MLA May AUs (Parts 1+2/hopefully 31)

Intro Post

5/1: from the mothership

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5/2:  anything can happen in the next half hour

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from the mothership

“Did you get your name figured out?”

“I almost didn’t!” She rolled over in her bed, kicking her legs up behind her.  “Midnight-sensei tried to nix it.”

“Nix it?”  Her mother’s volume ticked up a notch.  “Why?”

“She wouldn’t even say! She just tsked at me!”

“Typical hero—no offense, dear.  So?  What did you do?”

“Sat back down, thought about it, and then got back up and showed everyone the exact same name.  You shoulda heard them jeering.”

“Good girl.  Why?”

“A quiz, Mom?” she laughed. Of course there was.  There always was, when someone from the Army decided they wanted to go Hero.  Home base always had to make sure none of those ideas about how only heroes were fit to use quirks stuck.  “I kept the same name because there’s a bunch of dude heroes out there with reference names or scary names.  Why should Death Arms be okay as a name but not Alien Queen?”

Mina grinned at the sound of her mother’s hum of approval and did not say the rest, which was, Also I really wanted to see the look on our base commander’s face when he realizes that’s what he’s gotta call me from now on.  If school was teaching her anything (other than being a huge badass who was definitely going to be a base commander herself one day), it was that there were right things and wrong things you could say to every crowd, and sometimes stands were important, but sometimes so was saying what the people wanted to hear.

For now, anyway.

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anything can happen in the next half hour

<They just hit the 11th Crossing.  Twenty minutes and he’ll be on your front steps.>

Mera Yokumiru reads the message on his cell, looks away long enough to guzzle the rest of his coffee, then stares with red-ringed eyes at the time.  Twenty minutes until Yotsubashi Rikiya, second-in-command of the Paranormal Liberation Front—and in all the ways that count, still the Grand Commander of the Meta Liberation Army—will be walking through the Commission’s doors under the pretext of negotiating a government contract for Detnerat’s new Support Goods division.  Twenty minutes, which is cutting it very close.

In the next half hour, the raid will start.  The Commission has spent the last three months frantically researching, wiretapping, coordinating schedules, debating personnel assignments, and squabbling over tactics. They’ve lowered the ages of work studies, expedited license paperwork, and fudged exam scores to broaden the net of warm bodies they’re hoping to use to catch the Liberation Front before it even gets out the gates.

In the next half hour, police will move to arrest Yotsubashi, Endeavor’s team on the hospital, and Edgeshot’s on the Villa.  Hawks will bolt for Bubaigawara Jin, to arrest him if possible, but with a primary objective of ensuring Double doesn’t turn back the tide.  (And oh, the sleepless laughs and sighs of relief that went around the planning table when someone pointed out that at least Hawks wouldn’t have to choose between Double and Warp Gate.)  

All across the country, trusted heroes and police will move on PLF bases, heroes who’ve been living double lives for years, and what Hawks reported were called “Liberated districts.” Shoki-san over at the Public Security Examination office is probably sitting at her desk just like Yokumiru is at his, sucking down her canned tea and waiting for the pre-determined moment to submit the paperwork to initiate the dissolution of the Hearts & Minds Party.

If absolutely everything goes according to plan, then this is still going to cost lives and be a PR disaster on a scale never before seen in Yokumiru’s lifetime.  There are just too many people involved, too many enemies ready to fight to the death, too many allies going in unprepared for the magnitude of what they’re about to face.  Things aren’t going to go according to plan.

The warriors of Liberation are going to find out firsthand that there’s a difference between the kind of training that they spent years doing in secret and the training heroes do with full government support.  The heroes, in turn, are going to find the Army waiting for them, and only whatever Noumu Garaki Kyudai felt like leaving behind to make his point—no one bothered to communicate those specifics to Yokumiru, because once he slipped Skeptic-sama an e-mail about Hawks, the paranoia on what Yokumiru was allowed to know ratcheted way up.

They might have had a bit more faith in me, he reflects gloomily, aware but past caring about the jittery bounce in his knee.  I saw this coming from the start.

Okay, he didn’t predict Shigaraki beating Re-Destro—no one did; no one could—but the second both his day job and his real bosses set their eyes on the League of Villains, Yokumiru knew it was time to start scrubbing paperwork.  Hawks was good at his job, and the Commission’s paper-pushers were even better at theirs.  With Hawks and the MLA both on a collision course with the League, there was no way around it: the Commission was going to find out that Destro’s cause was still living. And once they did, the civilian privacy statutes—whittled down into a shadow of what they were pre-Advent—were going to pose no barrier at all to the emergency investigation that followed.

Yokumiru isn’t the only paper-pusher with outside loyalties, thankfully, and he had his branch of the family tree neatly pruned from the family registry four generations back almost a month before Hawks started passing around his highlighted copies of Destro’s memoir. Having to hide that connection is distasteful at best, but it’s not the worst thing a man could be asked to sacrifice for the cause.

I wonder if Re-Destro will recognize me…  Yokumiru’s tired scowl pulls itself deeper at the thought.  He’d flash the (prior) Grand Commander a salute if he could, but there are cameras all over the building, and given what he expects to happen when the handcuffs come out, that camera footage is going to wind up in a federal investigation sooner rather than later, definitely if the PLF doesn’t pull this off, and possibly even if it does.  He can’t intentionally blow his cover.

Anything can happen in the next half hour, but no matter what does, if Yokumiru’s sure of anything, it’s that it’s going to be a shitshow all around.  His eyes—tired or not—need to stay right where they are.

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Notes for Mina:

• it’s pretty damn silly that Bakugou gets to call himself Great Explosion Murder God Dynamite and a lot of characters laugh at it, but he still gets to keep it; meanwhile, Mina gets disapproved into calling herself something cutesy like Pinkyinstead of just letting her stick to her guns on the self-evidently superior Alien Queen.
• I suspect that MLA-aligned heroes have to do a fairly distressing amount of double-think to get by, hence Mina’s learned compartmentalization of who she tells what. Though their relationship is warm on the surface, being in a cult means you never really know who’s safe to confide in and who isn’t. Parent/child relationships are no exception.
• That’s what he’s gotta call me from now on. I approach MLA code names as being chosen when members officially join the Army’s ranks; they’re highly prized, hard-won designations. Hero school is its own gauntlet, however, so both to recognize that effort and to minimize the danger of using the wrong name in the wrong company, most MLA heroes just go by their hero names, rather than having separate code names.

(Lots More) Notes for Mera:

• I’ve long thought it totally ridiculous that the HPSC could carry off the kind of investigation they’d need to unearth all parties in the HPSC, not only in merely three months, but without tipping off a single member who catches wind of said investigation before the investigation catches wind of them. So this includes a bit of supposition on how that looked from the inside.
• Shoki-san…Her name kanji are, in keeping with BNHA’s pun names, something innocuous that are read as shoki,which means ‘secretary’ or 'clerk.’
• …at Public Security. The Public Security Examination Commission is a department in the Ministry of Justice that, among other things, gives the ultimate 'yay’ or 'nay’ on whether an organization meets the criteria for advocation of terrorism that allow the government to step in and curtail the members’ constitutional rights. They’re also the ones who decide how or if to implement the desired solutions of the department that carried out the initial investigations, the Public Security Intelligence Agency. My guess is that the HPSC is under that same Ministry of Justice umbrella; while Caleb Cook went with a different translation than the one used for the real-life Japanese departments, Horikoshi uses the same kanji for “Public Safety” that the IRL “Public Security” departments do: it’s 公安, kouan,in all cases.
• The family registry. Thekoseki,about which I have written before as follows: “The kosekiis a family registry–one is entered into one’s parents’ registry at birth, with all information about the family’s births, deaths, marriages, divorces and adoptions being kept in the same place.  The koseki (…) will also have references to one another, allowing a diligent person to track a family line and its major events back for generations by simply following the paperwork.” I suspect these documents played a major role in the HPSC’s tracking of MLA families, hence Mera getting ahead of the game by having his ancestors’ altered.
• it’s not the worst thing a man could be asked to sacrifice for the cause. There’s one’s life, obviously, but I was particularly thinking here of whichever poor warriors gave their lives to the cause, only to get posthumously offered up to the police as the wicked villains who attacked Deika because the MLA suddenly needed to cover up the League’s involvement.