Chapter 353 Thoughts

These are belated, but also, extremely extensive. I have a lotof thoughts about this chapter. A couple of those thoughts are even positive! I wish more of them were, but I have a lot of issues with, for example, the continued lazy handwave of just how many heroes are still active, and the even lazier characterization shortcuts at a time when the narrative themes would seem to demandthat no villain just gets dismissed as Bad because heroes can’t be bothered to ask basic questions about their motivations.

Hit the jump.

I am so unbelievably weary of the heroes always having all the people they need to do any given thing.

• Fighting literal thousands of trained warriors scattered in bases all across the country?  No big; the heroes have more than enough people!
• All the heavy hitters ran off to fight Machia?  Well, they won’t stop him, but the split in their forces still won’t have enough of an effect for the PLF at the villa to turn the tables.
• Heroes dead or resigning in mass numbers up against a resurgence in villains?  Eh, whatever, there are still more than enough no-names to fight off near-High Ends and explicitly station “dozens” of heroes everywhere they could possibly be needed!

Seriously, why even bother with the “heroes resigning” angle if it’s never really going to matter that they’re short-handed?  Why can’t I watch the heroes have to struggle to overcome a problem with the people and resources they already have on hand, rather than all their plans always coming together to drop them perfectly timed reinforcements and all the cannons and spare prosthetic limbs anyone could ever ask for?

And you know, it’s not like the general shape of things would even have to change overmuch to make things seem marginally more dire!  One simple thing would do it: skew the age range.  If ever so many heroes are dead and/or gone, then just show us more students. 

We already know students have been involved in professional actions, so why do we only ever see the UA kids—and only the ones we know, at that?  Why not show some of those briefly-glimpsed 2-A students?  Do literally any third years exist at UA other than the Big Three?  Where have the Ketsubutsu and Shiketsu kids been in all this?  Maybe make some of those background characters obvious teenagers instead of obvious Pros, and that’d help address the number issue.

Then too, you could get some more drama out of their relative inexperience or insecurity.  Of course, some of the window on that is already gone, since presumably even students whose classes weren’t getting attacked by villains on the regular have now all had work studies, internships, and whatever their parts were in the raids on the PLF—but even still, the mass reduction in the numbers of Pros, on top of the shifting tide of public opinion, would by rights have a psychological impact.

Instead, we’re continually stuck with the Class 1-A kids, a smattering of whatever Bs help the story, and a periodic shot of one of the Big 3 somewhere, and then a pile of Pros, never failing to have just enough people to succeed at whatever they’re doing, and my god, it’s so boring.  Thank god for Toga proactively lassoing her would-be love interest through a portal at the last second so we got anyshake-up on this at all. 

Cripes.  If Hose Face’s judgment is that the heroes were only pretending to be scattered and without unity, what does it say about what the villains are facing, and why should I believe Horikoshi when he tells me that no, really, the heroes totally are stretched thin!

And like, okay, having a bunch of people stationed to protect Machia, that’s a totally fair call.  It’s incredibly obvious that AFO would want Machia back on the field, and that the heroes would really, really not.  But what did Hawks and co. have to sacrifice to station so many people there to guard Machia?  What or who did they have to make the strategic choice to leave underdefended?

We know the police numbers are a bit thin where Ujiko is being kept, so is that going to matter?  Is a villain detachment going to show up to spring Ujiko?  What about Kurogiri?  Is Spinner going to run into enough opposition to stop him, especially since it’s been made so repeatedly clear that All Might and Hawks weren’t really planning for Spinner, much less a mid-sized-kaiju Spinner?  (More on him in a bit.)

And, if AFO is really so S+ Intelligence, did he foresee any of these calls?  It remains deeply weird to me that we had All Might saying he predicted AFO would throw everything he’s got at Deku/One For All a mere handful of chapters removed from AFO saying he never puts all his eggs in one basket; he always has multiple possible routes to take to get to the same end.

On the evidence of the manga, I’m forced to assume that Hawks just tacitly ignored All Might’s opinions and arranged for there to be back-up in multiple locations. If the task force had just taken All Might’s word for it, Machia and Kurogiri’s locations would have had whatever the standard complement of security is and no more. But then why let All Might even have that big triumphant moment about how they totally predicted that AFO would bring his army with him?

And if AFO is so S+ Intelligence, did he in turn predict what the heroes would choose to prioritize? Will there be a single area that he targets that the heroes didn’t already guess that he would? Seriously, for a villain who we’re constantly told is such a spider at the center of the web type, AFO certainly never seems to have counter-moves of his own prepared for when he takes the field.

Alternatively,are the attacks on Machia and Kurogiri’s locations not AFO’s work at all, but Skeptic’s?  Does that mean AFO is actually giving Skeptic a relatively free hand to manage the PLF’s resources, rather than dictating their deployment: you handle your people and I’ll handle mine?  If that’s the case, who on the hero side has got enough of a handle on Skeptic’s tactics to try to outmaneuver him?  The heroes haven’t even managed to disable his communications network!  Come on. Stop just telling us the heroes saw everything coming every chapter and make them have to workfor something for once!

OKAY, with that rant out of my system, let me move on.

I like Mineta nodding in tearful, vehement agreement to Mina’s comment that Todoroki got the job done. 

My favorite aspect of Mineta is that, while he’s prone to envy and poking fun at his classmates, he’s actually extremely invested in them, to the point that he’s reliably one of the most emotional in any given scene involving a previously endangered classmate turning out to be okay.  He’s the one bringing the get-well-soon gift at the hospital; he’s the one who hugs Bakugou; he’s the one who’s always in tears about someone the class was worried about turning out okay. 

It always baffles me somewhat to see fans of the students expressing confusion that Mineta cared about X Student whenever something like this comes up—like, guys, it’s always been that way, even very early on, and it’s only gotten more prominent as the class has gotten less safe.

On Hose Face:

Nice to see he’s got eyes under that mask.  I wonder if we’ll see what he actually looks like under there?  I’m so curious about that big trunk appendage he and Lunch Rush have.  And what’s with the headphones?  I remain interested in anything Horikoshi’s got to give us on him, and any of the rest of the Advisors, and I hope they’ll do anything at all interesting with the page-time they’re obviously coming up on.

However. 

What in god’s name was up with that transparently obvious nod to Midnight?  Surely Midnight was not the onlyhero Hose Face’s group had to overcome the day of the raid, and in the time they’ve been active since?  Why call her out specifically?  What’s the in-character motivation for highlighting that specificdeath?  While it’s easy to imagine Midnight was a fairly divisive hero, I would hardly expect “schoolteacher” to be the part anyone taking issue with her would focus on.  So is it rather UA in general that Hose Face has a beef with?

Or is it, as I suspect, not that he’s got anything against her personally, but rather that none of the UA kids have any way to know who killed Midnight unless her killer just says it out loud within one of their earshots?  Is the only reason he made that comment because Horikoshi could not come up with a single more credible, more elegant way to get the kids that knowledge?  Like, it couldn’t even be deployed as a battle taunt next chapter??

Right now, it just looks like a brute force way to get Mina and Kirishima psyched up for this fight, because god forbid any student should have to engage with Liberation ideology intellectuallywhen we can just throw a body count at it and use that to write it off. 

As if Shigaraki Tomura doesn’t have a body count!  As if Stain didn’t have a body count! And yet, Tomura is seriously engaged with as someone who needs help despite his crimes; we’re allowed to have heroic characters acknowledging that Stain had a point despite his methods. Why can’t we get the same for anyone from the MLA, especially when their point is apparently so compelling that tens of thousands of people across the country and across generations have found it worth dedicating their lives to?

And I don’t know; maybe Horikoshi will surprise me, and Hose Face will lay out some actual accusations against Hero Society that Mina and Kirishima will be called upon to respond to, something that will even get us as far as the “cool motive” part of, “Cool motive; still murder."  Maybe.

I feel like we particularly need that here because what we have right now are two members of the three pairs who failed the practical portion of their mid-term exams, who couldn’t think their way out of what their teacher/principal threw at them.  Mina and Kirishima had a good(-ish) tag team moment against Gigantomachia, so what newchallenge will this bring to the table for them?

More importantly, is whatever it’s got in store worth killing Midnight for?  I mean, hers will still be a death that serves no purpose but to motivate other characters’ development,* but will at least be gooddevelopment?  I have my doubts.

I further remain somewhat confused as to why this character beat is going to Mina. It’s not like the set-up is completelyabsent? Mina is the one who confidently declared that Midnight would be fine when her classmates worried; Mina was among those who found Midnight’s body/were there when she died. Sure, okay.

But Mina doesn’t, to the best of my recollection, have much prior relationship with Midnight. Mina isn’t the one Midnight expressed specific confidence in during the mid-terms. Mina isn’t the one Midnight entrusted dealing with Gigantomachia to. Mina isn’t the student Midnight was thinking of at the very end.

That’sallMomo. So why is Momo—whose plot for this entire series has been about learning to trust her gut and utilize that intelligence and flexible quirk of hers quickly, on the ground, in the moment—stuck doing support for a girl who can’t be bothered to remember her name instead of being out on the field? Hell, if Momo was there, we could even have something go drastically wrong, and there’d be someone there smart enough to roll with it and come up with something. Indeed, I’d expectthat to happen because it’s where I’ve been expecting her arc to be leading all along.

Instead, it’s Mina and Kirishima, and I just don’t know why it’s them. As with so many things about the current set-up, I’m desperately hoping that it’s still the early days, and things will still go to hell in interesting ways that will require some more ingenuity from our ostensible lead characters.

What’s the escort mission Kirishima mentioned?

Where could he possibly have been escorting someone to in the ruins of Jakku?  And why do I get the extremely exhausting feeling that it’s just going to be another tiresome case of the heroes always managing to have all the pieces they need set up in advance of when they need them, while the villains are scrambling to keep up, but for some reason I’m supposed to see the heroes as the underdogs in any situation ever?

What’s up with Sero’s "…”? 

I’ve seen it proposed that it’s just a comic beat because he’s one of the ones who had to get cartoonishly overpowered to show how strong Todoroki was?  But the official translation of Ojiro’s line doesn’t feel like it leads into that?  Nor can I chalk it up to someone who was a little closer to Shouto feeling that brother fighting brother is not something that should be cheered for, regardless of which brother came out on top, as Sero was neither in Shouto’s hospital room in Chapter 298 nor his makeshift dorm room in 342. 

I really have no clue what to make of it, but it strikes me as potentially interesting, especially since Sero strikes me as a bit more sensible and canny than Sato or Ojiro.

(I also liked it because it felt like a very brief part of the chapter that broke up the hype parade of heroes prematurely celebrating a victory I remain unconvinced they’re having to work very hard for.)

Kunieda is very nifty, even if I think he is making some extremely questionable fashion choices vis a vis where he puts a shirt collar and coat lapels.

I like his big creepy red-black flowers.  I do wonder what the motivation is behind “proving his utility to AFO."  A materialistic desire for the things a victorious AFO can offer?  The ideological zeal of a True Believer? Fear that he needs to keep himself on the Demon King’s good side? 

I thought Dictator’s phrasing on a similar note was odd back when we got him. He talked about the securityhe’d gain by bringing Deku in, like he was in some kind of danger if he didn’t, be that a threat to his life or a loss of something he valued. I was frustrated back then that Dictator was such a transparent villainous caricature that an exhausted Midoriya Izuku felt no need to follow up on that hint—here’s hoping Kunieda gets even a little more engagement!

While we’re in the Kunieda scene, let me add that Aoyama would make a more convincing Aesop’s Bat if he’d ever actually wantedto be on AFO’s side to begin with, or made a choice to come clean to the heroes because he thought it’d be more beneficial to him, as opposed to him being discovered inadvertently through no choice or action of his own.  His lack of agency continues to undermine his potentially interesting situation.  Well, at least him peeking out from behind the ever-delightful Fat Gum is cute.

Spinner’s section hurts my soul. 

God.  The hand reaching for his face, not with AFO’s usual forceful, commanding dominance, but more a terrible, and terribly gentle, intimacy. Spinner’s small, regretful smile.  God. 

My flailing about the way Horikoshi drew AFO and Spinner in That One Panel aside, I liked Spinner’s outside viewpoint on Dabi, and how you could sayhe’s just wrong about it—Dabi’s pretty flagrantly gunning for the murder-suicide with Endeavor, after all!—but at the same time, that very desire hasdriven Dabi to survive, doesfill him with passion and purpose in ways Spinner has always had to look outside himself to find even a semblance of. 

And maybe Spinner was doing and would have continued to do better with his feelings for Shigaraki, but circumstances, as well as Shigaraki and Spinner’s own flawed decisions, have split them apart from each other, so Spinner can’t really fall back on his feelings for Shigaraki either, at least not and feel at all good about it.  I sympathize, because I am also in quite a lot of pain over it.

I consider myself about halfway to being right on the money about Shouji when I called this back in November, but there are a lot of caveats in place before I can consider myself remotely happy about it.

I’ve written a fair amount about my concerns about Shouji foiling Spinner, but it occurred to me recently that there’s a worryingly large chance that my fears are exactly on point, and the reason for it will prove to be a cultural thing. 

To wit, my Western individualistic lens says that, no, it’s not Shouji’s job to wear a mask his entire life to save ignorant people from nothing worse than passing discomfort.  In a more community-minded society like Japan, though, would the perspective be different?  I have a sizeable concern that we’re going to get Shouji’s choice lionized, that the message will be, yes, choosing to make people uncomfortable when you could easily make a "minor” sacrifice like wearing a mask when you go out is breeching meiwaku,so Shouji is correct and kind and noble, and the heteromorphs raising hell because of the way they’re pre-judged are just being selfish.

I desperately want Horikoshi to prove me wrong on this.  I hope he will.  But good god, Shouji thinking about how proud he is to be in the same class as a kid putting himself through the meat grinder because of Family Duty is notfilling me with confidence.

Shouji. Shouji, you are carrying the weight of one of the only Societal Issues in this story that Horikoshi would have a really hard time trying to somehow make All For One’s Fault. Please, please,pleaseaddress that issue with a response that doesn’t boil down to, “Hurting people is wrong. Just because people mistreat us because of their baseless prejudice doesn’t give us the right to make trouble over it. All we can do is try to prove them wrong and suffer in silence in the meantime.”

All my thoughts on Dabi and his glowing circle can be found here.

All except one: “Vmmm”is certainly not a very biological-sounding sound effect, is it?  I looked up the Japanese sound effect there (it transliterates to kiiii) on manga SFX translation site The Jaded Network, which suggested that the kana there typically represent a high-pitched squeaking or screeching sound, as of a chair being pushed back when someone stands up or a car slamming the brakes.  That definitely sounds more like a sound ice could plausibly make than vmmm, but as before I remain mostly content to just see where the story’s going with whatever’s going on there.

I love that AFO is so known for mindgames that Hawks is like, “Oh, here it fucking comes.”

About which a post on Chapter 354 would probably be a more appropriate place to expound.

That’s what I’ve got for 353. What do people think: should I keep doing these chapter posts? I obviously (very obviously) won’t always have this much to say, but I’ve been getting more asks of late about current events, so I can try to keep up these big round-up posts if there’s interest.

I’m not super into the prediction game—I’m much more interested in observation and reflection—but I suspect I can usually muster up at least a few talking points. And I’m not completely unswayed by the modest bragging rights available when one notices+publically comments on a weird discrepancy months before the manga calls active attention to it. (For what of the manga remains, anyway.)

Let me know! Or that one anon can just keep messaging me asking for my chapter thoughts; whichever works.

(* Which I only can’t call a fridging because most of the characters who’ve had really strong reactions to it thus far have also been women.)

MLA May AUs (Parts 9+10/31)

Runningverybehind, but it’s being a real all-timer of A Month. I will get through these, though probably on a somewhat more lax timetable than initially planned so I can get to some languishing asks (and also talk about the most recent chapter, maybe).

Today’s fills are both very short; I have two longer ones finished, but first need to circle back to finish a few prompts I skipped over.

Intro Post

5/9: we can breathe in space, they just don’t want us to escape

+

5/10: destabilise, divide, or label

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

we can breathe in space, they just don’t want us to escape

“Why d’you keep your face covered up all the time, kid?”

Shouji starts at the question.  Lots of people wonder—he’s caught the lingering gazes and the speculative stares—but for someone to just ask outright, is…  Well, the last person who did was Hado-senpai, who immediately pivoted away to Todoroki instead of listening to his answer.

Gang Orca is—probably not like Hado-senpai.  Gang Orca goes on staring at him, eyes narrowed nearly closed, his red irises a spot of bloody color against the white markings around his eyes.

“A long time ago, there was… A little girl.  She saw my face and it—upset her.”  The words come slow and halting, unaccustomed to the open air.

“Don’t see why that’s any fault of yours.”  Gang Orca tilts his head to one side, the line of his mouth just visible past his high collar.  “Did somebody ask you to?”

Shouji shakes his head.  “No, I just—think it would be better to not…”

“Make waves?”

“Upset children.”  Is Gang Orca, who makes appearances at aquariums around the country multiple times a month, telling him not to worry about what people think of his appearance?

…Well, he is on the villainous hero ranking.

Gang Orca makes a sharp clicking sound, his version of a snort; the vocalization accompanies a short, silent wave from his sonic burst, a passing ghost of echolocation felt in Shouji’s inner ears.

“I get not wanting to upset kids,” he says, though his tone is nothing like a concession.  “But masking up like that just teaches ‘em that covering up is a fair thing to ask people like you and me.  It’s just a face.  Lotsa different faces in the world.”  He shakes his head; the movement tugs his heavy cape in tow, shifting it over his shoulders.  “They can’t go around expecting everyone whose face they don’t like to wear some kinda modesty veil.”

The words cut deep.  Defensiveness rises, a reflexive hurt that makes Shouji want to argue the point.  His family never told him this; Ectoplasm-sensei never told him this.  He wants to be a hero people can rely on, not one who scares the people he turns up to help.

He breathes through it, aware of his hands clenching into fists.

Gang Orca—who has not looked away from him once, the whorled patterns in the whites of his eyes barely moving—grins at the sight of it, or at least moves his mouth in a way that shows his teeth.

“You can get mad about it all you want, Tentacole.  You just oughta ask yourself if you’re willing to be the example people point to when they start talking about what’s fair and what’s not.  For as long as we’ve still got heroes, that’s one of the things heroes have to be.  Examples.”

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

destabilise, divide, or label

“Purpose in coming today?”

“I’m really looking forward to hearing the Grand Commander speak!  I’ve only ever seen him in pictures, so—”

“Go ahead.  Purpose in coming today?”

“It’s expected of me as a base commander.  …But of course, I also anticipate—”

“Mm-hmm.  Go ahead.  Purpose in coming today?”

“To put a bullet in that smarmy bastard Hanabata Koku’s head.”

Testament looks up from the endless list of conference attendees.  In the frozen moment of realization, the color is already visibly draining from the face of the man standing across the table from him.  Before he can do more than open his mouth to fumble for a lie—and definitely before he has time to move his hand towards wherever his gun is concealed—Aster has cleared the table in a rush of purple and black and is bearing the man to the floor.

“Thank you for your honesty,” Testament says, grinning.  “I was starting to think my meta-ability was being wasted here.”

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Notes for Shouji/Gang Orca:

Probably more than any of the others I’ll write for this project, this one is an even split on which character it’s “for” as an MLA AU.

I had the prompt marked for Shouij from the start, as it’s a shpiel I’ve been waiting to hear about him since pretty much the moment I read about his backstory. I’d initially conceived of it as coming from Shouji himself, aimed at some probably-Deku classmate, but I realized I’d need to take the plunge on describing his mouth, and I’d rather wait to get it in canon rather than get jossed in extremely short order. So then it became a matter of deciding who’d be willing to confront him about it, and Gang Orca—heteromorph, aquatic traits, scares children, extremely good at acting the part of a villain, andShouji’s work study mentor—was the obvious candidate.

Rambly Notes for Nemoto:

Cheating a bit on this one, in that it’s really just more of an AU I’ve already written, one in which Nemoto gets picked up by Curious instead of Overhaul. You can find that story here, if you like. I like Testament-version Nemoto because he’s still just as insufferable as Hassaikai-version Nemoto.

Aster is Toga’s No. 2, as pictured and briefly written about here. I picked her because I wanted an advisor who seemed physically capable of doing the violent stuff (so preferably someone from the more front-line regiments), as well as one who had an even enough temperament to handle both the boredom of a potentially uneventful posting and Nemoto’s obnoxious attitude (so some of the more overly-serious or rowdy types were also out).

Dealing with Nemoto’s attitude would be a particular demand today because stationing Nemoto with a list of attendees at the check-in point for a big conference feels very menial to him, and Nemoto hates doing menial work because he’s Important and should be with the other Important People. So he’s happy at the end of this because he proved his usefulness and now he gets to go help interrogate some unfortunate who is probably going to wind up buried in the woods within the day.

For some reason, Trumpet is the one whose life I imagine to be most frequently in danger. There’s the politician thing, of course, and one for a probably fairly radical party by the standards of the Hero Society norm, but also, he’s just kind of smarmy, and has that whole romantic entanglement with the Grand Commander that people probably had Opinions about. (Also, he’s clearly the one who would look most attractive when rumpled from Imperilment. This is probably not incidental to my repeated desire to threaten his life.)

MLA May AUs (Parts 7+8/31)

Intro Post

5/7: come join the feast

+

5/8: keep it on ice

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

come join the feast

The first three days after the disastrous raid were complete chaos, perhaps even worse than the raid itself had been.  That, at least, had been a mission: one knew that there would be risks, could be unforeseen turns.  School life, however, was meant to be predictable, routine.

It was now anything but.

A print-out had come to the 1-A Heights dorm that morning bearing the announcement that, effective immediately and indefinitely, students would now be helping the UA cafeteria staff to prepare meals for both the students themselves and the refugees.  It was to boost communal morale, encourage empathy, and help with the strain on school staff and resources.  A roster had been attached, and so, that afternoon, Ojiro had dutifully reported to the cafeteria alongside Iida and Uraraka.

They met up with Kendo, Shoda and Tokage and, before they had time to do more than exchange greetings, were swept into the kitchens by the cafeteria staff, absent the one Ojiro had most been expecting.

“Where’s Lunch Rush?” Uraraka whispered when she and Ojiro wound up sharing a counter to scoop rice and slice carrots.  Ojiro shrugged and shook his head, frowning.

“I don’t know,” he whispered back.  “Do you think something happened?”

“Wouldn’t it have said so in the announcement…?”  Uraraka leveled another scoop of grains before pouring it into the bowl of the biggest rice cooker Ojiro had ever seen.

“I don’t mind helping at all,” he said, feeling petty even as he said it.  “It’s just—is our cooking really going to help morale more than his would?”

“It—”  She broke off as Shoda came over, nudging over a foot stool and stepping up to the counter as well, laden down with onions.

The three continued working in silence for another minute before before Shouda spoke, his voice quiet and level.

“He was arrested.” The knife came down against the cutting board and rocked up again.  “Lunch Rush.”

Uraraka slapped one hand over her mouth to muffle her gasp as Ojiro yelped, “Arrested?!”

Sound in the kitchen died; in the horrible silence, he could feel every gaze turn on them.  Shoda stared at the knife and doggedly continued cutting.

“Uraraka-san!” scolded one of the kitchen ladies, tone harsh against the contours of the sucking, too-attentive quiet.  “Don’t touch your mouth while cooking!  Go and wash your hands again!”

“Yes, ma’am!”  Guiltily, Uraraka dashed off toward the sinks.

Shoda waited for the clang and clatter of food preparation to resume before he spoke again.  “Yes.  In the raids. He was a sympathizer.”  His voice had gone hard now.  “Shishida overheard some of the third-years talking about it yesterday. They say he had a brother in the Liberation Front.”

Ojiro swallowed, trying to find his words.  I never thought—he always seemed so…

If food’s made with heart, it always tastes good.  The line came back to him all at once, though he couldn’t think where he’d heard it—a TV show?  A comic? One of those cooking programs his grandma watched?  And Lunch Rush’s food had always been sogood.  And…

And Ojiro had never thought about it much beyond the general sense of nebulous pride, that he went to a school that was served food by the Cook Hero.

He looked at the pot of rice left behind on the counter, looked around at the kitchen workers, throwing themselves into making bigger meals than they’d probably ever had to make before, for the people coming to UA for shelter, hundreds already and more every day.

“Watch your hands,” Shoda said more gently and, when Ojiro looked at him, gave him a crooked smile. “We need all the hands we’ve got.”

Ojiro swallowed down the sting of self-recrimination, nodded, and got back to the carrots.

  —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Content Warnings: I’ll be upfront about this one: it’s Rei.  Therefore, expect talk of the Todoroki family situation, references to domestic abuse, murder, the insufficiencies of the legal system, and the early stages of cult recruitment targeting the vulnerable.

This fill features Twice’s number 3, this gal: 

keep it on ice

“He’d have hunted me to the ends of the earth if I’d taken the children, called me a kidnapper, mentally unstable.  I couldn’t go back to my parents; if I’d gone to the police, word would have gotten out. I just didn’t know what to do anymore.” Rei curled her fingers around the warm cup of honey-laden tea.

“I killed mine,” her host confided, and leaned over to pat her hand.  At Rei’s flinch and shocked look, Kairiki Kanai shrugged her sloping shoulders, smile unperturbed.  “He was threatening me and my little girl.  It was self-defense.”  A beat of silence, then, “Proactive self-defense.”

“You’re not…  There wasn’t any—legal trouble?”  Rei pulled the cup back across the table and held it near her face.  The steam and the scent of spearmint rolled over her cheeks.  The kitchen felt at once homey and too full of things that could become weapons.  She gripped the cup tighter.

“I had good lawyers, my dear.  People who want to change how toothless the laws are against domestic abuse are in this country.  They heard about my case and offered their help.”  Apparently unoffended, Kanai climbed back to her feet and returned to the stove.  “You never thought about it?”

“The laws?”

“Self-defense.”  She aimed a smile over her shoulder; it dimpled her cheeks.  Rei’s unease didn’t lessen, but a morbid fascination began to stir in her as well.

“He’s the—a hero,” she corrected herself.  While Kanai had been nothing but welcoming since Rei had arrived at her home after being secreted away from the shelter, she still didn’t know Rei’s real name—she seemed perfectly content to go on using the alias Rei had given.  But there wasn’t really anyone who wouldn’t know who the Number 2 Hero was; Enji had held the position for over two decades, after all. And it was—nice, to be someone other than Rei for now, even if the woman going by that name still wept inside her, paralyzed with guilt over the children she still didn’t know how to help.  “I could never…”

“Did he eat your food? Lie beside you at night?”  Kanai pulled the lid off the pot and peered at the simmering gyoza nabe inside; the smell of garlic and dashi washed through the room on the rising steam.  When Rei didn’t answer, she clicked her tongue and replaced the lid.  “Ah, I’m sorry; don’t mind me.  I just hate to see people thinking of themselves as so helpless.”

“Aren’t we?” Rei found herself asking, the words pulled out of her on a plaintive sigh.

“Not if we don’t want to be, my dear.  And make no mistake, anyone who tells you different is no one you should be trusting.”

 —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

(Excessive) Notes for Lunch Rush: 

• Helping in the cafeteria: In Japan, in basically all elementary schools and most middle schools, kids prepare and serve their own meals to their classmates in rotating lunch team assignments.  It’s less universally practiced in high schools, apparently, but definitely still a relatively common practice.  UA doesn’t do that–UA very prominently has a famous chef/hero that does all that for them.  There’s likewise never any suggestion that they clean their own classrooms, which is a near-universal thing in Japanese high schools.  This all kind of contributes to the feeling of UA as this elite school where the students don’t have to do plebe work like serving meals and cleaning.  We know they’ve been helping around the school since the war aftermath, though, so I wanted to look at a specific way that could have manifested if we ever got to see more of that material during the time Deku was away.
• First day teams: My first impulse was to include Shouto and Shishida in their respective class groups, but I thought that the first day should include both class presidents so they can get an idea of how things work and relay the information back to their classes; also that the cafeteria staff should be able to iron out how to incorporate the student help without having to also wrangle e.g. a kid who is notably bad at cooking and a kid who is covered in hair.  For the same reason, the first kids chosen besides the class presidents are all fairly mid-grade on their energy levels.  Not too high energy, not too low, just steady and reliable.  …But I do still like the comic image of Shishida covered head to toe in masks and hairnets.  He’ll just have to come later in the rotation, once the routine is set enough that the staff can start dealing with personalities/quirks that make cafeteria work more complex.
• Go and wash your hands again!:  If you’ve never done food preparation or service in a professional/commercial environment, they really are huge sticklers about this.  Which is not to say that it’s going to get properly done every time, but certainly if an appropriately exacting manager spots you touching your face in the kitchen and then not immediately moving towards a sink, you will probably get barked at.
• They say he had a brother in the Liberation Front:  Please look at these two and tell me I’m wrong.

• Also, I remain forever salty that the series never touches on how daily life is going to be impacted, not by the failure of heroes, not by the escape of a bunch of violent criminals, but by the arrest of 115,000seemingly normal, everyday people, some number of whom were in positions of influence in civilian infrastructure they can no longer fill because of being, you know, arrested.  Lunch Rush makes a good example of the kind of person In Your Neighborhood who just gets disappeared by the government one day and how that looks to the people left behind.
• If food’s made with heart, it always tastes good:  I don’t know if there’s a standardized aphorism for this, but it’s a sentiment I see around all the time in anime and elsewhere, applied to food, to music, to art.  The idea is that if something is beautiful or affecting or delicious enough, it cannot possibly have been made by a bad person; that if you put your feelings into your art, You Will Surely Be Able To Reach People.  Well, there’s no falsity in MLA!Lunch Rush’s cooking, and that’s surprising to kids who have not yet learned to recognize that their opponents have motivations beyond Evil For Evil’s Sake.

(Rambly) Notes for Rei: 

• MLA!Rei, obviously, doesn’t get into the MLA via the quirk supremacy vector like Geten.  Rather, her angle is that the laws limiting quirk use to heroes-only warps society, influencing everyday people to think of themselves as helpless, pitting heroes against each other in competition for limited resources and limited public attention, leading them to prioritize all the wrong parts of the job.  It’s a similar sentiment as Shigaraki’s manifesto at Jakku, but tracking the rot back to the quirk use laws, rather than heroes.  If everyone could use their quirks freely, if there wasn’t this dreadful ranking system, then her husband wouldn’t have been so obsessed with proving that he was number one–after all, he would have had no metric to compare himself against!  (Whether or not she’s rightabout this is largely immaterial; what’s important is getting another warrior for the cause, and one with sucha compelling story, too.)
• Kairiki Kanai, meaning something to the tune of Monstrous Strength Housewife.  While I don’t think she’s lying about her deceased husband, I do think her account is somewhat self-serving.  It was an extremely premeditated murder, I suspect.  I haven’t decided on her codename, though my sis-in-law’s suggestion of Ursadoes have some appeal.  Kanai’s daughter is the other bindi gal, the one with the out-of-control sweater neck who most recently cropped up in that panel of escaped PLF types.
• The laws about domestic abuse in Japan classify it as a civil issue, not a criminal one.  Domestic abuse being a keep-it-in-the-family thing, a man’s prerogative if his wife isn’t obeying him, or even not being an issue at all because men in Japan aren’t “violent” like Western men: all are views that activist groups have spent decades struggling against.  The first law against domestic abuse was passed only in 2001 (the US’s was in 1994, by the way, so not much better, though the US’s law also made a number of domestic abuses actual criminal offenses, rather than civil ones), and while it’s been expanded on a number of times since, there are still some pretty gaping holes in it, including the continued lack of criminal consequences for offenders–right now, it’s all still focused on fines and restraining orders and the like, not jail time.
• Horikoshi, of course, is not obligated to hew to real life law in his fantasy-future Japan setting, especially on behavior he clearly portrays as wrong!  Nor are Western fans obligated to swallow their discomfort because of a handwave of “it’s just the Japanese culture,” especially when Japanese activists are still working hard today to improve this state of affairs.  But it makes for valuable context all the same, especially when the main characters involved–Rei and Enji–are both older and have very Traditional sensibilities, exactly the sort of people that activists say are least likely to believe domestic abuse warrants a police report.
• As I’ve said before, I think the MLA sets themselves up to catch people falling through the social safety nets–ex-cons, abuse victims, orphans, the homeless.  They think of it as being there for people who the current system cannot or will not save, and they really do believe that!  But it’s predatory recruiting all the same, going on in all the places Heroes are least likely to intervene.

MLA May AUs (Part 5 + 6/31)

Intro Post

5/5: sorry, you’re not a winner

+

5/6: okay, time for plan b

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Content Notes: Language; Sports Festival violence but they’re even younger; Bakugou Mitsuki’s A+ Parenting.

sorry, you’re not a winner

“Why do I still have to fight in the baby brackets?”  The question from the backseat is a sharp, annoyed complaint.  Mitsuki rolls her eyes.

“Katsuki, you’re eleven.  You still area—”

“Now, now,” Masaru breaks in hurriedly as he eases the car into the drop-off lane for the front gate.  “I’m sure—”

“It’s stupid!” Katsuki insists.  “I’ve won them three years in a row!  Destro even wrote that kids are stronger than grown-ups.”

“That’s not quitewhat—”

“Heused to have kids fight their parents,” comes the rebellious mutter, and a kick to the back of Mitsuki’s seat.  “We should bring thatback.”

“Time for all brats to get out of the car now!” Mitsuki says with a nitroglycerine brightness as Masaru pulls up to the curb.  She all but shoves Katsuki out of the door; he goes, complaining the whole time, bursts and flares sparking around his hands.

They both sigh once the kid vanishes up the ramp towards the turnstiles, joining a flood of other children under the eyes of badged event staff.  Masaru slides the car back into the flow of traffic, heading for the reserved parking.

“…You didn’t tell him about Geten?” he asks at length.

Mitsuki flips down the passenger side vanity mirror and pats at her hair.  “Life’s full of surprises, dear.”  She tweaks a few strands back into place and smiles firmly at her reflection.  “He’s overdue for a few.”

-

Katsuki blows through the first four rounds just like he blew through his local qualifiers.  Older kids, younger kids, none of them give him a fight worth a damn.  He’s soover this.  Almost ninety years, the Liberation Army’s been around, and they still won’t bend for letting kids betterthan everyone else get where they deserve to be.  He might as well have stayed at home and watched the U.A. Sports Festival, for all the surprises the children’s tourney’s got to offer. 

At least the TVs in the breakroom are playing the adult brackets, too.  Bakugou spends his recovery time between rounds glued to the screen and comparing himself to what will, in five years, be his competition—finally, actualwarriors, people who’ve seen real fights.

He still isn’t impressed with most of them, but at least it’ll be a new crowd.

Round Five is exactly who he figured it’d be, exactly who it always is, and Katsuki sneers at the white-haired figure pacing out onto the field.

“You again.  Why can’t you lose a round early for once, you shitty yuki-onna?  Don’t you think everyone’s getting bored of watching me hand you your ass every year?”  He trash-talks because you gotta, and because even if Geten does put up a good fight before he goes down, he still doesgo down.  Goes practically feral every year, and every year, goes down.  It serves him right for being so close with the Grand Commander when he can’t even win the kiddy brackets, but still, Katsuki’s in a bad mood and ready to get this over with so they can get on to watching the realbrackets, and he can watch Dad put in the order for the sneakers he picked out as his victory prize last week.

Geten—three years older, and he still loses every time; Katsuki doesn’t know how he even keeps showing his face at this thing—sneers back.  “Just as overconfident as always.  You’re disgraceful.”

“Keep telling yourself that, Daddy’s Boy.”

“Hero apologist.”

The starter pistol fires, and they’re already moving.

It takes him too long to notice what’s wrong.

Just like every year, the first thing Geten’s gotta do is keep distance long enough to pull in ice from the cups of the audience and the concession stand machines.  Just like every year, he does.  His flying’s steadier than ever this year, and Katsuki’s still working on his—if this were a realfight, Geten could draw this out a lot longer by keeping more distance, but a vertical ring-out is still a ring-out, and he can’t keep farther away than Katsuki can launch himself.

Rattle his dumb ice dragons apart with blasts of hot concussive force, dodge any ice that he can’t get a hand on or burst before it reaches him, and just keep doing that until every cube is just so much water seeping into the ground.  Geten might be a better flier, but Katsuki’s getting bigger and stronger every year, so every year, he can push himself more, go longer and longer without starting to stagger from muscle burn and dehydration.

This year, the ice doesn’t stop coming.  The sculptures get blasted apart, but they don’t get any smaller when they put themselves back together.

It makes sense that Geten’s getting stronger too, but they’re in the same venue as always, the stadium in Re-Destro’s Mount Nowhere hometown.  Did the Grand Commander have more ice machines put in?  Is this favoritism?  Or is Geten’s range getting better?  Is he pulling from outside the stadium now?

The ice keeps coming.

Katsuki blasts and ducks and leaps and blasts and rolls and blasts some more.  He throws a glance at the jumbotron counter—almost ten minutes and it’s still going up; what the hell—then snaps his head back around just in time to intercept a long, serpent-shaped volley.

“You’re slowing down.”

It keeps coming.  The next one catches him from behind, and he tries to flip out of it, somersault back into standing, but his arm folds beneath him, leaving him flat on his back with an iceberg falling out of the sky aimed right at him.

He gets his hands up just in time, unleashing a full force blast to blow it away.  Ice shatters and goes everywhere, trailing melting water.  Gaze darting from one tumbling shard to the next, looking for the angle the next attack will come from, Katsuki’s eye catches on one liquid streamer.

It’s almost all water.  Geten can’t control water; that’s not what his meta-ability is and meta-abilities don’t just change.

And then a cloudy fragment of ice hits it from the side, goes solid white, and everything around it freezes.  This close to his face, Katsuki can feelthe temperature drop.

What the fuck.  What the fuck?!  Katsuki scrambles back to his feet just as the huge hand of ice snatches for him.

“What the fuck?!” he howls.  “You’re cheating!”

“No one’s cheating.  I just changed.” Above him, Geten’s got the hood up, so all Katsuki can see is those glowing eyes, but he can hearthe shit grinning as he answers, “It’s my win, Explosion.”

-

Masaru covers his face with one hand.  Even from the stands, he can hear the profanity.

“I am going to kick that kid’s ass for talking like that in front of everyone,” Mitsuki says beside him.

“Well, some frustration is understandable.”  The voice cuts in smoothly from the side, and both of them snap to attention.  “But he’s putting up an amazing fight, as always.”

Re-Destro waves aside their salutes and looks down towards the event, where Katsuki dangles in the air, arms pinned to his sides by the block of ice that at this point only barely resembles a fist.  He thrashes and yells, but the only sparks from his hands are sputtering and erratic, and the match counter stopped several seconds ago.

“You didn’t warn him about Geten’s evolution?” the Grand Commander asks lightly, and Mitsuki squares her shoulders.

“Our Katsuki was getting too proud,” she answers.  “Losing sight of the bigger picture.  He was overdue for something like this, and in the long run, it’ll be good for him.”  She pauses, a rare hesitation during which Re-Destro nods understanding, then continues.  “If I can ask, Grand Commander—what actually caused it?  The rumor mill’s been going crazy.”

“Ah.”  Re-Destro looks briefly abashed, rubbing at his nose with one knuckle.  “Well…  We had a small accident back in November.  A burn that needed attention.  There wasn’t enough ice to make a proper icepack, so Geten…  Changed the circumstances.”

“His burn, or someone else’s?”

“The latter.”

Mitsuki nodded.  “That’s why. Katsuki needs to learn who he’s fighting for.”

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Content Notes: Paranoid anti-government conspiracy theorists aren’t much fun to have as parents.

This fill features the PLF Advisor I affectionately refer to as Taser Face, this guy:

ok, time for plan b

The government tracked lightning users, that was the problem.  They were in high demand, not for being heroes, but for civil work, infrastructure stuff that looked boring as hell but paid like crazy.  Being even semi-good at grounding charges—much less being able to conduct them—meant you had pamphlets showing up in the mailbox practically the day you turned fourteen, incentive offers encouraging you to think about your future, your education, your “civic duty.”

Denki knew what his duty was, and it wasn’t to keep the gears of an oppressive society turning for a few more years before the Meta Liberation Army revolutionized it.  Not that the MLA didn’t want people in infrastructure, too, but…

“They use wiretaps,” Denki’s father used to mutter conspiratorially.  “They read your mail.  They’d chain you to the generators if they could get away with it, and seducing people with money is how they got as close as they can.”

The whole “become a lightning-themed hero instead” idea hadn’t gone over much better, obviously.  If Denki’s father had his way, the whole family would just live in the woods with no mailbox and train all day long.

His uncle—Mom’s older brother—had come to the rescue half a year later.

-

“Hey, throw it here!”

Galvanize pounded a fist into his open palm, then spread his hands out in front of him.  One of Denki’s cousins—they’d all been not-unsympathetically chucking handfuls of electricity and insults at him to recapture his attention every time it had strayed to  the town hall building—caught the lightning ball they’d been playing catch with and hurled it at his father like he was trying for a speed record.

The man caught it bare-handed then shook it out, sparks crawling down the backs of his hands and dispersing through his fingers.

“Got it,” he announced, and aimed a sharp grin at Denki that said, Like there was ever any doubt.  “If you think you’re up for it.”

Denki dropped all pretenses of caring about the game and dashed over.

“False identity,” turned out to be the answer.  “It’d mean moving in with some people we got up in Saitama.  They’ve got a space they need filled with a lightning meta; we got you.”

“I’ll do it.”  Denki didn’t hesitate; didn’t look for more than a second at his dad pushing his way out the door and stalking off towards the parking lot without a backward glance.

Cable TV.  Internet access.  Video games developed after 2145.  Trendy stores.  Modernity. How was a guy supposed to help bring liberation and the future to a backwards world when he didn’t even know what the present looked like?  The world was opening up in front of him, and no way was he gonna miss it.

“S’gonna mean not much chance to call home,” Galvanize warned.  “Your dad doesn’t want—”

“I’ll do it.”

-

Two years later, the world collapsed back into itself.  His friends were behind him.  Midnight-sensei ran alongside him.  And his uncle was striding out to the front of the crowd spilling out of the Villa, eyes locked on Denki’s, Amplivolt in hand.  He grinned—his old sharp grin, which hadn’t changed a bit, though his eyes weren’t unsympathetic.

Denki swallowed down the hard knob of fear in his throat; he blinked back stinging tears of panic and denial. He pounded a fist into his open palm, then spread his hands out in front of him.

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Notes for Bakugou:

• Destro Classic would like to stress that the mock battles he staged between parents and children featured adultchildren and he does not endorse staging live combat between grade-schoolers.
• Yuki-onna:Snow woman, among the better known Japanese youkai. Classically a killer in wintery times and high altitudes, but has a softer side in some stories, especially more modern ones.
• KatsukiwantedAll Might sneakers. He’s still an All Might fan, which is a complicated thing for him to navigate here, as you might imagine–hence Geten calling him a hero apologist. Masaru said he wasn’t allowed to pick hero merch as a reward for winning a Meta Liberation Army event, however.
• I suspect the tourneys (child and adult) have some intentional overlap with the U.A. Sports Festival. The U.A. Sports Festival has been said to have taken the place of the Olympics in HeroAca!Japan, and the MLA thinks that’s elitist garbage. They also don’t want too many of their own getting emotionally invested in hero students. For both reasons, they “counterprogram” with their own quirk-on-quirk showdowns.
• I have RD’s hometown as being somewhere up in the mountains in Nara, which is only something like 27% inhabitable land. Lots of room in that remaining 73% to build a village that the government mostly leaves alone because it seems to get on okay and it’s too much of a pain in the ass to get people up there anyway.
• Izuku is probably not in Katsuki’s life anymore in this AU. Is Geten a good replacement…? Well, they certainly push each other to br stronger, anyway! Just don’t ask about their moral development.

Notes for Kaminari:

• If Horikoshi doesn’t want to tell me about the alleged lucrative non-Hero jobs that account for there being so few lightning-powered heroes, I guess I’ll just have to make it up myself.
• Galvanize in my headcanon is a father of three and consequently resolutely unimpressed with Teenage Drama. He’s from the same hometown as Re-Destro and Trumpet.
• I also like the idea of Kaminari getting tangled with the MLA because he likes war novels with romantic elements+faddish cool things, and the wild popularity of the Destro memoir fits both of those criteria. This idea fit the prompt better, however.

MLA May AUs (Parts 3+4/31?)

Intro Post

5/3: you’re lost in the labyrinth

+

5/4: no sweat, no tears, no guilt

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Content Warning: Accidental death, harassment.

you’re lost in the labyrinth

It starts with blood on your hands, a sticky wetness you can smell but can’t see.

No.  Maybe it ends there.  Backtrack, turn the corner.

It starts with a power outage, a lit bedroom plunged into black, as if you’d blinked and gone blind.

Still not quite right.  Try again.

Maybe it starts with the fact that Dark Shadow was never like other quirks.  Usually, quirks start small.  Nearly harmless, no matter what their potential may be.  A quirk is like a muscle, after all, and children’s muscles are so weak.

But then there are quirks that don’t play by the rules.  Unique quirks, mysteries assembled from odds and ends of the genetic cloth.  Quirks that draw on resources beyond just a six-year-old’s tiny body.  Quirks unchained from the normal linear path of improvement or regression.

Quirks like Dark Shadow.

It starts with Dark Shadow, perhaps, and all the ways people misjudge him.

Your parents are out that night, enjoying dinner and an avant-garde play for their wedding anniversary.  If they were home, things might have ended differently.  They would know where to find the flashlights, would know to grab the flood lantern.

They told the sitter where to find these things before they left.  But the sitter is fifteen, her mind on other things, expecting no trouble, because really, how much trouble could one little shadow, teary-eyed and hiding beneath your elbow from the foyer’s overhead light, possibly cause?

Ah, and here’s this ending again, blood in the dark.

But it’s not the ending it seems—a great deal comes afterward.  Screaming and flashing lights, a violent whirl of people in costumes trying and failing to subdue Dark Shadow, until finally comes a hero wreathed in flames bright enough to burn the night away.

Everything is exposed.

Everything except your path, which twists awry, leading you into a labyrinth of court rooms, social workers, your mother grimly sending you back inside when you ask her what she’s scrubbing off the walls of your house.

Your father, from whom you inherited the shape of your face if not the color of your plumage, goes missing.  The police suggest in a back-handed way that he left (and who could blame him); your mother will believe otherwise (monster, said the writing on your walls, and carrion crow) until her dying breath.

You can’t talk to Dark Shadow anymore: the connection is still there, but to the best efforts of court orders and back-up generators, the darkness is exiled, and all Dark Shadow’s strength with it.  You aren’t allowed outside past sunset; you sleep with the lights on, a blindfold the only concession granted by your now-eternal day.

You change schools.  It doesn’t matter.

You change neighborhoods.  It doesn’t help.

No matter what, it always seems to go back to that night—to the blood in the dark.  And what you don’t dare tell anyone is, I wish I could go back.  I miss him.  I miss him so much.

But this, too, is not the ending, just time lost squinting against the unforgiving scrutiny of the light.

The exit, when you first stumble across it, goes unnoticed.  A reporter, one whose face sticks with you because you like the black sclera of her eyes and the cool blue of her skin.  There were so many reporters at first, and maybe she was even among them, but the news cycle turns ever onward.  What makes her stand out even more than her eyes is her timing: three full years after that night, she contacts your mother with a request for an interview.

“You poor thing,” she says directly to Dark Shadow when you meet, and shock shivers down the bond.  “It’s not your fault you were afraid.  And how short-sighted, to keep your wings clipped like this.”

You don’t know it at the time, when you’re staring at the woman with wide eyes and a stuttering heartbeat (another beginning, albeit a much more embarrassing one), but this statement both instantly endears Kizuki Chitose to your mother, while also striking her to paranoia at the unaccustomed kindness.

Life goes on.  At the time, you fail to recognize her for the exit she is. Everything changes when her article goes to print.

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

no sweat, no tears, no guilt

Content Warning: Gore, Creature Rejection Clan, hate crime violence (past and attempted), referenced child abandonment. This fill guest-stars this delightful fellow, who I’ve been saying for ages that I’ll eventually write something about:

Looking around in the aftermath, Sugar counted bodies: three people in black robes and skull masks, three people whose builds matched the guys who’d spotted him at the convenience store and tailed him to the pit stop.  Two of them lay frozen, dead mid-convulsion.  Their mouths hung open, filled with white spittle and Sugar’s own clumpy secretions, which had eaten right through the hoods.   A low, wet sizzling noise said the dental records were not going to be any help to anyone who happened across the bodies.

The third man was still hanging in there—literally, speared in three places to the trunk of an ancient camphor laurel by the kid’s branches and choking out whimpered breaths as he twitched and writhed.

Idiots.  As if any heteromorph would just not notice he was being followed this far out in the sticks.  Or, having noticed, would bolt for the woods instead of his big, mobile, defensible truck.

Sugar plodded over to the third man and looked over the kid’s work.  One hit through the shoulder, another just barely through the waist—a few centimeters more and it’d’ve been a clean miss—and the third through the meat of the upper thigh.  That’d be the one that’d kill the guy, and quick, too.

The air reeked of menthol from the oozing tree sap, which made a good cover for all the rest.

“Thought you’d have safety in numbers, huh?” Sugar asked him in a low croak.  “Thought the dumb toad would be too slow and stupid to stand a chance against you fancy emitter metas.  How many of us have you run down in the woods out here?  Tell me where you buried ‘em and maybe in a few months I’ll see to it the cops back in town get a tip-off about where I bury you.”

A hand, covered in blood and still smelling faintly of the ozone of lightning discharge, lifted in a shaking gesture.  One of the kid’s branches lifted in warning, ready to strike at the first sign of a stray spark. Sugar didn’t follow the pointing, didn’t look away.  Not until the man groaned and went still, slackening against the laurel.

Sugar’s tongue darted out, snaring the skull mask and the plain hood beneath it, then spitting them out to the side as he stepped close enough to check the man’s eyes—staring and blank, not gone long enough yet to be clouding over, but that was just a matter of time.

He stepped back again and looked the rest of the way up through the leaves.

Shinji laid low against the center boughs, just one arm raised, bulging and branching out into the knotty limbs that curved back, serpentine, into the spears holding one dead bigot in place.  His had a tricky face to try and read—not real human, not real animal, either—but his gaze held steady, even if his eyes looked wider than his usual.

“Not bad,” Sugar said, and watched the tension leak out of the kid’s shoulders.  “You gonna need to throw up or anything?  Lotta people do, their first time.”  Especially when they’re partnered up with me.  (Sugar had it on good authority that watching him plug up someone’s mouth with his inner elbow and choke them with bufotoxin was disgusting even by the standards of people who disposed of bodies.)

“…I’ll be good.  ”  The kid hadn’t grown up learning a spoken language, and that still showed in the time and care he put into stringing his words together.  He rolled his shoulder back, and with a snapping rush, retracted his branches back into a simple, misleadingly arm-shaped limb.  The corpse sagged to a heap on the ground.  “It isn’t—my first time.”

“Right.  Almost forgot.”  It’d been Diopside who found the kid, not Sugar, but that scene probably hadn’t looked much different from this one.  Skull-face activity in Kyushu had been bad for years, and the infant abandonment rate in Kagoshima was still one of the highest in the country.  Plus, Mother Nature herself often wasn’t as pretty as she looked in postcards.

“Will you really—tell police about them?”  The kid pushed himself out of the tree in a fluid motion; the sound he made hitting the ground barefoot was closer to a bulb planter sinking into garden sod than anything you’d peg as someone landing after a jump. He wiped his bloodied hand against the laurel trunk unselfconsciously.

“Hell no,” Sugar answered.  “Their families knew what they were doing in the evening, and if they didn’t, they shoulda been paying more attention.  They can spend the rest of their lives wondering about it, just like the families of their victims.

“Come on.  We got some holes to fill, and I wanna be back on the road soon.”

Shinji nodded, lifting the body with the barest of creaking sounds and no complaints.

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Notes for Tokoyami:

• Tokoyami is an edgelord, so he gets second-person POV, the edgiest of all POVs.
• It occurred to me, in writing this, that maybe the reason more people don’t think Tokoyami is creepy is that ravens in Japanese mythology are less symbols of death than they are of wisdom and guidance. All the same, I think it would take very little to push the life of someone with his specific array of factors into a complete tailspin of harassment and heteromorph/villain quirk discrimination, and so it is here.
• Tokoyami’s edgy second-person narrator, please, it’s called a “sleep mask,” not a “blindfold.”
• Curious at this point would be 29, off the reporter beat and into in-depth magazine exposées.

Notes for Kamui Woods + Sugar:

• The most interesting thing about Kamui Woods to me is the over-the-top moral binarism of calling a purse-snatcher “pure evil.” If he were more “face,” I could pass that off as just being his hero persona’s “thing,” but he’s always presented as so earnest. He also apparently has a documentary-worthy backstory, which to me has “Inspiring True Story” written all over it. Thus, MLA!Shinji is picked up out of his travail-filled childhood by a group that has no interest whatsoever in tempering his moral education with nuances about how to treat their enemies. Probably always going to be a bit more comfortable around heteromorphic types than he is “normal-looking” humans.
• “Sugar” as a codename is a roundabout reference to cane toads, which were my primary referent for the character’s power set. They’re an invasive species in many of the places they’re found in the world, one of those cases of a species being introduced to cull the population of one that’s causing problems, but then growing into a problem of their own–in this case, cane toads introduced to eat cane beetles that were damaging sugar cane.
• Bufotoxin is a caustic secretion that causes red gums, drooling, loss of coordination, convulsions, hallucinations, death of cardiac arrest, and so on. It’s a considerably more serious threat to dogs, who will just go around putting anything in their mouths, but it can be a problem for humans who lick or consume toads as well. Seeing as Sugar is human-sized himself, his version is considerably more potent.
• This may have been an exercise in vigilante justice against bigots, but Sugar’s probably done this to MLA runaways, too. The uglier side of being an illegal underground cult is that, whatever your righteous ideals, you can’t risk that anyone will leave and spill your secrets.