injected into your bloodstream every time was stored where one of your redundant kidneys was previously located. You could have created a gland to create it for you from Omu's save data, or even synthesise it manually, provided you ate the right materials, but the little mukade was always so enthusiastic to gift you with some… You had no idea what you were storing it for, but maybe you could incorporate it into the next addition to your physiology.
Your dad was away again on a 'business trip' in (he actually just wanted to visit his parents without upsetting your mom, so that was the official excuse - she did not get along with them for some reason), and would be returning the night before his birthday.
You had decided that you wanted to surprise him by growing a tail, in order to look more like him. Your mom had initially protested, but, after realising the futility of attempting to dissuade you, agreed that your dad would appreciate the gesture.
You repeated the same basic method you'd used for your ears, creating a reference from the cat's data, then scaling up. The finished tail couldn't be too long, only about three feet or your current heart started to tear itself from exertion, and required the depletion of an entire freezer's worth of meat to create the required muscle mass, but it was so worth it. Until you fell over backward and crushed the majority of the bones inside it. You'd had to skimp on the density to make it light enough to lift, which was fine when the tail was suspended, but too much uneven pressure and you had to waste time [focusing] to repair the damage.
Maybe this was why reptiles had scales? You examined the sole piece of Nidhogg's 'data' and there was no way you were going to waste so much time repairing each individual part! Something like Omu's armor would be more efficient, as it wouldn't spread your concentration too thinly when [focusing]; you combined the material of your bitey friend's carapace with the structure of a tortoise's, in order to account for the size increase, to create some thin dermal plating along the thicker sections of your tail, using up several bags of sugar in the process.
You tested this improvement immediately by accidentally falling over again, and while the bones didn't break to the same extent as the previous time… well, you were glad you couldn't feel pain. Although the damage could be fixed in a fraction of the previous time, you really needed to fix that balance problem; the root lay in your legs, which were unsurprisingly not suited to compensating for the additional weight of an armoured tail.
You checked the clock, one in the morning, plenty of time to have some fun - this time, you took a different option with your legs. They were relatively simple to edit: slowly transfer the preexisting materials around to the different sections of your leg, test, heal, repeat.
Adding joints was pointless; digitigrade was definitely the best way to go.
Test, heal, repeat, change, test, heal, repeat, change, test.
Got it.
---
After returning from winter break one year, you discovered that you may have made a mistake in assuming that Omu was male. You'd reached down the drain as usual, intending on saying hi and making sure that was getting enough food, and pulled out an angry ball. An angry ball of cuteness that was curled around a clutch of eggs.
After squealing excitedly for a minute, they were all placed inside your mouth - gently, so as not to damage any, and you made another discovery.
'Save data' usually contained plans for a few parts of the whole organism; it was why you couldn't make a full replica of Nidhogg for whatever reason you'd want a dead snake. But this stuff… It had everything.
While there was no difference besides quantity between the [potential] in the eggs' data and that of Omu's, you felt that this would be an important clue in identifying what exactly 'save data' was...
---
As all your friends lived inside you, there was no need to be upset about your graduation into junior high. And anyway, there were so many new things to learn! So many new people to accidentally scar for life!
However, there was one thing that you simply could not tolerate about junior high school, and that was the uniform: trousers simply did not accommodate for your tail or your legs, so you couldn't walk in them without tearing. A skirt worked in theory, but your tail was attached through a bulky section of muscle trailing up your back, not magic, so skirts just rode up to somewhere around your ribs. Blazers and ties were pointlessly restricting accessories, so you refused to wear them on principle. Shirts were your worst enemy, concealing your secondary mouth in a futile attempt to bring your cuteness down to the level of a mere mortal. Plus, the buttons kept getting stuck between your teeth.
What was even the point? You lacked any of the useless parts that others had to cover up, being the owner of a vastly less wasteful digestive system that could even break down metal if given enough time and acid. That had been awkward to explain to the doctors. Hell, if they wanted to colour coordinate, you could just dye your skin black and white by changing the levels of melanin - if you added a few flaps of skin around your wrists and ankles, nobody would be able to tell the difference!
Due to your obstinacy, the only local option available to you was Orudera Junior High, a school so desperate to for a graduate to go into the acclaimed 'hero academy', UA, that they would overlook pretty much any inappropriate quirk usage. It had not occurred to the faculty that it was possibly their graduates' resulting lack of discipline regarding their quirks that cost them their entrance exams.
Yes, please continue using your potentially lethal quirks with little to no regard to civilian casualties - it's precisely what we look for in a hero.
You didn't complain; they let you walk around effectively naked.
Junior high was a lot more intense than primary school, not just because of the increased workload. You were infinitely grateful that you'd followed your mother's advice on underselling your quirk, because to many of the students, the UA entrance exams were the final round of a year gauntlet of grade sabotage and physical violence. While it was only the most competitive of students who instigated it, targeting anyone with a quirk they believed could pose a threat to their chances of getting in, the apathy of the faculty left victims with a choice between retaliation and giving up on their dreams. You mostly avoided the conflict, as popular belief was that your quirk let you eat animals and add the best parts to yourself, a 'relatively useless power' for combating villains. They were thirteen year olds, not zoologists.
Very rude thirteen year olds.
For that reason, you avoided socialising almost entirely until the day you decided to follow the blond from your physics class during break. While you refused to even think of attempting to copy quirks, because you were going to be a hero through your own power not someone else's damn it, you would allow research into their required physical changes in order to improve your own body - such as how Explody McAngermanagementissues's hands didn't break or burn from the use of his quirk. You needed the former so that your legs would stop breaking so often, and the latter because branching into explosives sounded like a Really Good Idea that would definitely not end badly for you. Or your health insurance provider.
You'd successfully tailed him and the rest of his friends (?) to an empty classroom, when upon following them inside, you spotted Bakusomething verbally abusing what appeared to be a sentient shrub in a uniform. You couldn't see the victim's face, as they had their back to you, but what you could see resembled a small bush, at least.
Oh dear. Blondie was raising his voice. This could easily develop into a fight. Wait - grass types are weak against fire!
You have to do something to interrupt them...
Main Action:
[ ] Screw Bakuxxx and his harem (?), heroes don't stand by and watch! It is time to unleash your lizard heritage.
[ ] Break the ice by introducing them to your friends.
[ ] Break the ice by nomming the blond one.
Additional actions: Write-in
---
AN: And so the canon derailment begins. I can almost hear the screams from here.
The following parts definitely won't be as long as this, sorry. I just wanted to write both options. Plus, I greatly underestimated how long Japanese primary school lasts when planning this, and only one major upgrade in years is a bit… Oh well… it's only really a basic aspect of one area of your quirk. Once the prologue's over, improvements are only coming from additional actions. As in, do X and try to Y. Unless I get bored and give you another free basic aspect. I reserve my right to be indecisive.
Giant centipedes will eat anything they're large enough to. If I don't post ever again, it's because I've been arrested for all the weird shit in my browsing history from researching this part.
Unrelated, but I once saw a group of thirteen year olds call a tapir a baby elephant. And not as a joke.
Prologue 0.05 - Izuku Midoriya
- Location
- Somewhere cold
[X] Noms
It was really not a good day to be Izuku Midoriya.
It could also be said that it was almost never a good day to be Izuku Midoriya, because the universe he resides in apparently has an overabundance of cinnamon-seeking suffering missiles and a taste for fireworks.
He even keeps a list of them, ranked in order from the absolute worst at at number one, all the way down to number one thousand two hundred and eighty three, after which the notebook ran out of paper. Midoriya likes to write things down, because at this point even the Uncaring Void was fed up with listening to his screaming.
Number one took up three whole pages in his notebook, as even after all this time he could still remember every second of that day; from the moment his dreams were ground to dust in front of him, to his mother throwing what remained to the wind, to the overwhelming feeling of despair andnothingmattersanymoreheshouldjust - No, bad Izuku. You're over it. You're completely stable. And you're going to go to UA, and Kacchan won't hate you a-and everything will be perfect.
So, that fact that this day had just taken the number two spot was really saying something.
---
The day hadn't even had the decency to start well; I'd stayed up too late doing homework the previous night, and as a result of my sleeping in, had to skip breakfast so that I didn't miss the bus. I missed it anyway, forgot to bring the homework, and now Bakugo was being his usual compassionate self. Not to be rude, but Kacchan was not the most creative when it came to insults; there were only so many variations of useless, weak, pathetic, etc. before it got repetitive.
"Excuse me ~ may I ask you something, mister peroxide?"
Kacchan didn't bother to look up at the lilting, disused voice emanating from behind me. I continued to hold his gaze; if I stayed put he probably wouldn't go after the poor kid.
"The fuck you just call me? Little shits like you better move along, we're busy here. Right, guys?"
He glanced around at his gang, probably wondering why they weren't backing him up. Huh, they normally do at this point, I wonder what's… That's not a good sign.
His new friends were looking in the direction of the newcomer with varying degrees of fear, some beginning to slowly back away from our location in an attempt to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Bakugo actually looked a little…nervous. Granted, that just meant he looked angry, but his stance was more closed than usual, and his eyes were just a tiny bit too wide.
Cold dread pulsed at my back; I hesitantly turned around.
It was Kaede Shima, from class 1-E.
Heck.
Until now I'd never even seen them aside from passing glances in the corridor, neither of us much for socialising, so I'd thought the overheard conversations had been exaggerated - I was wrong. Shima reminded me of a zombie, with their unsteady gait and the way they looked at Kacchan like he was a piece of meat. Their face just looked… wrong. It was comparatively normal to the rest of their body, but something about the shape that I can't quite identify gave an uncanny valley effect, with the cat ears just making the creepiness worse through contrast. Something red scuttled over the top of their shoulder - gah! I thought that was just a zip! The mouth in their midsection now hung open limply, and there were large bugs crawling out of the hole.
Centipedes. The not-screaming-in-terror part of my brain identified. Venomous ones, too.
Shima reached inside, and I tried not to be sick as they pulled out another, uncaring of how deeply it bit into their hand, and placed it on a nearby desk.
"You're rude."
"And? What the fuck are you going to do about it, you freak?!"
Bakugo had pushed me back while I was distracted, moving to block my view of the intruder. From his tone of voice, he was about to do something very stupid.
"We're busy in here - so you better fuck off right now - !"
His fist pulled back as he crossed the distance between them
"Or you can eat this!"
"Okay~!"
Shima shot forward to meet Bakugo mid-strike, his fist sinking into the hole in their stomach, and stopping.
Until his sweat exploded, and.. th-a..ts a l-lot offf bloo-
---
I woke up to the sound of screaming, the tang of iron in the back of my throat, and found myself draped over a desk. The screams faded, much to my relief, and also that of the person next to me, if their sigh was anything to go by. Wait -
I raised my head to spot Shima crouching in a sea of bloody chunks, eating some. I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on not throwing up.
"Ah! Please don't do that again; you hit your head last time when you fell, and you're not supposed to sleep if you do that, I think. I didn't see anything wrong inside your head, but you can't be too careful. Oh, sorry about not asking permission first, but you're so small, and my stomach was already out everywhere, so I just couldn't help myself."
"Y-you.. What do you mean? What did you do?!"
My voice came out a few octaves higher than I would have liked, but the thought of them doing something to me while I was unconscious was…
"Oh? I just ate you, nothing to worry about. Hey, no don't -"
---
I next awoke in a hospital, Mom's concerned face staring down at me.
"Izuku? Are you feeling alright? The doctors said you hit your head quite hard…"
I couldn't help but smile at her concern; Mom always worried too much about me. I was fine though, even if my head was killing me, I was fine. Because this whole day had been some kind of hallucination after I... I don't know, got run over by the bus or something, a comforting thought to me.
"I was so scared when I got that call from the school, but your friend over there explained everything to me - they've been so helpful."
She said, pointing over to the bed next to the window to the left of me, in which a grinning Kaeda sat as they played with one of their nightmare bugs. They waved over at me, the centipede digging into their hand with it's forcipules to avoid being thrown off; my throat became incredibly dry all of a sudden.
"Hi! I'm glad you're okay - you were unconscious for so long that we were starting to get worried. I'm sorry you had to see all that, by the way."
The images came back in full force at the reminder.
"Izuku!"
"I… I'm fine, Mom. I just felt a bit sick, don't worry."
I was painfully aware of the weight of her hand on my back, of my weak breathing. I wouldn't be able to do anything to help her if Shima decided to attack. They said that they tried to eat me, they'd thrown themselves into Kacchan's blast, and they'd… how did they survive that anyway?
My enigmatic 'friend' examined us for a minute, before adding:
"Oh yeah, I almost forgot - the police want you to confirm what happened back there. You know, to make sure that mess was because I decided to experiment with quirk interaction, rather than something crazy like attempted murder."
My mom laughed with them at that, while I planned my next move carefully; they were lying about what had happened, why? To help Bakugo? None of this made any sense… I needed more information, but right now, keeping the closest thing I had to a friend out of jail would take priority.
---
All too quickly, things returned to normal. I was discharged from hospital later that day, once they confirmed that I wasn't concussed. Bakugo came back to school his usual self, although he did allow everyone a grace period before his more violent exploits started back up. His gang had escaped questioning by ditching him before the punch had even connected, but sure enough, a new one formed around him - who wouldn't want to hang around someone with such a great quirk for hero work?
But all the unanswered questions about Shima kept gnawing away at me, much like one of their pets on their hand. And so, two weeks after the incident, I found myself seeking them out.
Against every logical part of my brain, I approached them after school. They were behind the main building, as usual, menacing a flock of sparrows. In the end, they spoke first. After waiting long enough for me to make an idiot of myself in a sputtering attempt to initiate a conversation, of course.
"Sooo… what do you want to talk about, De… Deko… De-kun..?" It's De-kun, right?"
I decided to let the accidental (?) insult slide.
"Um, yeah, that's it. Look, Shima-san, I-I was wondering if I could, uh, maybe… ask you something? About that… event. I mean - sorry, if you don't want to talk about it it's fine I don't mind - ah, sorry, this must be somethingreallypersonalI'lljustbe... going n-now…"
They caught me by the back of my collar - I let out an undignified squeak.
"De-kun, are you okay? You're acting strange. I don't really know you that well, though, so maybe this is normal for you?"
I almost laughed at the weirdness of this whole situation: them of all people, being concerned about me? Oh well, I got this far, might as well go for it -
"Shima-san, could you please tell me…"
---
"...what exactly is your quirk?"
You took a moment to consider his question, remembering what your mother told you, so long ago, and…
Main Action:
[ ] Give him the 'public version'.
[ ] Invite him over to your house.
[ ] Tell him everything.
Additional Action:
[ ] Write-in.
---
AN: Can any of you picture Deku actually swearing?
Yeah, he's acting a bit OOC now, but sleep deprivation and sheer, undiluted terror will do that to you. Our favourite cinnamon roll will be back to normal soon. If normal can even exist any more for them.
Just one more part, and the prologue will finally be over! I'm not really sure if I can still call it a prologue with how differently it turned out from my plan, though. The big timeskip from the last part was meant to happen after this, but oh well. Better to try and fail than play it safe, I guess.
The change in tense is deliberate, not for some plot related reason, just to help show the difference in perspectives or something like that. There's probably a word for it. Exploring different perspectives is fun.
Next time: It's back to being unintentionally terrifying as I probably maybe explain what just happened. I have no idea what I'm doing!
It was really not a good day to be Izuku Midoriya.
It could also be said that it was almost never a good day to be Izuku Midoriya, because the universe he resides in apparently has an overabundance of cinnamon-seeking suffering missiles and a taste for fireworks.
He even keeps a list of them, ranked in order from the absolute worst at at number one, all the way down to number one thousand two hundred and eighty three, after which the notebook ran out of paper. Midoriya likes to write things down, because at this point even the Uncaring Void was fed up with listening to his screaming.
Number one took up three whole pages in his notebook, as even after all this time he could still remember every second of that day; from the moment his dreams were ground to dust in front of him, to his mother throwing what remained to the wind, to the overwhelming feeling of despair andnothingmattersanymoreheshouldjust - No, bad Izuku. You're over it. You're completely stable. And you're going to go to UA, and Kacchan won't hate you a-and everything will be perfect.
So, that fact that this day had just taken the number two spot was really saying something.
---
The day hadn't even had the decency to start well; I'd stayed up too late doing homework the previous night, and as a result of my sleeping in, had to skip breakfast so that I didn't miss the bus. I missed it anyway, forgot to bring the homework, and now Bakugo was being his usual compassionate self. Not to be rude, but Kacchan was not the most creative when it came to insults; there were only so many variations of useless, weak, pathetic, etc. before it got repetitive.
"Excuse me ~ may I ask you something, mister peroxide?"
Kacchan didn't bother to look up at the lilting, disused voice emanating from behind me. I continued to hold his gaze; if I stayed put he probably wouldn't go after the poor kid.
"The fuck you just call me? Little shits like you better move along, we're busy here. Right, guys?"
He glanced around at his gang, probably wondering why they weren't backing him up. Huh, they normally do at this point, I wonder what's… That's not a good sign.
His new friends were looking in the direction of the newcomer with varying degrees of fear, some beginning to slowly back away from our location in an attempt to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Bakugo actually looked a little…nervous. Granted, that just meant he looked angry, but his stance was more closed than usual, and his eyes were just a tiny bit too wide.
Cold dread pulsed at my back; I hesitantly turned around.
It was Kaede Shima, from class 1-E.
Heck.
Until now I'd never even seen them aside from passing glances in the corridor, neither of us much for socialising, so I'd thought the overheard conversations had been exaggerated - I was wrong. Shima reminded me of a zombie, with their unsteady gait and the way they looked at Kacchan like he was a piece of meat. Their face just looked… wrong. It was comparatively normal to the rest of their body, but something about the shape that I can't quite identify gave an uncanny valley effect, with the cat ears just making the creepiness worse through contrast. Something red scuttled over the top of their shoulder - gah! I thought that was just a zip! The mouth in their midsection now hung open limply, and there were large bugs crawling out of the hole.
Centipedes. The not-screaming-in-terror part of my brain identified. Venomous ones, too.
Shima reached inside, and I tried not to be sick as they pulled out another, uncaring of how deeply it bit into their hand, and placed it on a nearby desk.
"You're rude."
"And? What the fuck are you going to do about it, you freak?!"
Bakugo had pushed me back while I was distracted, moving to block my view of the intruder. From his tone of voice, he was about to do something very stupid.
"We're busy in here - so you better fuck off right now - !"
His fist pulled back as he crossed the distance between them
"Or you can eat this!"
"Okay~!"
Shima shot forward to meet Bakugo mid-strike, his fist sinking into the hole in their stomach, and stopping.
Until his sweat exploded, and.. th-a..ts a l-lot offf bloo-
---
I woke up to the sound of screaming, the tang of iron in the back of my throat, and found myself draped over a desk. The screams faded, much to my relief, and also that of the person next to me, if their sigh was anything to go by. Wait -
I raised my head to spot Shima crouching in a sea of bloody chunks, eating some. I squeezed my eyes shut and focused on not throwing up.
"Ah! Please don't do that again; you hit your head last time when you fell, and you're not supposed to sleep if you do that, I think. I didn't see anything wrong inside your head, but you can't be too careful. Oh, sorry about not asking permission first, but you're so small, and my stomach was already out everywhere, so I just couldn't help myself."
"Y-you.. What do you mean? What did you do?!"
My voice came out a few octaves higher than I would have liked, but the thought of them doing something to me while I was unconscious was…
"Oh? I just ate you, nothing to worry about. Hey, no don't -"
---
I next awoke in a hospital, Mom's concerned face staring down at me.
"Izuku? Are you feeling alright? The doctors said you hit your head quite hard…"
I couldn't help but smile at her concern; Mom always worried too much about me. I was fine though, even if my head was killing me, I was fine. Because this whole day had been some kind of hallucination after I... I don't know, got run over by the bus or something, a comforting thought to me.
"I was so scared when I got that call from the school, but your friend over there explained everything to me - they've been so helpful."
She said, pointing over to the bed next to the window to the left of me, in which a grinning Kaeda sat as they played with one of their nightmare bugs. They waved over at me, the centipede digging into their hand with it's forcipules to avoid being thrown off; my throat became incredibly dry all of a sudden.
"Hi! I'm glad you're okay - you were unconscious for so long that we were starting to get worried. I'm sorry you had to see all that, by the way."
The images came back in full force at the reminder.
"Izuku!"
"I… I'm fine, Mom. I just felt a bit sick, don't worry."
I was painfully aware of the weight of her hand on my back, of my weak breathing. I wouldn't be able to do anything to help her if Shima decided to attack. They said that they tried to eat me, they'd thrown themselves into Kacchan's blast, and they'd… how did they survive that anyway?
My enigmatic 'friend' examined us for a minute, before adding:
"Oh yeah, I almost forgot - the police want you to confirm what happened back there. You know, to make sure that mess was because I decided to experiment with quirk interaction, rather than something crazy like attempted murder."
My mom laughed with them at that, while I planned my next move carefully; they were lying about what had happened, why? To help Bakugo? None of this made any sense… I needed more information, but right now, keeping the closest thing I had to a friend out of jail would take priority.
---
All too quickly, things returned to normal. I was discharged from hospital later that day, once they confirmed that I wasn't concussed. Bakugo came back to school his usual self, although he did allow everyone a grace period before his more violent exploits started back up. His gang had escaped questioning by ditching him before the punch had even connected, but sure enough, a new one formed around him - who wouldn't want to hang around someone with such a great quirk for hero work?
But all the unanswered questions about Shima kept gnawing away at me, much like one of their pets on their hand. And so, two weeks after the incident, I found myself seeking them out.
Against every logical part of my brain, I approached them after school. They were behind the main building, as usual, menacing a flock of sparrows. In the end, they spoke first. After waiting long enough for me to make an idiot of myself in a sputtering attempt to initiate a conversation, of course.
"Sooo… what do you want to talk about, De… Deko… De-kun..?" It's De-kun, right?"
I decided to let the accidental (?) insult slide.
"Um, yeah, that's it. Look, Shima-san, I-I was wondering if I could, uh, maybe… ask you something? About that… event. I mean - sorry, if you don't want to talk about it it's fine I don't mind - ah, sorry, this must be somethingreallypersonalI'lljustbe... going n-now…"
They caught me by the back of my collar - I let out an undignified squeak.
"De-kun, are you okay? You're acting strange. I don't really know you that well, though, so maybe this is normal for you?"
I almost laughed at the weirdness of this whole situation: them of all people, being concerned about me? Oh well, I got this far, might as well go for it -
"Shima-san, could you please tell me…"
---
"...what exactly is your quirk?"
You took a moment to consider his question, remembering what your mother told you, so long ago, and…
Main Action:
[ ] Give him the 'public version'.
[ ] Invite him over to your house.
[ ] Tell him everything.
Additional Action:
[ ] Write-in.
---
AN: Can any of you picture Deku actually swearing?
Yeah, he's acting a bit OOC now, but sleep deprivation and sheer, undiluted terror will do that to you. Our favourite cinnamon roll will be back to normal soon. If normal can even exist any more for them.
Just one more part, and the prologue will finally be over! I'm not really sure if I can still call it a prologue with how differently it turned out from my plan, though. The big timeskip from the last part was meant to happen after this, but oh well. Better to try and fail than play it safe, I guess.
The change in tense is deliberate, not for some plot related reason, just to help show the difference in perspectives or something like that. There's probably a word for it. Exploring different perspectives is fun.
Next time: It's back to being unintentionally terrifying as I probably maybe explain what just happened. I have no idea what I'm doing!
Prologue 0.06
- Location
- Somewhere cold
[X] Cinnamon roll aura - activate!
Surprisingly, your genius idea of putting a person capable of spontaneous combustion inside you had not gone very well, but at least my friends were all clear of the blast radius when it occurred.
Awww - they were even helping clean up! Well, all except for -
"Hey, Jenny! Get away from that poor plant person!"
Said plant person had collapsed after the sudden repainting of the classroom, and was now bleeding from where you assumed he hit himself on the way down. You attempted to pick up Jenny when she predictably ignored you, only for you to realise that your legs weren't quite attached any more. Oh right, you just got blown up - should probably fix that first. Jenny looked quite comfortable for the time being, having found herself a cozy spot in the boy's ear.
You realised that you may have been wrong in your assumption that his mess of hair was a plant: Jenny's only that friendly to things that can bleed.
You took stock of your injuries: legs and tail were lying somewhere to my right, what organs hadn't been sublimated were burned beyond use, but your arms were fine, so there was that at least. Your 'save data' was also, for lack of a better word, safe, as you stored it all in the upper portion of your spine. First things first, a new stomach. For now you could handle most of your bodily processes with your quirk, but being able to sleep without instantly dying would be nice.
It was slow going, what with the added distraction of circulating oxygen manually, but you eventually isolated the correct part of your own 'save data' to form a new stomach around the useless, dead section of your torso. It was significantly larger than your previous one, but your main priority was to regain as much mass as possible - you could scale it down later.
Although… Glancing over at the boy lying on the floor, not too far away that you couldn't drag yourself, you had an idea. Might as well get something out of this disaster - here's to questionable decisions!
You moved quickly, and soon found yourself with a few new scrap of 'save data' and a reclaimed, if irritated, Jenny. You noted with some disappointment that there appeared to be no difference between how 'you' humans felt to live animals; the boy didn't even appear to have any interesting secondary quirks, except for his far inferior stomach. Seriously, it could barely absorb anything, kind of pathetic really.
Gloating aside, you dumped him onto a nearby desk, and made your way back over to your lower body. You'd planned on cannibalising it for parts that you could use to slowly rebuild a new set, only to be pleasantly surprised that they not yet recognised as dead, and therefore uneditable, by your quirk. However, like your numerous failed attempts at creating life, it was fading fast.
As usual, you decided to try something impulsive, and reshaped yourself so that your lower half was positioned roughly where it would usually be, now attached by a tumorous growth of flesh from your stomach. A rudimentary heart was formed somewhere inside; new arteries, nerves, connecting the two halves. Very slowly, of course, but this classroom was rarely used - you had plenty of time.
You'd never thought of this before: connecting and editing pre-existing parts was something that could significantly increase the amount of time that you could experiment in, as normally you had to wait until weekends or holidays to get everything done in one uninterrupted session. Now if you could just figure out why the organisms kept dying… You were so distracted by the exciting ideas that flooded your mind that you nearly asphyxiated on two separate occasions.
Eventually, you got your body back to working order and set about regaining some biomass. Even if the cells had been killed off by the burns, they were still something.
A student chose at this moment to enter the classroom and start screaming their head off, for some reason. They left in a hurry though, so maybe that was just their regular method of coping with the everyday stresses of life.
People were so strange sometimes - you sighed, as did the not-a-plant next to you.
You popped another gobbet of charred flesh into your mouth, and worriedly observed how he squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to go back to sleep.
"Ah! Please don't do that again; you hit your head last time when you fell, and you're not supposed to sleep if you do that, I think. I didn't see anything wrong inside your head, but you can't be too careful. Oh, sorry about not asking permission first, but you're so small, and my stomach was already out everywhere, so I just couldn't help myself."
That woke him up, although the squawking probably wasn't a good sign.
"Y-you.. What do you mean? What did you do?!"
"Oh? I just ate you, nothing to worry about. Hey, no don't… do that."
He'd blacked out again. That head injury must have been more significant than you thought...
Hey - were those sirens? Maybe blondie or his friends had the decency to call an ambulance...
---
It was not an ambulance, it was in fact the police, who were very surprised to find anyone in need of medical attention. More accurately, anyone who could make use of it. The ambulance got here pretty quickly after you cleared that up.
"Hi, Matsuda! You're driving me again?"
"Fucking hell, not you… This is the second time this month, Shima!"
---
Hospitals were much more fun when you had someone to talk to, you decided. While your parents used to drop everything to be there with you during the first few years after manifesting your quirk, you'd made them stop after you became old enough to realise the impact it had on their job security. As such, you'd almost forgotten what it felt like to be constantly harried about your welfare by a hysteric parent.
Inko Midoriya had been beside herself when she first burst into the hospital room, and so you'd taken it upon yourself to explain what had happened at school. The novelty of being the one to comfort someone rather than the one watching in confusion on the sidelines made you slightly more compassionate to her situation than the sleep-deprived police officer stationed outside the room, to the relief of all parties involved. Nobody wanted to deal with a hysterical mother who had the ability to cry with the force of a high pressure water cannon.
Your chatting eventually turned to more mundane matters, like cooking, schoolwork, and her tiny not-plant son, at which point he decided to wake up.
"Izuku? Are you feeling alright? The doctors said you hit your head quite hard… I was so scared when I got that call from the school, but your friend over there explained everything to me - they've been so helpful."
She gestured over to you, and you waved. Oops, sorry Tina, forgot you were there.
"Hi! I'm glad you're okay - you were unconscious for so long that we were starting to get worried. I'm sorry you had to see all that, by the way."
He paled and doubled over at that.
"Izuku!"
"I… I'm fine, Mom. I just felt a bit sick, don't worry."
You watched as they comforted each other; they were so… cute together? Well, not cute cute, more like how kittens were sort of cute, despite their creepy ears.
---
You waited until he had fully recovered to check yourself out, wanting to observe them a bit more. That, and make sure your friends were all alright after such a frightening event for them.
The hospital had unofficially given up on normal policies when it came to you, for the sake of the staff's sanity.
You heard from the police that the blond, who was apparently called Bakugo, had panicked after the 'adverse effects of your experimental quirk interaction', and was halfway to the next city over when he they managed to intercept him. Bakugo had been fast, but flight through extremely loud explosives was not the most stealthy method of travel.
Anyway, upon returning home and reassuring your parents that you weren't being arrested again, you began to analyse your new 'save data'.
The quirkless boy had been a blessing in disguise, as the 'data' you'd gained from him was so much easier to reproduce than your own, what with his pathetically simple organs, and all. It was and educational experience too, as your default physiology was different in more ways than just your stomach: in the genetic lottery that allowed such a wonderful ability to develop, a few redundancies in other aspects of you were to be expected. With time to fully compare the two, you could identify and fix these mistakes - poor blood flow there, some underdeveloped bones there. You even noticed irregularities in the 'data' for some of the organs you'd discarded all those years ago.
This was strange… weren't the physical effects of quirks supposed to develop later in life to prevent those sorts of problems? You researched the subject as best you could, yet as far as you could tell, these sorts of defects were definitely an irregularity for your generation. If anything, it seemed more like the sort of problems that occurred for the early quirk wielders.
---
A week or two after the whole exploding thing, the quirkless boy approached you, scaring away the sparrows you'd been attempting to catch. The two of you stood in silence for a minute, until you took pity on the boy's pitiful attempts to spark a conversation.
"Sooo… what do you want to talk about, De… Deko… De-kun..?" It's De-kun, right?"
"Um, yeah, that's it. Look, Shima-san, I-I was wondering if I could, uh, maybe… ask you something? About that… event. I mean - sorry, if you don't want to talk about it it's fine I don't mind - ah, sorry, this must be somethingreallypersonalI'lljustbe... going n-now…"
He abruptly turned, and tried to run off; people have been doing that a lot to you lately. You caught him by the back of his stupidly restricting clothes. Ha! Another point on the list of reasons you had against not wearing any - people can choke you with them!
"De-kun, are you okay? You're acting strange. I don't really know you that well, though, so maybe this is normal for you?"
His shoulders shook slightly in response to that, but he at least turned back to face you. Progress? You waited as he formulated his response, concentration written over his face. Ohh, one of those confusing people who think before they act; he'd get along well with your mother, now that you think about it…
"Shima-san, could you please tell me… what exactly is your quirk?"
You considered lying, and immediately decided against it. Something about the little deku scrub just made you want to hug him, and the thought of lying sent an unfamiliar pulse of guilt through you.
"Well, do you need to be anywhere urgently? Because this is going to take a while to explain, if you want all the details."
"Y-you mean you'll tell me?!"
"Yeah..? That's what you wanted to know, right?"
"Ah - yes, sorry. I-I just... didn't expect you to tell me that quickly. Sorry."
As you explained what you knew, his nerves were gradually replaced by growing excitement at your quirk's potential. He was a quirk enthusiast; the sort that would spend hours upon hours pouring over each minute facet of a popular hero's abilities in order to write entire essays on why All Might would always win in a fight. Your quirk, with all its unconfirmed limits just begging for someone to experiment with was like catnip to him.
Your enthusiastic discussion was cut short by the sound of De-kun's phone; you played with one of your many-legged friends as he talked, noticing how low the sun had sunk while you'd been chatting.
"Sorry, Shima-san. I've got to get home now, but we could talk more tomorrow. I-I mean, if you want t-
He spotted your friend, and blinked.
"Where did that thing come from?"
"Lindsey and the others live in my stomach ~"
You explained, opening up your torso so he could get a better look. He blanched.
"You keep your… pets... inside you."
"Pets..? Oh, you mean my friends - they're so cute, aren't they? I used to have more, but they kept eating each other once they hatched, and then I had to get rid of the males because they kept trying to.. Well, you know."
De-kun didn't respond, and just stared blankly into the bug-filled hole in your abdomen - you took this as an invitation to continue:
"The largest one's Omu, she's the mother; then this is Tina, this one's Lindsey, Jenney is still inside, Daigankai's the prettiest, and Ankheg is somewhere in my hair right now. Oh, and the one hugging your shoe is Three Seven Eight."
He shrieked, swinging his leg up and sending the centipede flying into your face.
"IT WAS BITING ME!!"
"She was hugging you with her mouth!"
---
AN: Splitting this into two parts because I said that I wouldn't make another stupidly long chapter and I'm sticking to it.
*checks word count for this half*
...shit.
Surprisingly, your genius idea of putting a person capable of spontaneous combustion inside you had not gone very well, but at least my friends were all clear of the blast radius when it occurred.
Awww - they were even helping clean up! Well, all except for -
"Hey, Jenny! Get away from that poor plant person!"
Said plant person had collapsed after the sudden repainting of the classroom, and was now bleeding from where you assumed he hit himself on the way down. You attempted to pick up Jenny when she predictably ignored you, only for you to realise that your legs weren't quite attached any more. Oh right, you just got blown up - should probably fix that first. Jenny looked quite comfortable for the time being, having found herself a cozy spot in the boy's ear.
You realised that you may have been wrong in your assumption that his mess of hair was a plant: Jenny's only that friendly to things that can bleed.
You took stock of your injuries: legs and tail were lying somewhere to my right, what organs hadn't been sublimated were burned beyond use, but your arms were fine, so there was that at least. Your 'save data' was also, for lack of a better word, safe, as you stored it all in the upper portion of your spine. First things first, a new stomach. For now you could handle most of your bodily processes with your quirk, but being able to sleep without instantly dying would be nice.
It was slow going, what with the added distraction of circulating oxygen manually, but you eventually isolated the correct part of your own 'save data' to form a new stomach around the useless, dead section of your torso. It was significantly larger than your previous one, but your main priority was to regain as much mass as possible - you could scale it down later.
Although… Glancing over at the boy lying on the floor, not too far away that you couldn't drag yourself, you had an idea. Might as well get something out of this disaster - here's to questionable decisions!
You moved quickly, and soon found yourself with a few new scrap of 'save data' and a reclaimed, if irritated, Jenny. You noted with some disappointment that there appeared to be no difference between how 'you' humans felt to live animals; the boy didn't even appear to have any interesting secondary quirks, except for his far inferior stomach. Seriously, it could barely absorb anything, kind of pathetic really.
Gloating aside, you dumped him onto a nearby desk, and made your way back over to your lower body. You'd planned on cannibalising it for parts that you could use to slowly rebuild a new set, only to be pleasantly surprised that they not yet recognised as dead, and therefore uneditable, by your quirk. However, like your numerous failed attempts at creating life, it was fading fast.
As usual, you decided to try something impulsive, and reshaped yourself so that your lower half was positioned roughly where it would usually be, now attached by a tumorous growth of flesh from your stomach. A rudimentary heart was formed somewhere inside; new arteries, nerves, connecting the two halves. Very slowly, of course, but this classroom was rarely used - you had plenty of time.
You'd never thought of this before: connecting and editing pre-existing parts was something that could significantly increase the amount of time that you could experiment in, as normally you had to wait until weekends or holidays to get everything done in one uninterrupted session. Now if you could just figure out why the organisms kept dying… You were so distracted by the exciting ideas that flooded your mind that you nearly asphyxiated on two separate occasions.
Eventually, you got your body back to working order and set about regaining some biomass. Even if the cells had been killed off by the burns, they were still something.
A student chose at this moment to enter the classroom and start screaming their head off, for some reason. They left in a hurry though, so maybe that was just their regular method of coping with the everyday stresses of life.
People were so strange sometimes - you sighed, as did the not-a-plant next to you.
You popped another gobbet of charred flesh into your mouth, and worriedly observed how he squeezed his eyes shut in an attempt to go back to sleep.
"Ah! Please don't do that again; you hit your head last time when you fell, and you're not supposed to sleep if you do that, I think. I didn't see anything wrong inside your head, but you can't be too careful. Oh, sorry about not asking permission first, but you're so small, and my stomach was already out everywhere, so I just couldn't help myself."
That woke him up, although the squawking probably wasn't a good sign.
"Y-you.. What do you mean? What did you do?!"
"Oh? I just ate you, nothing to worry about. Hey, no don't… do that."
He'd blacked out again. That head injury must have been more significant than you thought...
Hey - were those sirens? Maybe blondie or his friends had the decency to call an ambulance...
---
It was not an ambulance, it was in fact the police, who were very surprised to find anyone in need of medical attention. More accurately, anyone who could make use of it. The ambulance got here pretty quickly after you cleared that up.
"Hi, Matsuda! You're driving me again?"
"Fucking hell, not you… This is the second time this month, Shima!"
---
Hospitals were much more fun when you had someone to talk to, you decided. While your parents used to drop everything to be there with you during the first few years after manifesting your quirk, you'd made them stop after you became old enough to realise the impact it had on their job security. As such, you'd almost forgotten what it felt like to be constantly harried about your welfare by a hysteric parent.
Inko Midoriya had been beside herself when she first burst into the hospital room, and so you'd taken it upon yourself to explain what had happened at school. The novelty of being the one to comfort someone rather than the one watching in confusion on the sidelines made you slightly more compassionate to her situation than the sleep-deprived police officer stationed outside the room, to the relief of all parties involved. Nobody wanted to deal with a hysterical mother who had the ability to cry with the force of a high pressure water cannon.
Your chatting eventually turned to more mundane matters, like cooking, schoolwork, and her tiny not-plant son, at which point he decided to wake up.
"Izuku? Are you feeling alright? The doctors said you hit your head quite hard… I was so scared when I got that call from the school, but your friend over there explained everything to me - they've been so helpful."
She gestured over to you, and you waved. Oops, sorry Tina, forgot you were there.
"Hi! I'm glad you're okay - you were unconscious for so long that we were starting to get worried. I'm sorry you had to see all that, by the way."
He paled and doubled over at that.
"Izuku!"
"I… I'm fine, Mom. I just felt a bit sick, don't worry."
You watched as they comforted each other; they were so… cute together? Well, not cute cute, more like how kittens were sort of cute, despite their creepy ears.
---
You waited until he had fully recovered to check yourself out, wanting to observe them a bit more. That, and make sure your friends were all alright after such a frightening event for them.
The hospital had unofficially given up on normal policies when it came to you, for the sake of the staff's sanity.
You heard from the police that the blond, who was apparently called Bakugo, had panicked after the 'adverse effects of your experimental quirk interaction', and was halfway to the next city over when he they managed to intercept him. Bakugo had been fast, but flight through extremely loud explosives was not the most stealthy method of travel.
Anyway, upon returning home and reassuring your parents that you weren't being arrested again, you began to analyse your new 'save data'.
The quirkless boy had been a blessing in disguise, as the 'data' you'd gained from him was so much easier to reproduce than your own, what with his pathetically simple organs, and all. It was and educational experience too, as your default physiology was different in more ways than just your stomach: in the genetic lottery that allowed such a wonderful ability to develop, a few redundancies in other aspects of you were to be expected. With time to fully compare the two, you could identify and fix these mistakes - poor blood flow there, some underdeveloped bones there. You even noticed irregularities in the 'data' for some of the organs you'd discarded all those years ago.
This was strange… weren't the physical effects of quirks supposed to develop later in life to prevent those sorts of problems? You researched the subject as best you could, yet as far as you could tell, these sorts of defects were definitely an irregularity for your generation. If anything, it seemed more like the sort of problems that occurred for the early quirk wielders.
---
A week or two after the whole exploding thing, the quirkless boy approached you, scaring away the sparrows you'd been attempting to catch. The two of you stood in silence for a minute, until you took pity on the boy's pitiful attempts to spark a conversation.
"Sooo… what do you want to talk about, De… Deko… De-kun..?" It's De-kun, right?"
"Um, yeah, that's it. Look, Shima-san, I-I was wondering if I could, uh, maybe… ask you something? About that… event. I mean - sorry, if you don't want to talk about it it's fine I don't mind - ah, sorry, this must be somethingreallypersonalI'lljustbe... going n-now…"
He abruptly turned, and tried to run off; people have been doing that a lot to you lately. You caught him by the back of his stupidly restricting clothes. Ha! Another point on the list of reasons you had against not wearing any - people can choke you with them!
"De-kun, are you okay? You're acting strange. I don't really know you that well, though, so maybe this is normal for you?"
His shoulders shook slightly in response to that, but he at least turned back to face you. Progress? You waited as he formulated his response, concentration written over his face. Ohh, one of those confusing people who think before they act; he'd get along well with your mother, now that you think about it…
"Shima-san, could you please tell me… what exactly is your quirk?"
You considered lying, and immediately decided against it. Something about the little deku scrub just made you want to hug him, and the thought of lying sent an unfamiliar pulse of guilt through you.
"Well, do you need to be anywhere urgently? Because this is going to take a while to explain, if you want all the details."
"Y-you mean you'll tell me?!"
"Yeah..? That's what you wanted to know, right?"
"Ah - yes, sorry. I-I just... didn't expect you to tell me that quickly. Sorry."
As you explained what you knew, his nerves were gradually replaced by growing excitement at your quirk's potential. He was a quirk enthusiast; the sort that would spend hours upon hours pouring over each minute facet of a popular hero's abilities in order to write entire essays on why All Might would always win in a fight. Your quirk, with all its unconfirmed limits just begging for someone to experiment with was like catnip to him.
Your enthusiastic discussion was cut short by the sound of De-kun's phone; you played with one of your many-legged friends as he talked, noticing how low the sun had sunk while you'd been chatting.
"Sorry, Shima-san. I've got to get home now, but we could talk more tomorrow. I-I mean, if you want t-
He spotted your friend, and blinked.
"Where did that thing come from?"
"Lindsey and the others live in my stomach ~"
You explained, opening up your torso so he could get a better look. He blanched.
"You keep your… pets... inside you."
"Pets..? Oh, you mean my friends - they're so cute, aren't they? I used to have more, but they kept eating each other once they hatched, and then I had to get rid of the males because they kept trying to.. Well, you know."
De-kun didn't respond, and just stared blankly into the bug-filled hole in your abdomen - you took this as an invitation to continue:
"The largest one's Omu, she's the mother; then this is Tina, this one's Lindsey, Jenney is still inside, Daigankai's the prettiest, and Ankheg is somewhere in my hair right now. Oh, and the one hugging your shoe is Three Seven Eight."
He shrieked, swinging his leg up and sending the centipede flying into your face.
"IT WAS BITING ME!!"
"She was hugging you with her mouth!"
---
AN: Splitting this into two parts because I said that I wouldn't make another stupidly long chapter and I'm sticking to it.
*checks word count for this half*
...shit.
Last edited:
Prologue 0.07
- Location
- Somewhere cold
You tracked De-kun down after school the next day; he was busy having a quiet conversation with blo - Bakugo. Still getting used to that. Anyway, Bakugo stalked out without prompting once he noticed your presence, so you didn't have to escalate the situation, much to your disappointment - you still wanted his 'save data' after all.
De-kun watched Bakugo leave with mixed expressions of relief and concern, before turning to thank you quietly.
"So, what do you want to test out today, De-kun?"
He brightened at the mention of committing crimes against nature, and began rummaging through his bag.
"Oh - right! You know how you mentioned your 'save data'? Well, something about it seemed familiar, so I spent a couple of hours last night going through the advanced biology textbook…"
"And? What did you find?"
"Absolutely nothing!"
"...huh?"
"There was nothing in the advanced book, so I went back to the basic one, and on one of the very first pages -"
He finally found what he was looking for, and flashed the page at you:
"Stem cells! One of the very first things we covered in class. They're plurip-"
You tuned him out as you started mentally strangling yourself for not realising this sooner. How?! You've had what, eight years? The internal screaming continued.
"-rejected by the host body; that's why you wound up in hospital the first time."
He beamed up at you as you slowly placed your hands on his shoulders, a grin affixed to your face.
"De-kun, thank you so much for this, but Kaede needs to go beat their head against a wall right now."
Slightly confused, Izuku stopped you before you could leave;
"But… what about the other things I was planning on testing?"
"...Other things?"
He swapped his textbook for a notebook, flicking through it to display several pages of preprepared results tables.
"I had a couple of experiments planned to help narrow down what your quirk actually is. I figured if we worked that out first, it would make testing your capabilities easier."
You stared in surprise at the sheer amount of thought he'd put into this. Which was, apparently, the wrong thing to do, as your companion immediately began to panic.
"S-sorry! Was this too much?! I'm so sorry I just get really excited about this sort of thing and I didn't think about how weird this would seem to you and I'm sorry just please don't let them e-"
You cut him off by patting him on the head, still too shocked to formulate more than a few sentence fragments.
"Stop apologising. Let's go - your house."
A few minutes passed by in awkward silence as the two of you walked, De-kun occasionally glancing over at you with the look of a startled rabbit. Damn rabbits, always too fast for you to catch - Watership Down made it look misleadingly easy.
Anyway, you needed to check something:
"De-kun, you're not a conspiracy theorist, are you?"
"..No?"
Well, that rules that out. Hmm.
"Cultist?"
"No. Where are you going with this?"
"So... you're just a regular person, who just so happens to actually want to help me, to no benefit to yourself?"
"I-is there something wrong with that?"
Oh, wow. How was it possible for someone to be this nice? Even after you'd made him go through that… event, which, as your mom had explained, may possibly have been a tiny bit scary for someone who didn't know that you'd be fine with most of your internal organs vaporised. People this nice were an endangered species, according to her, and on your pride as a hero, you were not about to let such a rare specimen get damaged.
"...Never change, De-kun."
Although he didn't know it, the little deku scrub had just gained a new guard-catlizard.
---
An hour and two bags of sugar later, De-kun's mom returned from work. She then attempted to drown you with her tears. Apparently, her son hadn't brought anyone back with him for years, which was evidently a bad thing. Maybe context mattered? Did that mean your parents would be happy if you brought people to your house and didn't try to eat them? Then again, they'd probably be fine if you just brought home some humans instead.
Inko eventually paused her murder attempt, and your conversation turned to heroes; favourites, ideal names for yourself, what you'd do. It was a very one sided conversation, as you both univocally agreed on All Might, had none, and didn't know, respectively. So, the conversation again turned to Izuku, which appeared to be her nickname for her son.
Speaking of whom, De-kun was certainly taking a while to get that book; you wondered what was keeping him.
---
Izuku was in fact outside the living room, his back pressed against the door, and was currently wondering why he had ever thought bringing you to his home was a good idea. This was, if he remembered correctly, the sort of thing people did with stage two friends at minimum, not acquaintances that they weren't even sure weren't planning on feeding them to their 'friends'! He dragged his hands down his face in frustration. He'd been so caught up in the thrill of theorising what their quirk could be that he'd forgotten how dangerous it was to let people get so close.
...
...At least Mom was happier than he'd seen her in a while; she was always so concerned for him, even before he'd started worrying her by letting her see how much the loss of Kacchan's friendship had affected him.
The sounds of excited chatter, interspersed with laughter, echoed throughout the darkened hallway.
...
He sighed; maybe he was just overthinking this. He tended to do that a lot. What was the worst that could happen, anyway? …Okay, that was maybe not the best train of thought. He did not need such graphic mental images.
But really, maybe he was just being paranoid? Judging by what he saw on tv, it's not like his experiences with Kacchan could be considered a normal friendship, so why not give it a shot and deal with the inevitable backfire later?
...they sounded like they were having fun in there.
...
He straightened, turning to face the door in a surge of determination. Kacch - Bakugo was not going to ruin this chance for him. Who cares if they would find him pathetic? Was he going to apologise for having dreams? He'd promised himself that he wouldn't let other people's opinions get to him any more - and heroes don't lie to people.
Clutching the notebook tightly against his chest, Izuku stepped into the living room.
---
The first year of your friendship was very productive, thanks to Izuku: the two of you had narrowed down the specifics of your quirk to some kind of self-biokinesis at a cellular level, minimum, as well as a secondary quirk of awareness of live, eaten animals. All within the first week.
He helped make his first crime against nature within the following month, when he had you attempt to change something inside you in a similar way to how you could edit your own body; a nest of huntsman spiders he'd found had been used as test subjects, as there was no way you were going to risk any of your friends. While you found that you couldn't [focus], or directly change the creatures to the same extent as your own body, you could give the decomposition effect a target, as well as [push] certain cells into your victims. In this case, the target was the spider's [potential], which was highlighted by your quirk in rainbow neon. While it took some practice to hit the correct area of their cells, resulting in some horrific failures that repulsed even you, you eventually managed to replace the 'instructions' for the spiders' relatively harmless venom with that of your friends'.
And so, Izuku accidentally unleashed an army of giant spiders with agonisingly painful venom into the world, after forgetting to tell you that you weren't supposed to release them once you were done. You were so proud when the public health warnings started appearing on the news.
---
However, the most important breakthrough came during the summer holidays. Due to the fact that every organism you disconnected from yourself always died, you couldn't save time by creating and editing them bit by bit, so the two of you had waited until there was more free time to test this aspect of your quirk.
"So what exactly is the problem with them?"
Izuku prodded the dead centipede - less resource-intensive to make than a cat.
"There's just something missing from them; there's nothing wrong with their components, but they just don't work on their own once I disconnect them…"
You picked up the useless thing and gave it to Ankheg, the least picky of your girls. Silence descended as he thought, occasionally glancing over to the spread of open textbooks, strewn across your bedroom floor. After a while, he picked one up, flicking through it as he spoke.
"You mentioned… when you create these organisms, you don't have to 'push' energy into them?"
"No, it just happens naturally as I grow them."
"And…" he paused, and went back a few pages "you checked that the heart, nervous system, all that, work before disconnecting?"
"Yes. Of co -"
He slammed the book down, scanning the page, and you grinned - you knew that look in his eye. He'd found something.
"Kaede, have you tried putting more than the required amount of energy into them, just before you disconnect?"
You didn't answer, already in the process of creating another - energy… where would that be? You [pulled] on that intangible sense of 'you', a strange sensation that left you tasting spots in your inwards sense, and [pushed] it in the direction of the centipede-shaped growth on your side. You couldn't truly isolate the 'you-ness' and the route it took inside you tore, heated, feeling 'not'.
You kept the transfer going as you disconnected, only a split second, but it left you feeling more exhausted than all of the days previous attempts at creating life combined. The new centipede dropped onto the floor, and you sagged to the side, numb. Still watching.
It twitched.
You slowly reached over and poked an antenna.
It began tearing into your finger.
"YES! OhmygodyesFINALLY!!"
"Gah! Kaede - can't - breathe…"
You let him out from the bear hug and tried to do a backflip. Tried. Your mind was racing, filling with possibilities for the next step. Birds: need a bird, see how hot air balloons work, maybe planes maybe buy one EAT IT flying.
Izuku just sat there, sharing your joy. And now there was guilt - shooting through you, a sobering emotion that burst your giddiness. He's helped you so much… for nothing. It was uncomfortable. It wasn't fair. You picked yourself up from your position on the floor, and faced him.
"Izuku, thank you. This is more than enough, let me help you now."
"W-what?! No, no, really, it's fine. You don't need to do anything for me."
The look you had on your face caused Izuku to pale; it was the same expression you'd had when you'd come up with the brilliant idea of making spiders 'bigger, and with like, acid or something'.
"We're going to UA, De-kun. Who's going to stop us preparing ahead of schedule? Now… let's see what sort of upgrades we can give you."
Main Action:
[ ]Kindly inform his metabolism that it isn't the Stone Age - you can stop hoarding that fat now. Get some muscles instead.
[ ]Put in a request for some subdermal armor - De-kun's too squishy as it is.
[ ]De-kun could do with a few more friends in his life, don't you think?
Additional Actions: Write-in.
---
AN: Last major timeskip DONE. Onwards - to the plot derailment!!
I'm only offering minor changes to Izuku for now; he still has those pain receptors after all, and MC doesn't want to hurt him.
It didn't fit in because of the pacing, but the reason that they kept dying because the cats/centipedes weren't functioning on their own, because instead you were controlling them manually, which didn't carry over when you disconnected. It's like you were checking to see if a generator was switched on, only when you checked the indicator light, you already had a light pointed at it. If that makes sense. Can't get too detailed, there's still a few things I'm going to leave for you to work out about how the specifics of the quirk works.
De-kun watched Bakugo leave with mixed expressions of relief and concern, before turning to thank you quietly.
"So, what do you want to test out today, De-kun?"
He brightened at the mention of committing crimes against nature, and began rummaging through his bag.
"Oh - right! You know how you mentioned your 'save data'? Well, something about it seemed familiar, so I spent a couple of hours last night going through the advanced biology textbook…"
"And? What did you find?"
"Absolutely nothing!"
"...huh?"
"There was nothing in the advanced book, so I went back to the basic one, and on one of the very first pages -"
He finally found what he was looking for, and flashed the page at you:
"Stem cells! One of the very first things we covered in class. They're plurip-"
You tuned him out as you started mentally strangling yourself for not realising this sooner. How?! You've had what, eight years? The internal screaming continued.
"-rejected by the host body; that's why you wound up in hospital the first time."
He beamed up at you as you slowly placed your hands on his shoulders, a grin affixed to your face.
"De-kun, thank you so much for this, but Kaede needs to go beat their head against a wall right now."
Slightly confused, Izuku stopped you before you could leave;
"But… what about the other things I was planning on testing?"
"...Other things?"
He swapped his textbook for a notebook, flicking through it to display several pages of preprepared results tables.
"I had a couple of experiments planned to help narrow down what your quirk actually is. I figured if we worked that out first, it would make testing your capabilities easier."
You stared in surprise at the sheer amount of thought he'd put into this. Which was, apparently, the wrong thing to do, as your companion immediately began to panic.
"S-sorry! Was this too much?! I'm so sorry I just get really excited about this sort of thing and I didn't think about how weird this would seem to you and I'm sorry just please don't let them e-"
You cut him off by patting him on the head, still too shocked to formulate more than a few sentence fragments.
"Stop apologising. Let's go - your house."
A few minutes passed by in awkward silence as the two of you walked, De-kun occasionally glancing over at you with the look of a startled rabbit. Damn rabbits, always too fast for you to catch - Watership Down made it look misleadingly easy.
Anyway, you needed to check something:
"De-kun, you're not a conspiracy theorist, are you?"
"..No?"
Well, that rules that out. Hmm.
"Cultist?"
"No. Where are you going with this?"
"So... you're just a regular person, who just so happens to actually want to help me, to no benefit to yourself?"
"I-is there something wrong with that?"
Oh, wow. How was it possible for someone to be this nice? Even after you'd made him go through that… event, which, as your mom had explained, may possibly have been a tiny bit scary for someone who didn't know that you'd be fine with most of your internal organs vaporised. People this nice were an endangered species, according to her, and on your pride as a hero, you were not about to let such a rare specimen get damaged.
"...Never change, De-kun."
Although he didn't know it, the little deku scrub had just gained a new guard-catlizard.
---
An hour and two bags of sugar later, De-kun's mom returned from work. She then attempted to drown you with her tears. Apparently, her son hadn't brought anyone back with him for years, which was evidently a bad thing. Maybe context mattered? Did that mean your parents would be happy if you brought people to your house and didn't try to eat them? Then again, they'd probably be fine if you just brought home some humans instead.
Inko eventually paused her murder attempt, and your conversation turned to heroes; favourites, ideal names for yourself, what you'd do. It was a very one sided conversation, as you both univocally agreed on All Might, had none, and didn't know, respectively. So, the conversation again turned to Izuku, which appeared to be her nickname for her son.
Speaking of whom, De-kun was certainly taking a while to get that book; you wondered what was keeping him.
---
Izuku was in fact outside the living room, his back pressed against the door, and was currently wondering why he had ever thought bringing you to his home was a good idea. This was, if he remembered correctly, the sort of thing people did with stage two friends at minimum, not acquaintances that they weren't even sure weren't planning on feeding them to their 'friends'! He dragged his hands down his face in frustration. He'd been so caught up in the thrill of theorising what their quirk could be that he'd forgotten how dangerous it was to let people get so close.
...
...At least Mom was happier than he'd seen her in a while; she was always so concerned for him, even before he'd started worrying her by letting her see how much the loss of Kacchan's friendship had affected him.
The sounds of excited chatter, interspersed with laughter, echoed throughout the darkened hallway.
...
He sighed; maybe he was just overthinking this. He tended to do that a lot. What was the worst that could happen, anyway? …Okay, that was maybe not the best train of thought. He did not need such graphic mental images.
But really, maybe he was just being paranoid? Judging by what he saw on tv, it's not like his experiences with Kacchan could be considered a normal friendship, so why not give it a shot and deal with the inevitable backfire later?
...they sounded like they were having fun in there.
...
He straightened, turning to face the door in a surge of determination. Kacch - Bakugo was not going to ruin this chance for him. Who cares if they would find him pathetic? Was he going to apologise for having dreams? He'd promised himself that he wouldn't let other people's opinions get to him any more - and heroes don't lie to people.
Clutching the notebook tightly against his chest, Izuku stepped into the living room.
---
The first year of your friendship was very productive, thanks to Izuku: the two of you had narrowed down the specifics of your quirk to some kind of self-biokinesis at a cellular level, minimum, as well as a secondary quirk of awareness of live, eaten animals. All within the first week.
He helped make his first crime against nature within the following month, when he had you attempt to change something inside you in a similar way to how you could edit your own body; a nest of huntsman spiders he'd found had been used as test subjects, as there was no way you were going to risk any of your friends. While you found that you couldn't [focus], or directly change the creatures to the same extent as your own body, you could give the decomposition effect a target, as well as [push] certain cells into your victims. In this case, the target was the spider's [potential], which was highlighted by your quirk in rainbow neon. While it took some practice to hit the correct area of their cells, resulting in some horrific failures that repulsed even you, you eventually managed to replace the 'instructions' for the spiders' relatively harmless venom with that of your friends'.
And so, Izuku accidentally unleashed an army of giant spiders with agonisingly painful venom into the world, after forgetting to tell you that you weren't supposed to release them once you were done. You were so proud when the public health warnings started appearing on the news.
---
However, the most important breakthrough came during the summer holidays. Due to the fact that every organism you disconnected from yourself always died, you couldn't save time by creating and editing them bit by bit, so the two of you had waited until there was more free time to test this aspect of your quirk.
"So what exactly is the problem with them?"
Izuku prodded the dead centipede - less resource-intensive to make than a cat.
"There's just something missing from them; there's nothing wrong with their components, but they just don't work on their own once I disconnect them…"
You picked up the useless thing and gave it to Ankheg, the least picky of your girls. Silence descended as he thought, occasionally glancing over to the spread of open textbooks, strewn across your bedroom floor. After a while, he picked one up, flicking through it as he spoke.
"You mentioned… when you create these organisms, you don't have to 'push' energy into them?"
"No, it just happens naturally as I grow them."
"And…" he paused, and went back a few pages "you checked that the heart, nervous system, all that, work before disconnecting?"
"Yes. Of co -"
He slammed the book down, scanning the page, and you grinned - you knew that look in his eye. He'd found something.
"Kaede, have you tried putting more than the required amount of energy into them, just before you disconnect?"
You didn't answer, already in the process of creating another - energy… where would that be? You [pulled] on that intangible sense of 'you', a strange sensation that left you tasting spots in your inwards sense, and [pushed] it in the direction of the centipede-shaped growth on your side. You couldn't truly isolate the 'you-ness' and the route it took inside you tore, heated, feeling 'not'.
You kept the transfer going as you disconnected, only a split second, but it left you feeling more exhausted than all of the days previous attempts at creating life combined. The new centipede dropped onto the floor, and you sagged to the side, numb. Still watching.
It twitched.
You slowly reached over and poked an antenna.
It began tearing into your finger.
"YES! OhmygodyesFINALLY!!"
"Gah! Kaede - can't - breathe…"
You let him out from the bear hug and tried to do a backflip. Tried. Your mind was racing, filling with possibilities for the next step. Birds: need a bird, see how hot air balloons work, maybe planes maybe buy one EAT IT flying.
Izuku just sat there, sharing your joy. And now there was guilt - shooting through you, a sobering emotion that burst your giddiness. He's helped you so much… for nothing. It was uncomfortable. It wasn't fair. You picked yourself up from your position on the floor, and faced him.
"Izuku, thank you. This is more than enough, let me help you now."
"W-what?! No, no, really, it's fine. You don't need to do anything for me."
The look you had on your face caused Izuku to pale; it was the same expression you'd had when you'd come up with the brilliant idea of making spiders 'bigger, and with like, acid or something'.
"We're going to UA, De-kun. Who's going to stop us preparing ahead of schedule? Now… let's see what sort of upgrades we can give you."
Main Action:
[ ]Kindly inform his metabolism that it isn't the Stone Age - you can stop hoarding that fat now. Get some muscles instead.
[ ]Put in a request for some subdermal armor - De-kun's too squishy as it is.
[ ]De-kun could do with a few more friends in his life, don't you think?
Additional Actions: Write-in.
---
AN: Last major timeskip DONE. Onwards - to the plot derailment!!
I'm only offering minor changes to Izuku for now; he still has those pain receptors after all, and MC doesn't want to hurt him.
It didn't fit in because of the pacing, but the reason that they kept dying because the cats/centipedes weren't functioning on their own, because instead you were controlling them manually, which didn't carry over when you disconnected. It's like you were checking to see if a generator was switched on, only when you checked the indicator light, you already had a light pointed at it. If that makes sense. Can't get too detailed, there's still a few things I'm going to leave for you to work out about how the specifics of the quirk works.
Prologue 0.08 - Yuuko Shima
- Location
- Somewhere cold
"Mom, where can I buy some bullet ants?"
"Check the internet, dear."
I took another sip of my coffee, too tired to look up from the paper. Oh look, that celebrity died yesterday.
...wait.
"Kaede, why exactly do you want to buy bullet ants?"
"Reasons."
"Okay, that makes sense."
I am fully aware that our child had a few, slight problems. Such as their obsession with bodily modification, the fact that their best friends were bugs with a taste for human flesh, and their complete inability to recognise dangerous situations whenever they appeared.
Now some of that may be down to me and my over-reliance on caffeine to function, which has led to some questionable decisions on my part, like right now, where I'm quietly expositioning to myself rather than paying attention to whatever Kaede's doing. Is that my credit card they've got? Meh, too tired to move.
However, the last problem is entirely my husband's fault.
Don't get me wrong, I love him very much, it's just… Well, he looks like somebody flayed a velociraptor, stretched the skin over a human skeleton, then broke the guy's back, legs and hands for good measure. When he's happy, it gets even worse, as their sheer number of teeth would give a shark pause. He's always in a good mood, which can be problematic.
In short, he looks terrifying. And making an impressionable young child associate something that every primal part of their brain is screaming at them to run from with happiness is generally going to produce some kind of nightmare fetishist. Not that either of us care about that, mind you - whatever makes Kaede happy.
But anyway, by far the worst part about him is the fact that he's a morning person.
"Yuuko ~ how's the decaf suiting you?"
I glared into the coffee with the intensity of a thousand suns; no wonder I was expositioning if I was drinking this shit.
"Aww, don't be like that, it's terrible for you anyway."
"Don't care, let me die in peace."
Ryou laughed, hugging me, despite the newspaper to the face he got in return. Kaede called from the computer room:
"Mom, what's your pin code?!"
"I don't remember - your father took my good coffee!"
"It's ten in the morning!"
"It's my day off, I can sleep in if I want!"
---
After I'd finally gotten some proper coffee, and felt less like a microwaved corpse, I started talking with Ryou about what to get as a reward for Kaede; they were graduating soon, after all. That, and after the heart attack last winter, they hadn't been to the hospital in over five months - a new record.
"We are not getting them bullet ants. Do you not remember what happened with the spiders?"
"Then I've got nothing."
It was certainly taking a while to decide on something; it was difficult to find things that Kaede both enjoyed and couldn't find a way to bring about the apocalypse with.
"...Maybe something that would be useful to them when they start at UA? Or just something to help them out in fights would be reassuring…"
Kaede was going to UA, it was an indisputable fact, but even so - the thought of our little Kaede fighting villains is more than a little unsettling. Pepper spray and body armor were ruled out as redundant, and while some kind of heromade weapon would be useful, they were bloody expensive.
"We could, I don't know, pay someone to let Kaede eat them?"
I stared at him, struggling to hold back the expletives.
"And then what happens if they go blabbing about how they can theoretically copy quirks? We wouldn't be safe anywhere! Hell - they don't even need to do that. What do you think would happen if they panicked while right next to their organs?"
He held up his hands in surrender.
"Sorry, sorry, I didn't think."
"No, I'm sorry, it's fine, I just-" I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose, feeling a headache coming on. "Maybe we should just go with your first idea."
"The explosives?"
"No, the bullet ants. At least it's just an upgrade to something they already have, rather than giving them the idea of synthesising explosives. That is not happening in my house."
"Hey, I paid for it. Oh, speaking of jobs, I've - er, got another… business trip… coming up later in the year, so, ah -"
"You're a terrible liar."
"I know."
---
AN: So, have one of these things. Doesn't feel right without some sort of break.
"Check the internet, dear."
I took another sip of my coffee, too tired to look up from the paper. Oh look, that celebrity died yesterday.
...wait.
"Kaede, why exactly do you want to buy bullet ants?"
"Reasons."
"Okay, that makes sense."
I am fully aware that our child had a few, slight problems. Such as their obsession with bodily modification, the fact that their best friends were bugs with a taste for human flesh, and their complete inability to recognise dangerous situations whenever they appeared.
Now some of that may be down to me and my over-reliance on caffeine to function, which has led to some questionable decisions on my part, like right now, where I'm quietly expositioning to myself rather than paying attention to whatever Kaede's doing. Is that my credit card they've got? Meh, too tired to move.
However, the last problem is entirely my husband's fault.
Don't get me wrong, I love him very much, it's just… Well, he looks like somebody flayed a velociraptor, stretched the skin over a human skeleton, then broke the guy's back, legs and hands for good measure. When he's happy, it gets even worse, as their sheer number of teeth would give a shark pause. He's always in a good mood, which can be problematic.
In short, he looks terrifying. And making an impressionable young child associate something that every primal part of their brain is screaming at them to run from with happiness is generally going to produce some kind of nightmare fetishist. Not that either of us care about that, mind you - whatever makes Kaede happy.
But anyway, by far the worst part about him is the fact that he's a morning person.
"Yuuko ~ how's the decaf suiting you?"
I glared into the coffee with the intensity of a thousand suns; no wonder I was expositioning if I was drinking this shit.
"Aww, don't be like that, it's terrible for you anyway."
"Don't care, let me die in peace."
Ryou laughed, hugging me, despite the newspaper to the face he got in return. Kaede called from the computer room:
"Mom, what's your pin code?!"
"I don't remember - your father took my good coffee!"
"It's ten in the morning!"
"It's my day off, I can sleep in if I want!"
---
After I'd finally gotten some proper coffee, and felt less like a microwaved corpse, I started talking with Ryou about what to get as a reward for Kaede; they were graduating soon, after all. That, and after the heart attack last winter, they hadn't been to the hospital in over five months - a new record.
"We are not getting them bullet ants. Do you not remember what happened with the spiders?"
"Then I've got nothing."
It was certainly taking a while to decide on something; it was difficult to find things that Kaede both enjoyed and couldn't find a way to bring about the apocalypse with.
"...Maybe something that would be useful to them when they start at UA? Or just something to help them out in fights would be reassuring…"
Kaede was going to UA, it was an indisputable fact, but even so - the thought of our little Kaede fighting villains is more than a little unsettling. Pepper spray and body armor were ruled out as redundant, and while some kind of heromade weapon would be useful, they were bloody expensive.
"We could, I don't know, pay someone to let Kaede eat them?"
I stared at him, struggling to hold back the expletives.
"And then what happens if they go blabbing about how they can theoretically copy quirks? We wouldn't be safe anywhere! Hell - they don't even need to do that. What do you think would happen if they panicked while right next to their organs?"
He held up his hands in surrender.
"Sorry, sorry, I didn't think."
"No, I'm sorry, it's fine, I just-" I sighed, rubbing the bridge of my nose, feeling a headache coming on. "Maybe we should just go with your first idea."
"The explosives?"
"No, the bullet ants. At least it's just an upgrade to something they already have, rather than giving them the idea of synthesising explosives. That is not happening in my house."
"Hey, I paid for it. Oh, speaking of jobs, I've - er, got another… business trip… coming up later in the year, so, ah -"
"You're a terrible liar."
"I know."
---
AN: So, have one of these things. Doesn't feel right without some sort of break.
Last edited:
By Any Means Necessary 1.01
- Location
- Somewhere cold
[X] *Awaken plays in the background*
"A-are you sure this is safe?
"Aw, you don't have to worry about me, De-kun! All my important parts are up here, anyway."
"That… wasn't what I meant, Kaede."
Izuku hadn't been very enthusiastic about being eaten, for some reason, so you'd offered to make your stomach a bit less cramped by moving some bones out of the way. You'd disconnected your lower half again, this time with crude circulatory and respiratory systems attached, in order to keep it alive for however long this would take. After that, he started making excuses about accidentally damaging your other internal organs, so you'd messily relocated them to a large growth above your shoulders. Thank god for plastic sheeting, because your mom would have killed you if she'd had to replace the carpet again. That said, she might kill you later for emptying the fridge for the third time this week, but oh well.
"De-kun, do you want these upgrades or not?"
"Yes! Of course - it's just… It's kind of scary to, er, be eaten alive, you know?"
"No, not really."
He deflated at your uncomprehending tone, and resigned himself to his fate as your first test subject. Okay, it sounds bad, but is there really any other way to put it? Wait, no time to waste with that - lets see what organs Izuku can do without…
Appendix, that's a good place to start; you broke it down into parts his body could reabsorb. Oh dear, that appeared to cause some internal bleeding. Shit. You [pushed] as much coagulants as it was safe to into the area and hoped for the best.
Now that there was a bit more space inside, you set about getting his lungs to grow; you figured that if he received more oxygen, his body wouldn't produce so much lactic acid. You couldn't help but feel smug about your quirk again - no acid buildups for you when you could manually neutralise it. Anyway, producing this result in something not fully 'you' was an arduous process: you had to first copy the parts of him that contained the 'plans' for how his lungs should be built, then edit said plans so that they'd think that his lungs should take up more space than they were supposed to, then test the plans out on your own [focused] lungs to make sure that they would grow in a way that wouldn't kill him, which took a surprisingly long time. Humans were so… breakable. All before destroying his copy of the original plans and [pushing] the improved ones into place.
Countless spiders had died for you to gain that level of accuracy, but it would be worth it to make De-kun happy. Speaking of...
"Izuku, you doing okay?"
No response, he was sleeping. Might as well edit a bit more.
While you were at it, you redid the 'plans' for his intestines too - they already wasted so much space that it probably wouldn't matter if they didn't grow to match his new proportions...
Hmm. Was he using that spleen? You decided to leave it, just to be safe, but two kidneys? That was just pointless - you broke one down before you could stop yourself ...aaand there was the internal bleeding again. Luckily, your quirk made topping up his blood supply relatively simple.
Although you wanted to give him an amazing stomach like your own, it simply wouldn't work without your quirk to support it, so you had to settle for making him as much like his favourite hero as possible. Now, he's going to need to be a bit bulkier if he would be fighting villains, so you gave him the same treatment you'd given yourself when you realised that you weren't growing as much as all the other children. Repeating the same process you had for the changes to his lungs, you made sure that his liver would synthesize more growth hormones than usual, which would, in theory, slow his rate of lipogenesis as well as help him slowly become… er, whatever the term for 'not a scrawny midget' was. Sure, there could be side effects later on, as he didn't have your quirk to help prevent them, but you could fix that. Probably.
You let Izuku out. He didn't wake up for a while, in which time you managed to pull your body back together and comfort your other, smaller friends.
"Owww… Kaede… what did you do?"
You pushed a plate of food over to him - mostly kale and iron supplements, but it would help his body make up for the blood he lost. And again with the guilt…
"Do you want the specifics, or the summarised version?"
"...mmphh…"
Summary it is.
"Well, the good news is, you're never going to have to deal with appendicitis! That, and you're going to be expecting some growth spurts pretty soon, so I hope you like clothes shopping."
"...yay?"
---
You kept an eye on Izuku for the next few months, but nothing major went wrong, which was unusual considering your track record. Maybe the universe would simply not allow someone so adorable to die? You should test tha - NO nope no no not testing that. Shut up, brain.
Despite the unlikelihood of success, Izuku began getting taller; not to an unnatural degree, but just enough so that he didn't seem like such an easy target for the other students any more.
---
Over the course of the next year, you practiced creating organisms by combining stem cells you'd collected, striving for something flight capable. You didn't get very far on that; while you understood the theory behind the structure of bird bones, you simply couldn't get it to come out right without some kind of reference. On the plus side, you made a new friend.
You'd decided to mess around with the huntsman spider cells, initially to see what went wrong with your flawless plan to create a legion of acid spitting spiders, when you realised how many legs they had.
You lived your life firmly adhering to the philosophy that the more limbs something has, the better the hugs, and therefore the more you should risk life and limb in order to obtain said hugs. While your girls had spiders beat with their sheer number of legs, spiders made up for it in length that centipedes' ittle bitty needle feet just couldn't match. Also, spider legs were fluffy, automatically making them the best thing ever.
And so, what started as an attempt to grow a spider big enough for hugging gradually snowballed into Bael, the giant fluffball / pillow / dog. Bael was like a dog in the way that they liked to bring you things. Like dead animals. Bael was a good boy.
It turned out that insects can physically be a lot bigger than their maximum size without any major overhauls to their anatomy; they didn't naturally because it was incredibly inefficient for avoiding being eaten, or consuming enough food to live. As your new friend would not be having any problems with either of the above while you were still alive, you could increase their size to just under double that of a normal one. Swap the reproductive organs and the functionally useless spinnerets for an enlarged respiratory system, and you could go even bigger.
The finished creature would grow to own a roughly eighty centimetre leg span, but for the time being little Bael could still fit in your hand. If they squashed their legs up a bit.
He got along well with De-kun, who was always so excited to find the spider hiding in his hair or schoolbag.
---
The two of you had begun preparation for your final exams when something vaguely interesting occurred.
Although Bakugo, as well as the majority of the school body, ignored you and Izuku almost entirely, your not-so-tiny-anymore friend's determination to get into UA had sent him over the edge. Thankfully, you had been there to interrupt Bakugo's threats through the means of a centipede to the face.
Hmm, blondie has a debilitating fear of venomous bugs on his face, who could have guessed?
Daigankai was fine, but you and De-kun had missed the last bus, and so had to walk back, not that you minded the opportunity to talk. The scores UA required for entry were worryingly high, so the two of you had spent more time studying rather than actually interacting lately. Well, you've been studying, and Izuku has been attempting to tutor you; you may or may not have tuned out too many classes in favour of playing with your friends.
Now that you think about it, why did they set the bar so high in the first place? Surely your failure to solve quadratic equations was unrelated to fighting villains?
"Kaede, will Bakugo be alright after that? I know he can be a bit… abrasive, but I still…"
"Nah, he'll be fine - the venom's not lethal to humans. He might want to get that bite checked out though… I think she may have started trying to eat him, seeing as they're all so used to being able to snack on me."
He shuddered at that. Ah, he must be cold.
The two of you continued to walk, chatting about something inane to fill the time, until you heard something... strange. Like a surge of water below the ground. But it's not been raining, so it can't be from the drains…
"De-kun -" You interrupted his analysis of the latest licensed heroes. This could be dangerous for him.
"There's something weird underground…"
Your ears twitched, were those footsteps, too? The rushing sound grew louder, passing beneath you and moving ahead. It seemed to slow as it passed beneath the shadow of the overpass before you - was that a manhole cover?
"It's going to come out over there, we should m-"
You paused, the footsteps were getting louder, as if whoever was pursuing the strange mass was getting closer. The liquid thing had taken too long to make up it's mind on surfacing, and would be intercepted at this rate. It could be dangerous, but whatever happened next would almost certainly be interesting to watch.
You turned to Izuku, who was panicking at your uncharacteristic silence, and grinned.
"Want to watch the fight?"
Main Action:
[ ] Nom whatever comes out.
[ ] Just shove your head down there and see what happens.
[ ] Get all your friends to safety, then watch.
Additional Actions: Write-in.
---
AN: Soon...
Just going to take this opportunity to awkwardly mention how happy all your responses make me. It's on the same level as somebody randomly giving me a box of cute animals. But I also find you all terrifying, so more like somebody giving me a box of alligators? I mean, they're adorable, but now I have no hands.
I realise my metaphor is wearing a bit thin here, so thank you and I'm off to be embarrassed in a corner now.
"A-are you sure this is safe?
"Aw, you don't have to worry about me, De-kun! All my important parts are up here, anyway."
"That… wasn't what I meant, Kaede."
Izuku hadn't been very enthusiastic about being eaten, for some reason, so you'd offered to make your stomach a bit less cramped by moving some bones out of the way. You'd disconnected your lower half again, this time with crude circulatory and respiratory systems attached, in order to keep it alive for however long this would take. After that, he started making excuses about accidentally damaging your other internal organs, so you'd messily relocated them to a large growth above your shoulders. Thank god for plastic sheeting, because your mom would have killed you if she'd had to replace the carpet again. That said, she might kill you later for emptying the fridge for the third time this week, but oh well.
"De-kun, do you want these upgrades or not?"
"Yes! Of course - it's just… It's kind of scary to, er, be eaten alive, you know?"
"No, not really."
He deflated at your uncomprehending tone, and resigned himself to his fate as your first test subject. Okay, it sounds bad, but is there really any other way to put it? Wait, no time to waste with that - lets see what organs Izuku can do without…
Appendix, that's a good place to start; you broke it down into parts his body could reabsorb. Oh dear, that appeared to cause some internal bleeding. Shit. You [pushed] as much coagulants as it was safe to into the area and hoped for the best.
Now that there was a bit more space inside, you set about getting his lungs to grow; you figured that if he received more oxygen, his body wouldn't produce so much lactic acid. You couldn't help but feel smug about your quirk again - no acid buildups for you when you could manually neutralise it. Anyway, producing this result in something not fully 'you' was an arduous process: you had to first copy the parts of him that contained the 'plans' for how his lungs should be built, then edit said plans so that they'd think that his lungs should take up more space than they were supposed to, then test the plans out on your own [focused] lungs to make sure that they would grow in a way that wouldn't kill him, which took a surprisingly long time. Humans were so… breakable. All before destroying his copy of the original plans and [pushing] the improved ones into place.
Countless spiders had died for you to gain that level of accuracy, but it would be worth it to make De-kun happy. Speaking of...
"Izuku, you doing okay?"
No response, he was sleeping. Might as well edit a bit more.
While you were at it, you redid the 'plans' for his intestines too - they already wasted so much space that it probably wouldn't matter if they didn't grow to match his new proportions...
Hmm. Was he using that spleen? You decided to leave it, just to be safe, but two kidneys? That was just pointless - you broke one down before you could stop yourself ...aaand there was the internal bleeding again. Luckily, your quirk made topping up his blood supply relatively simple.
Although you wanted to give him an amazing stomach like your own, it simply wouldn't work without your quirk to support it, so you had to settle for making him as much like his favourite hero as possible. Now, he's going to need to be a bit bulkier if he would be fighting villains, so you gave him the same treatment you'd given yourself when you realised that you weren't growing as much as all the other children. Repeating the same process you had for the changes to his lungs, you made sure that his liver would synthesize more growth hormones than usual, which would, in theory, slow his rate of lipogenesis as well as help him slowly become… er, whatever the term for 'not a scrawny midget' was. Sure, there could be side effects later on, as he didn't have your quirk to help prevent them, but you could fix that. Probably.
You let Izuku out. He didn't wake up for a while, in which time you managed to pull your body back together and comfort your other, smaller friends.
"Owww… Kaede… what did you do?"
You pushed a plate of food over to him - mostly kale and iron supplements, but it would help his body make up for the blood he lost. And again with the guilt…
"Do you want the specifics, or the summarised version?"
"...mmphh…"
Summary it is.
"Well, the good news is, you're never going to have to deal with appendicitis! That, and you're going to be expecting some growth spurts pretty soon, so I hope you like clothes shopping."
"...yay?"
---
You kept an eye on Izuku for the next few months, but nothing major went wrong, which was unusual considering your track record. Maybe the universe would simply not allow someone so adorable to die? You should test tha - NO nope no no not testing that. Shut up, brain.
Despite the unlikelihood of success, Izuku began getting taller; not to an unnatural degree, but just enough so that he didn't seem like such an easy target for the other students any more.
---
Over the course of the next year, you practiced creating organisms by combining stem cells you'd collected, striving for something flight capable. You didn't get very far on that; while you understood the theory behind the structure of bird bones, you simply couldn't get it to come out right without some kind of reference. On the plus side, you made a new friend.
You'd decided to mess around with the huntsman spider cells, initially to see what went wrong with your flawless plan to create a legion of acid spitting spiders, when you realised how many legs they had.
You lived your life firmly adhering to the philosophy that the more limbs something has, the better the hugs, and therefore the more you should risk life and limb in order to obtain said hugs. While your girls had spiders beat with their sheer number of legs, spiders made up for it in length that centipedes' ittle bitty needle feet just couldn't match. Also, spider legs were fluffy, automatically making them the best thing ever.
And so, what started as an attempt to grow a spider big enough for hugging gradually snowballed into Bael, the giant fluffball / pillow / dog. Bael was like a dog in the way that they liked to bring you things. Like dead animals. Bael was a good boy.
It turned out that insects can physically be a lot bigger than their maximum size without any major overhauls to their anatomy; they didn't naturally because it was incredibly inefficient for avoiding being eaten, or consuming enough food to live. As your new friend would not be having any problems with either of the above while you were still alive, you could increase their size to just under double that of a normal one. Swap the reproductive organs and the functionally useless spinnerets for an enlarged respiratory system, and you could go even bigger.
The finished creature would grow to own a roughly eighty centimetre leg span, but for the time being little Bael could still fit in your hand. If they squashed their legs up a bit.
He got along well with De-kun, who was always so excited to find the spider hiding in his hair or schoolbag.
---
The two of you had begun preparation for your final exams when something vaguely interesting occurred.
Although Bakugo, as well as the majority of the school body, ignored you and Izuku almost entirely, your not-so-tiny-anymore friend's determination to get into UA had sent him over the edge. Thankfully, you had been there to interrupt Bakugo's threats through the means of a centipede to the face.
Hmm, blondie has a debilitating fear of venomous bugs on his face, who could have guessed?
Daigankai was fine, but you and De-kun had missed the last bus, and so had to walk back, not that you minded the opportunity to talk. The scores UA required for entry were worryingly high, so the two of you had spent more time studying rather than actually interacting lately. Well, you've been studying, and Izuku has been attempting to tutor you; you may or may not have tuned out too many classes in favour of playing with your friends.
Now that you think about it, why did they set the bar so high in the first place? Surely your failure to solve quadratic equations was unrelated to fighting villains?
"Kaede, will Bakugo be alright after that? I know he can be a bit… abrasive, but I still…"
"Nah, he'll be fine - the venom's not lethal to humans. He might want to get that bite checked out though… I think she may have started trying to eat him, seeing as they're all so used to being able to snack on me."
He shuddered at that. Ah, he must be cold.
The two of you continued to walk, chatting about something inane to fill the time, until you heard something... strange. Like a surge of water below the ground. But it's not been raining, so it can't be from the drains…
"De-kun -" You interrupted his analysis of the latest licensed heroes. This could be dangerous for him.
"There's something weird underground…"
Your ears twitched, were those footsteps, too? The rushing sound grew louder, passing beneath you and moving ahead. It seemed to slow as it passed beneath the shadow of the overpass before you - was that a manhole cover?
"It's going to come out over there, we should m-"
You paused, the footsteps were getting louder, as if whoever was pursuing the strange mass was getting closer. The liquid thing had taken too long to make up it's mind on surfacing, and would be intercepted at this rate. It could be dangerous, but whatever happened next would almost certainly be interesting to watch.
You turned to Izuku, who was panicking at your uncharacteristic silence, and grinned.
"Want to watch the fight?"
Main Action:
[ ] Nom whatever comes out.
[ ] Just shove your head down there and see what happens.
[ ] Get all your friends to safety, then watch.
Additional Actions: Write-in.
---
AN: Soon...
Just going to take this opportunity to awkwardly mention how happy all your responses make me. It's on the same level as somebody randomly giving me a box of cute animals. But I also find you all terrifying, so more like somebody giving me a box of alligators? I mean, they're adorable, but now I have no hands.
I realise my metaphor is wearing a bit thin here, so thank you and I'm off to be embarrassed in a corner now.
Last edited:
By Any Means Necessary 1.02
- Location
- Somewhere cold
[X] Noms are always the right course of action
In an utterly unsurprising turn of events, you decided to throw self preservation to the wind and straight up try to eat whatever poked its head out of the manhole. You didn't have to wait long; the footsteps passed beneath the two of you, culminating in an earsplittingly loud crack.
De-kun filled the ensuing silence with various worried noises as you edged closer to the opening in the ground. A few feet away, you froze, pressing closer to the ground - the manhole was opening. You shot forwards, wrapping yourself around the massive arm that emerged.
You then realised that you couldn't possibly fit the whole creature inside you, and this may have been a bad idea.
Whatever you were attached to was tall. Imposingly so, with a casual stance that just radiated power. His expression was unreadable, the angled sunlight shrouding his eyes to leave only a dark gash. But, his teeth, they were bared like some kind of rabid animal. You found yourself shaking uncontrollably - he was terrifying and you couldn't get away in time and Izuku was running forwards he was going to die all your faul-
"ALL MIGHT!!"
In an impressive feat of strength that made you fuzzy with pride, De-kun shoved you off of All Might to break your face on the unforgiving concrete.
What.
"I-I'm so sorry, we didn't realise it was you. Ah! Is that a villain in that bottle?! T-this is so- ! P-p-please let me get my notebook for an autoAARGH- !
The poor excitable puppy had just tripped over your tail to join you on the ground.
What is happening? Is this real? DID YOU JUST TRY TO EAT THE GREATEST HERO IN THE WORLD? Your minor existential crisis was interrupted by a booming voice, chilling you to the bone quicker than your father could run from responsibility:
"Please don't move, my enthusiastic fan - there is a dangerous insect near your head! Do not worry, because I am here to help!"
Although you were sure you'd left the rest of your tiny friends at home, one of your girls had been nesting in Izuku's hair / symbiotic head bush, and was not happy about being disturbed; Three Seven Eight had chosen to express her impotent rage by crawling around in an angry circle. In full view of All Might.
Without even needing to think about it, you intercepted his kick.
---
Toshinori Yagi was in denial; he had certainly not just murdered a child in front of their best friend.
This was not blood.
And the dead child was not gnawing on his leg. He looked down at them.
"What? I need some biomass."
"Kaede!! You can't do that! H-he's-"
"A rude man who just tried to murder my friend; he owes me a leg."
They weren't getting very far - with their torso now more doughnut than body part, they had to rely on their teeth to even get a grip on him. While he'd been in shock, this 'Kaede' had seemingly melted what remained of their body into a blob of flesh, which was just… no.
As All Might, he'd spent the vast majority of his life dealing with some of the more... eccentric people the world had to offer: from Aizawa's tendency to hibernate, to Endeavor's adorably unwavering fixation on surpassing him. Not that he was complaining - he wouldn't trade his experiences for anything.
However, Toshinori's opinion was that, like people, eccentricity could be easily separated into good and bad categories: one is endearing, and distinguishes a person through their unwillingness to yield under the strain of societal norms. The other kind stemmed less from strength of character, and was more evident of some deeply ingrained problem that could affect the course of their lives, in a negative way. The 'other kind' was usually dealt with through a mix of serious conversation with the strange person, as well as the occasional spot of physical violence, depending on the context of the situation.
What was this, though? It couldn't be bad that this kid was so accepting of all forms of life, but if it was one of those... Never before had he met anyone who he couldn't sort into either clean-cut category, until he met you. Well done you.
His concentration slipped.
---
All of a sudden, the Number One Hero exploded into a cloud of steam, which had the annoying side effect of scalding your corneas and rendering you blind. There may have been some damage to the rest of your face too, if De-kun's screaming was anything to go by.
"Shit, not now - !"
All Might tried to run, but you held on with the indomitable strength of an overly aggressive corgi. You were about the size of one, thanks to him - you weren't just going to let him get away with that.
"Dmhhkh, ghht hmm!"
"A-ah! Right!!"
Izuku picked himself off the ground and swung his bag at the hero, or at least tried to; you could still feel the thick steam in the air, so it must have been quite difficult to aim. The bag collided with the back of your head, and you let out an undignified shriek, having assumed that it was All Might attempting to crush your skull. Unfortunately, you couldn't simultaneously scream and bite someone's ankle with only one mouth.
You heard two sets of footsteps recede into the distance as De-kun gave chase.
---
Izuku was thankful for Kaede's alterations to his body as he gave chase after the impostor hero; they allowed him to catch up fairly quickly. Three Seven Eight squirmed in his pocket, and he was considering the merits of hurling the clingy insect at the man in front of him when said villain tripped. At this point, Izuku was too close to stop in time.
"I-I'm so sorry, sir!"
Wait, no, stop apologizing to the villain! Even if he looks seriously ill, and IS THAT BLOOD?
A wet cough was the only response from the villain, more blood spilling from their mouth. Izuku's sense of self preservation was shot from behind by his altruism, who cackled maniacally as self preservation bled out on the floor and died forever.
He helped the skeletal man sit up, pulling Three Seven Eight off when she attempted to chew the man's bloodied shoe. An awkward silence descended as they both got their breath back.
"Is… is your friend going to be alright?"
Izuku nodded warily, the image of Kaede's scalded face still fresh in his mind. He wouldn't be able to look at a poached egg without feeling sick for the next year or so after seeing that.
"I'm *kaff* sorry about that, by the way. I didn't mean to hurt anyone…" He stared at the centipede in Izuku's lap for a minute, disgust written across his face. "Why do you have a pet… one of those things? They're not exactly known for their affection."
"They're Kaede's, not mine; and I don't really get the appeal either."
"Ah."
They sat for another minute, the maybe-a-villain checking the seal on the bottle they were carrying, with Izuku silently debating the best way to ask his question. It was a bit rude to just ask someone that, but was there really any other way? He decided to take a cue from Kaede and be direct about it:
"So... are you a villain?"
"WHAT?!"
He made a mental note to never follow Kaede's example again.
"Me? A-a villain? Are you-? What are y-? I'm All Might! Just because I look like this… it's the result of an old injury - I can only maintain the other form for about three hours a day. If it wasn't a secret from the media, nobody would take me seriously! Can you take this face seriously?!"
That... made sense. How many others like Izuku had been inspired by the seemingly invincible hero? It was his existence, the assurance that he would always be there to stop any criminal, no matter how tough, that kept the crime rates so low. Nobody with a brain wanted to be a supervillain if it entailed a wall of muscle beating you up. It was bad for business.
Huh. Izuku was taking the revelation surprisingly well. It was probably some kind of desensitisation to reality due to prolonged exposure to Kaede. They tend to have that effect on people.
The crushing disappointment was still there, but Izuku couldn't bring himself to resent the hero for not living up to his expectations. Still, something about this just didn't add up:
"Why did you just tell me then? You could have lied and pretended you were a villain."
"..."
Ah, yes, that expression one gets when mentally screaming at their own stupidity. Izuku was very familiar with that expression.
"...Is there any way you could forget what I just told you?"
"No."
"Just *cough* wonderful."
"I-it's alright, I won't tell anyone. I'm a… I… I really admire your work, so I won't jeopardise it."
"Heh, thanks. You know, you don't have to mince words, I'm just as disappointed with me as you are."
More silence. Was this a good time to ask? It was now or never - All Might was getting to his feet, ready to leave. Just as the hero began to walk away, Izuku blurted out:
"Is it true, what you always say on television? Is it really possible for someone like me to become a hero?"
All Might turned back to face him, grinning through the blood.
"Of course you can, anyone can be a hero if they try!"
This was definitely the Number One Hero all right; nobody else could possibly have so much faith in the power of optimism. Izuku couldn't help but smile a little at that. It was one of the parts of the hero that he'd admired the most. But… he had to know.
"E-even if they don't have a quirk? C-c-could I still be a hero?"
That shut him up.
"..."
It stung, that pitying expression, now coming from his favourite hero. Izuku was glad Three Seven Eight was there. Physical pain was a welcome distraction.
All Might tried to say something, but kept cutting himself off. What could he say that would help, anyway? Eventually, he stopped trying, leaving with the stirring captive villain.
And Izuku was alone.
---
By the time De-kun returned you'd managed to fix your eyes, as well as sort your life-support-organ-blob out to be more efficient, utilising the leftovers to give yourself some arms. You put those arms to good use by hugging De-kun as soon as he was within reach.
"What's wrong? What did he do to you? W-why are you crying?"
The words kept pouring out, but you were too tired to put much force behind them. He crouched down so that you could hug him properly, instead of just his legs - he was shaking. This probably wasn't the best time for words.
The two of you stayed like that for a while.
---
Izuku accepted your suggestion of a sleepover. Your mom allowed it, despite the lack of warning, after the state you came home in. Your cover story backfired when she left the house to attempt to find and castrate the villain who'd dared to use you as a shield against All Might. You weren't really sure how that would work, considering that the villain had literally been a pool of sludge, but if anyone could find a way, it would be her.
The hero who'd stopped her breaking into the local holding facility had been kind enough to escort her to a grocery store on the way back. There'd been nearly no food left after you rebuilt yourself, so your dad was especially grateful to the unidentified skeletal hero who'd accompanied her. Not that your dad only cared about food, he just had a few complications in his life as an effect of his quirk, such as difficulty digesting anything that wasn't meat or eggs.
Anyway, Izuku hadn't talked much about what had happened between him and All Might, but from what you could gather, he'd said something ridiculous to De-kun about him not being capable of becoming a hero. Which, in your opinion, was just stupid. Sure, he was a fragile, baseline human, but any villain that wanted to hurt him would have to get through you first. With the help of your augmentation, your dad's unusual connections, and your tiny friends, the two of you would definitely become the best heroes ever!
Coming to terms with what a truly insensitive person your favourite hero was was difficult, but all the evidence was there: putting a hole through your chest, threatening Three Seven Eight, and above all, making Izuku cry. Thankfully, you had this wonderful coping mechanism called pure, undiluted rage.
He would pay in blood for deceiving you.
Blood and limbs.
Which you would then return once he'd learned his lesson, because All Might was just that cool.
---
Only a few short months remained before the UA entrance exam, and in the gaps between frantic revision, you couldn't help but feel unprepared. You had a bit of free time next weekend, but what would be the best way to spend it?
Main Action:
[ ] The harbour's not too far away… there's got to be something interesting over there.
[ ] You want one of those birds, and you're going to get one, even if you have to climb for it.
[ ] De-kun mentioned that he used to go hunting for bugs with Bakugo - go ask him for some advice.
Additional Actions: Write-in.
---
AN: Facial burns are not recommended: they look awful, and may frighten nearby cinnamon rolls. The effects of having an actual, supportive friend are really something. So are the effects of growing up around a certain, tall, toothy father figure.
Sorry about the delay, I probably won't be able to update as quickly as before any more. But on the plus side, you'll have more victims to play with soon!
Soon...
Edit: Now with character sheet!
In an utterly unsurprising turn of events, you decided to throw self preservation to the wind and straight up try to eat whatever poked its head out of the manhole. You didn't have to wait long; the footsteps passed beneath the two of you, culminating in an earsplittingly loud crack.
De-kun filled the ensuing silence with various worried noises as you edged closer to the opening in the ground. A few feet away, you froze, pressing closer to the ground - the manhole was opening. You shot forwards, wrapping yourself around the massive arm that emerged.
You then realised that you couldn't possibly fit the whole creature inside you, and this may have been a bad idea.
Whatever you were attached to was tall. Imposingly so, with a casual stance that just radiated power. His expression was unreadable, the angled sunlight shrouding his eyes to leave only a dark gash. But, his teeth, they were bared like some kind of rabid animal. You found yourself shaking uncontrollably - he was terrifying and you couldn't get away in time and Izuku was running forwards he was going to die all your faul-
"ALL MIGHT!!"
In an impressive feat of strength that made you fuzzy with pride, De-kun shoved you off of All Might to break your face on the unforgiving concrete.
What.
"I-I'm so sorry, we didn't realise it was you. Ah! Is that a villain in that bottle?! T-this is so- ! P-p-please let me get my notebook for an autoAARGH- !
The poor excitable puppy had just tripped over your tail to join you on the ground.
What is happening? Is this real? DID YOU JUST TRY TO EAT THE GREATEST HERO IN THE WORLD? Your minor existential crisis was interrupted by a booming voice, chilling you to the bone quicker than your father could run from responsibility:
"Please don't move, my enthusiastic fan - there is a dangerous insect near your head! Do not worry, because I am here to help!"
Although you were sure you'd left the rest of your tiny friends at home, one of your girls had been nesting in Izuku's hair / symbiotic head bush, and was not happy about being disturbed; Three Seven Eight had chosen to express her impotent rage by crawling around in an angry circle. In full view of All Might.
Without even needing to think about it, you intercepted his kick.
---
Toshinori Yagi was in denial; he had certainly not just murdered a child in front of their best friend.
This was not blood.
And the dead child was not gnawing on his leg. He looked down at them.
"What? I need some biomass."
"Kaede!! You can't do that! H-he's-"
"A rude man who just tried to murder my friend; he owes me a leg."
They weren't getting very far - with their torso now more doughnut than body part, they had to rely on their teeth to even get a grip on him. While he'd been in shock, this 'Kaede' had seemingly melted what remained of their body into a blob of flesh, which was just… no.
As All Might, he'd spent the vast majority of his life dealing with some of the more... eccentric people the world had to offer: from Aizawa's tendency to hibernate, to Endeavor's adorably unwavering fixation on surpassing him. Not that he was complaining - he wouldn't trade his experiences for anything.
However, Toshinori's opinion was that, like people, eccentricity could be easily separated into good and bad categories: one is endearing, and distinguishes a person through their unwillingness to yield under the strain of societal norms. The other kind stemmed less from strength of character, and was more evident of some deeply ingrained problem that could affect the course of their lives, in a negative way. The 'other kind' was usually dealt with through a mix of serious conversation with the strange person, as well as the occasional spot of physical violence, depending on the context of the situation.
What was this, though? It couldn't be bad that this kid was so accepting of all forms of life, but if it was one of those... Never before had he met anyone who he couldn't sort into either clean-cut category, until he met you. Well done you.
His concentration slipped.
---
All of a sudden, the Number One Hero exploded into a cloud of steam, which had the annoying side effect of scalding your corneas and rendering you blind. There may have been some damage to the rest of your face too, if De-kun's screaming was anything to go by.
"Shit, not now - !"
All Might tried to run, but you held on with the indomitable strength of an overly aggressive corgi. You were about the size of one, thanks to him - you weren't just going to let him get away with that.
"Dmhhkh, ghht hmm!"
"A-ah! Right!!"
Izuku picked himself off the ground and swung his bag at the hero, or at least tried to; you could still feel the thick steam in the air, so it must have been quite difficult to aim. The bag collided with the back of your head, and you let out an undignified shriek, having assumed that it was All Might attempting to crush your skull. Unfortunately, you couldn't simultaneously scream and bite someone's ankle with only one mouth.
You heard two sets of footsteps recede into the distance as De-kun gave chase.
---
Izuku was thankful for Kaede's alterations to his body as he gave chase after the impostor hero; they allowed him to catch up fairly quickly. Three Seven Eight squirmed in his pocket, and he was considering the merits of hurling the clingy insect at the man in front of him when said villain tripped. At this point, Izuku was too close to stop in time.
"I-I'm so sorry, sir!"
Wait, no, stop apologizing to the villain! Even if he looks seriously ill, and IS THAT BLOOD?
A wet cough was the only response from the villain, more blood spilling from their mouth. Izuku's sense of self preservation was shot from behind by his altruism, who cackled maniacally as self preservation bled out on the floor and died forever.
He helped the skeletal man sit up, pulling Three Seven Eight off when she attempted to chew the man's bloodied shoe. An awkward silence descended as they both got their breath back.
"Is… is your friend going to be alright?"
Izuku nodded warily, the image of Kaede's scalded face still fresh in his mind. He wouldn't be able to look at a poached egg without feeling sick for the next year or so after seeing that.
"I'm *kaff* sorry about that, by the way. I didn't mean to hurt anyone…" He stared at the centipede in Izuku's lap for a minute, disgust written across his face. "Why do you have a pet… one of those things? They're not exactly known for their affection."
"They're Kaede's, not mine; and I don't really get the appeal either."
"Ah."
They sat for another minute, the maybe-a-villain checking the seal on the bottle they were carrying, with Izuku silently debating the best way to ask his question. It was a bit rude to just ask someone that, but was there really any other way? He decided to take a cue from Kaede and be direct about it:
"So... are you a villain?"
"WHAT?!"
He made a mental note to never follow Kaede's example again.
"Me? A-a villain? Are you-? What are y-? I'm All Might! Just because I look like this… it's the result of an old injury - I can only maintain the other form for about three hours a day. If it wasn't a secret from the media, nobody would take me seriously! Can you take this face seriously?!"
That... made sense. How many others like Izuku had been inspired by the seemingly invincible hero? It was his existence, the assurance that he would always be there to stop any criminal, no matter how tough, that kept the crime rates so low. Nobody with a brain wanted to be a supervillain if it entailed a wall of muscle beating you up. It was bad for business.
Huh. Izuku was taking the revelation surprisingly well. It was probably some kind of desensitisation to reality due to prolonged exposure to Kaede. They tend to have that effect on people.
The crushing disappointment was still there, but Izuku couldn't bring himself to resent the hero for not living up to his expectations. Still, something about this just didn't add up:
"Why did you just tell me then? You could have lied and pretended you were a villain."
"..."
Ah, yes, that expression one gets when mentally screaming at their own stupidity. Izuku was very familiar with that expression.
"...Is there any way you could forget what I just told you?"
"No."
"Just *cough* wonderful."
"I-it's alright, I won't tell anyone. I'm a… I… I really admire your work, so I won't jeopardise it."
"Heh, thanks. You know, you don't have to mince words, I'm just as disappointed with me as you are."
More silence. Was this a good time to ask? It was now or never - All Might was getting to his feet, ready to leave. Just as the hero began to walk away, Izuku blurted out:
"Is it true, what you always say on television? Is it really possible for someone like me to become a hero?"
All Might turned back to face him, grinning through the blood.
"Of course you can, anyone can be a hero if they try!"
This was definitely the Number One Hero all right; nobody else could possibly have so much faith in the power of optimism. Izuku couldn't help but smile a little at that. It was one of the parts of the hero that he'd admired the most. But… he had to know.
"E-even if they don't have a quirk? C-c-could I still be a hero?"
That shut him up.
"..."
It stung, that pitying expression, now coming from his favourite hero. Izuku was glad Three Seven Eight was there. Physical pain was a welcome distraction.
All Might tried to say something, but kept cutting himself off. What could he say that would help, anyway? Eventually, he stopped trying, leaving with the stirring captive villain.
And Izuku was alone.
---
By the time De-kun returned you'd managed to fix your eyes, as well as sort your life-support-organ-blob out to be more efficient, utilising the leftovers to give yourself some arms. You put those arms to good use by hugging De-kun as soon as he was within reach.
"What's wrong? What did he do to you? W-why are you crying?"
The words kept pouring out, but you were too tired to put much force behind them. He crouched down so that you could hug him properly, instead of just his legs - he was shaking. This probably wasn't the best time for words.
The two of you stayed like that for a while.
---
Izuku accepted your suggestion of a sleepover. Your mom allowed it, despite the lack of warning, after the state you came home in. Your cover story backfired when she left the house to attempt to find and castrate the villain who'd dared to use you as a shield against All Might. You weren't really sure how that would work, considering that the villain had literally been a pool of sludge, but if anyone could find a way, it would be her.
The hero who'd stopped her breaking into the local holding facility had been kind enough to escort her to a grocery store on the way back. There'd been nearly no food left after you rebuilt yourself, so your dad was especially grateful to the unidentified skeletal hero who'd accompanied her. Not that your dad only cared about food, he just had a few complications in his life as an effect of his quirk, such as difficulty digesting anything that wasn't meat or eggs.
Anyway, Izuku hadn't talked much about what had happened between him and All Might, but from what you could gather, he'd said something ridiculous to De-kun about him not being capable of becoming a hero. Which, in your opinion, was just stupid. Sure, he was a fragile, baseline human, but any villain that wanted to hurt him would have to get through you first. With the help of your augmentation, your dad's unusual connections, and your tiny friends, the two of you would definitely become the best heroes ever!
Coming to terms with what a truly insensitive person your favourite hero was was difficult, but all the evidence was there: putting a hole through your chest, threatening Three Seven Eight, and above all, making Izuku cry. Thankfully, you had this wonderful coping mechanism called pure, undiluted rage.
He would pay in blood for deceiving you.
Blood and limbs.
Which you would then return once he'd learned his lesson, because All Might was just that cool.
---
Only a few short months remained before the UA entrance exam, and in the gaps between frantic revision, you couldn't help but feel unprepared. You had a bit of free time next weekend, but what would be the best way to spend it?
Main Action:
[ ] The harbour's not too far away… there's got to be something interesting over there.
[ ] You want one of those birds, and you're going to get one, even if you have to climb for it.
[ ] De-kun mentioned that he used to go hunting for bugs with Bakugo - go ask him for some advice.
Additional Actions: Write-in.
---
AN: Facial burns are not recommended: they look awful, and may frighten nearby cinnamon rolls. The effects of having an actual, supportive friend are really something. So are the effects of growing up around a certain, tall, toothy father figure.
Sorry about the delay, I probably won't be able to update as quickly as before any more. But on the plus side, you'll have more victims to play with soon!
Soon...
Edit: Now with character sheet!
Self Enhancements:
Toothy secondary mouth - looks good
Internal organ optimisation - who needs those things when you can have more stomach?
Kitty ears of intimidation - can hear a greater range of frequencies, can eavesdrop easier; have to manually account for air pressure changes
Tail, lightly armored - increased defenestration potential, does not like impact damage
Digitigrade legs - look good, keep breaking though, should probably do something about that
Venom sac - your friends just love giving you some! Now, what to do with it…
Tall - you are very tall
Save data:
Japanese grass snek (partial, not useful for full creation, but at least it tells you how to make scales)
Neighbors' genocidal pet cat
Tortoise
Giant centipede
Deku Scrub
Huntsman spider
Friends:
Omu, Lindsey, Ankheg, Three Seven Eight, Tina, Jenney, Daigankai - clingy giant centipedes, much anger, much venom
Bael - big floofy huntsman spider
Deku Scrub - a rare lifeform composed entirely of cinnamon, 10/10 would adopt
Toothy secondary mouth - looks good
Internal organ optimisation - who needs those things when you can have more stomach?
Kitty ears of intimidation - can hear a greater range of frequencies, can eavesdrop easier; have to manually account for air pressure changes
Tail, lightly armored - increased defenestration potential, does not like impact damage
Digitigrade legs - look good, keep breaking though, should probably do something about that
Venom sac - your friends just love giving you some! Now, what to do with it…
Tall - you are very tall
Save data:
Japanese grass snek (partial, not useful for full creation, but at least it tells you how to make scales)
Neighbors' genocidal pet cat
Tortoise
Giant centipede
Deku Scrub
Huntsman spider
Friends:
Omu, Lindsey, Ankheg, Three Seven Eight, Tina, Jenney, Daigankai - clingy giant centipedes, much anger, much venom
Bael - big floofy huntsman spider
Deku Scrub - a rare lifeform composed entirely of cinnamon, 10/10 would adopt
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