Musutafu Prefecture has three major cities. Takoba, the prefecture capital. Hosu, which used to be a notable industrial centre before the war. And Aldera, which was the smallest and least important of Musutafu's urban sprawls.
Once the war ended, the situation was practically reversed. Aldera was by far the most stable and prosperous city in the prefecture, although mostly because it suffered the least destruction during the war.
Takoba was on the fence, really. Thanks to the tireless work of superintendent Aizawa (it should have been done by some of the police higher-ups, but the National Police Agency was still half-dead and the system struggled to work) and the presence of the governor, Takoba more or less worked.
Sure, half of the city was mostly abandoned or turned into a slum where the police didn't dare to go unless it was in force, and with either a company of the Riot Police or SAT troopers. But the other half, more or less, worked.
Hosu didn't.
Hosu was a notable centre of the armaments industry before the war. During it, absolutely everyone wanted a piece. By the time both sides realized that there was nothing left to fight for anymore, the city was lying in ruins.
Oh, some of it was rebuilt. Humans are curious creatures, equally likely to show feats of heroic willpower as they are to just give up or break. But there were limits to what they could achieve before the money ran out.
Today, less than a quarter of the city had running water, electricity and at least a basic level of law enforcement. It was maintained both by the police and by the JSDF forces manning the checkpoints by the entrances to the stable zones.
The rest was partially depopulated (whoever could, fled long ago), and either a slum or a completely abandoned district. The crime was rampant, and the gangs and local self-defence militias (sometimes indistinguishable from the gangs) fought turf wars. While the police and army were doing their best to hold their ground in hopes of better times coming.
If Takoba was a modern city in crisis, Hosu reached the cyberpunk dystopia level of criminal activity and hopelessness for all but the privileged one. Just without the cool gadgets.
Izuku had Mei's drone (now with thermovision, because of course she kept improving it) scan the entire area surrounding the dilapidated excuse of a long-pillaged warehouse. She found three people waiting inside, which more or less lined with the estimated size of whatever group they were supposed to meet.
Well, they lacked one person, but it was less worrying than them having surplus people in hiding.
Izuku decided to pop up to say hello with Uraraka and Kirishima. The latter lacked a cool, intimidation-factor inducing hero uniform, and was simply wearing some identity-concealing hoodie.
"So, do we make an entrance, or…?" Uraraka asks Izuku when they are close.
"It's possible that they have a detection-oriented meta-ability." It would be a rather cool thing to have, really. They didn't have any. The closest they had was Izuku while under Ignition, which made him perceive things to pull in the vicinity, but he didn't have any control over its activation. And it had a rather short range. "Trying to appear out of nowhere only to be detected beforehand would look cheap. So here's what we'll do."
(***)
"This is a bad idea." Shinsou announces. "This is a horribly bad idea. It's probably a trap, you realize that?"
That talk again? Weren't they past it already?
"In case you didn't notice, I can't keep paying your bills forever." Kyoka Jirou replies with a voice of absolute tiredness. "My parents aren't THAT wealthy. And if I don't do that, you'll be back to robbing convenience stores. So please, do me a favour, and let me try to contact whatever organization is gathering people like us and supporting them, which apparently includes housing and food. Also, shut up for a moment. Alright?"
He obediently shuts up. Great. Her parents are rather famous, at least locally (they own a radio station, which was very popular before the war and somehow still exists today). They supported her ever since her ability manifested and they realize her need to meet others like her. But there is a limit on how much money she can throw around.
She really is at her wits' end.
Besides, she jacked herself into a support beam and is listening intently. She can hear or at least search through the sounds within a kilometre distance. The guests are already in front of the building, and thus far, nothing indicates a trap.
Mieko says nothing. She is their exit strategy if things go belly-up. Hopefully, they won't. But she is still partially hidden behind a pillar, just in case it was an attack. Kyoka truly hopes that this position looks natural, because otherwise whoever is coming will probably realize she is important.
The warehouse entrance opens. Kyoka immediately realizes that whatever group they contacted means business.
She certainly can't afford a riot shield, gun and quite high-tech looking bodysuit with a closed helmet.
A woman (the bodysuit betrays that much) enters first, looks around (her face locks to the group in front of her for a few seconds), then makes a step sideways, puts the shield down (it stands upright, and covers most of her height) and…
Kyoka almost freaks out when the woman pulls a rifle from her back. At least she doesn't point it towards them. She is just holding it, in a position where her shield is mostly concealing her.
Then two more people enter. Both wearing hoodies and facemasks. One - a bulky man - stands by the entrance, mirroring the riflewoman's position. The other (probably a man, but it's hard to say, they are kinda small) walks forward and stops in the middle of the warehouse.
"I'm Defiant." The figure at the front announces. It's a young man, judging from the voice. "The head of the Metahuman Network. You wanted to meet with us."
Kyoka gulps. This is certainly a bit more intimidating than she expected.
"Defiant?" She was about to say something, but Shinsou cut in. Oh, she is absolutely pissed at him now. "What are you, a superhero?" His standard mocking tone is all there. He is probably trying to make sure that he can at least put one enemy under his meta-ability if he wants, but she is still angry at him for cutting her off. She is a leader, damn it!
"Yes." Defiant doesn't seem fazed by the mockery at all. "I have a superpower. I use it to fight criminals and save people. That makes me a superhero, at least by the definitions of the term that I know of."
"Oh, great." Shinsou clicks his tongue in irritation. "A loony."
"Stop that." Kyoka has enough. She gives him one of her trademark icy stares. If he stood closer and she was alright with betraying her meta-ability, she would already hit him with her earphone jacks.
"We hoped to meet with someone serious." Shinsou promptly replies. "We got a guy who thinks he is a superhero. He is probably going to die in a ditch in a week or two. This meeting was a mistake."
Kyoka knows why he is this angry and frustrated. This doesn't make him any less of a pain in the ass.
"I think that's your leader's thing to decide." Defiant cuts in. Shinsou looks back at him. "Also, I think you are seriously selling me short without even trying to find out what I can do and what I already did."
"Oh, really?" Shinsou stares back at him, and Kyoka realizes that he is about to do a Very Stupid Thing. "Remain motionless for three minutes."
Defiant freezes.
"Shinsou, you idiot." Kyoka wants to go home. And bash Shinsou's head in with a club. "Undo that at once."
"No." Shinsou replies. The two sidekicks of Defiant are growing clearly worried. Kyoka prays that this doesn't change into a gunfight. Because they don't have guns. "See, this is my ability. Mind control. Just a minuscule mistake and if I wanted, you'd be dead. That's how far your stupid dream takes you. It's unbreakable, by the way. So shove your…"
Kyoka realizes that something is wrong when Shinsou stops talking. He is clearly trying to open his jaw, but it doesn't seem to work. It's as if something was holding her in place.
"Unbreakable, really?" Defiant asks, and Shinsou's eyes widen in shock. "I think you are overselling yourself now, Shinsou-kun." Kyoka stares at him in horror. Shinsou's mind-control was impossible to resist unless he messed up the orders. They tested that! "I recognize you now. The series of robberies here, in Hosu. Since you didn't kill or maim anyone and I recognize that living in this city isn't easy, I'll consider your criminal acts as caused by desperation. So I'll not drag you to the nearest police precinct, especially as I recognize the usefulness of your meta-ability and the fact that keeping you imprisoned would be hard. But if I get to see you using your meta-ability on anyone not in self-defence or without their approval, I'm going to slam your face into the floor so many times that it will stop resembling a face. Did I make myself clear?"
The grip on Shinsou's face lessens.
"Y...yes." Shinsou manages to reply. He is truly and honestly terrified of Defiant now.
"If your meta-ability works as I think it does, you have great potential as a hero, Shinsou-kun." Defiant continues. "You could diffuse hostage situations or get suicidal people off the edges of the building without even trying. So please, don't squander it by acting like an idiot."
This time Shinsou doesn't reply. Instead, he seems to shrink a bit.
"So, can we go back to negotiating?" Defiant says, turning his head towards Kyoka. She wakes up from the stupor.
"Errr, yes." At least it's still a negotiation. Though she is certain that she lost a lot of negotiation power with Shinsou's stupid stunt. "Hosu is… honestly, not doing pretty well. Our only source of funds considers moving to Takoba or Aldera. We can't stay here. So we're looking for someone to…"
"... help you with that." Defiant interrupts her. "We don't exactly have a presence at Aldera, but Takoba wouldn't be a problem. Do not expect luxury, but basic accommodations shouldn't be a problem. Becoming a hero is entirely optional. We have two metahumans who are merely under our protection and aren't a part of the Network."
"Protection?" Kyoka asks. "From what?" Thus far, the biggest problem in Hosu was not getting shanked after walking into the wrong alleyway. Shanked, shot in the head or captured and sold, but that only if you walked into the REALLY wrong alleyway.
"I'm a superhero." Defiant replies with a shrug. "Supervillains come in a package with that term. One particularly nasty is gathering up metahumans from this prefecture. I already had to battle him to rescue a six-year-old girl he all but tortured, and I'm not looking forward to doing that again."
Shit. The worst thing she saw done with powers were Shinsou's convenience store robberies and Toga's blood frenzies. The idea that someone was gathering people with powers (meta-abilities?) with bad intentions… Not good.
Ugh. She probably should have expected that. But somehow she didn't.
It could still be a trap. Defiant could be the one gathering metahumans up. There was a way to test that.
"I think that we'll agree to work with you." Kyoka says. "But under one condition."
"Yes?" Defiant asks back.
"You let Shinsou get one of your sidekicks under his meta-ability." She replies. "So he can ask them if you are speaking the truth. I will not trust your words with no proof."
Defiant's head turns towards his two sidekicks. They both nod.
"Sure." He shrugs. "Have fun with that."
(***)
"Did someone tell you that your personality does a hundred-eighty when you're in your superhero mode?" Uraraka asks when they leave the warehouse and start walking towards the edge of Hosu.
"Ehhhh?" Izuku replies. Not very intelligently, but he really didn't expect that question. "Www...what do you mean?"
"Dude, you were intimidating like hell back there." Kirishima adds. "I got chills when you grabbed that mind-controlling guy and gave him a monologue."
"Uhm, I just said what came to my mind." Izuku replies. "And the mask smoothed my voice out, so the stuttering wasn't there."
"They are going to freak out when they see and hear you without it." Uraraka ads and sighs. "Mark my words."
Izuku is more worried about Mei freaking out when she finds out about Mieko Eto's meta-ability. For now, he is completely ignoring her inquiries into the new meta-abilities of the new Metahuman Network members.
(***)
They return to the hideout three hours later. Rather exhausted by the entire ordeal. Mei immediately leaps off at Izuku, complaining about him keeping her in the dark. And asking him where the new people are.
Oh, if only she knew.
Izuku sends the message from his phone. This is going to be fun.
(***)
Shino Sosaki realizes that something's fishy almost immediately. Izuku Midoriya is way too dodgy about his favourite subject, despite Mei being the one to attempt interrogation.
She also feels out of place. She is the only non-metahuman in the building. She promptly retreats to the corner of the common room and continues observing the gathering of people with honestly kinda bullshit-level powers.
After a few minutes of chaos and attempted interrogations, the air at the opposite end of the room suddenly… starts turning black?
Shino's hand goes towards her gun. But then Izuku announces that it's all according to plan. What in the...?
There is a black, circular surface with a yellowish/orangish edge floating there. And then, suddenly, the black colour is replaced by a look into a completely different room. There is a girl with long, black hair and some ruined pair of trousers and T-shirt looking at them through it, slightly startled. Then she waves at them awkwardly.
"New member number one." Izuku Midoriya announces. "Mieko Eto. Meta-ability - teleportation." Shino stares at him in shock. "She can, although it's a time-consuming thing, open gateways connecting two places, allowing for instantaneous travel between them. Though she can only maintain two such connections at once."
Shino can see the existential dread dawning on Mei's face. It's like seeing someone go through all stages of grief in ten seconds. Oh, dear. She is already acutely aware of Mei's pained reaction to seeing the meta-abilities obliterate the constants of physics.
She heard her complain yesterday that everyone in this building, save for Shino, is a supervillain because they are breaking the laws of physics, biology or genetics. And they should probably go to jail for that. It was that bad. And now? This.
"Izu." Mei says, with a voice and face screaming the word 'trauma'. "Hold me, I'm going to cry." She buries her face into the front of his battle hoodie. He hugs her back and uses his right hand to pat her head.
Oh, they are cute together.
The teleportation girl walks into the room with a backpack and a suitcase. She stands beside the portal, clearly feeling rather awkward there.
The second person to walk through is a punk-ish black-haired girl wearing a black leather jacket, salmon-coloured shirt with some rips, black pants and boots, a black choker and a pair of headphones. They look to be custom-designed because they seem to cover a lot of space under the ears rather than just the ears.
"Kyoka Jirou." Izuku announces. "Her meta-ability is in her ears." The girl takes off one of her headphones, showing the flexible, plug-like earlobes that were hidden underneath them. "She can connect them to the various surfaces, enough to hear all sounds within a distance counted in at least hundreds of meters. She can also project and amplify sounds through whatever they touch. Apparently, her heartbeat is loud enough to shatter concrete when she does that."
Okay, that was… well, in modern warfare, your ability to destroy things tends to be secondary in importance after your ability to know things. That girl sounded scarily useful, at least in urban warfare.
"Uhm, what happened to her?" Kyoka asks, her exposed earlobe pointing towards Mei. Who was sobbing loudly.
"She's a scientist." Izuku replies promptly. "She just saw someone teleport between two cities. She is taking it pretty hard." The word 'teleport' is accentuated by a quiet wail from Mei. Izuku hugs her tighter.
"Oh, alright." Kyoka decides to not pay Mei any more attention and stands next to Mieko.
The third person emerges from the portal. This time with baggage (backpack). Vaguely purplish, messy hair. Eyebags. He also glanced towards Izuku and he seemed to be afraid of him? Odd.
The oddest part was the fact that he was holding what looked like the end of a leash. The other side was clearly still on the other side of the portal. Did he have a dog or something?
"Hitoshi Shinsou." Izuku announces. "His meta-ability is mind control. If he speaks to you and you respond verbally, he can issue orders to you and you will obey them in a trance-like state. He can't issue self-destructive orders, and he can't alter the way your conscious mind works, so he can't tell you to like him, for example. Also, it apparently doesn't work on me."
There is a story behind it, one that Shino is kinda curious about. She is also abjectly terrified. Mind control now, really? Literally every new metahuman she meets adds another exclamation mark to the general level of importance the metahuman research has in her mind.
She wonders how long it will take Mei to confront her parents about it. In Shino's opinion, this should happen as soon as possible.
There are some worried reactions after the mind control part.
"We had a very serious talk about it." Izuku continues. "And Shinsou-kun will not use his powers on anyone here unless you give him his explicit approval to do so." Shinsou jerks a bit and is clearly afraid of Izuku.
Once again, odd. That kid is all cuteness and rainbows (except in the bedroom, as Mei apparently discovered). Seeing him intimidate people is rather strange.
"There is also supposed to be a fourth member." Izuku says. Kyoka nods towards him and gestures towards Hitoshi. Who, promptly, pulls the leash.
There is a girl on the other side. Messy blonde hair, somewhat ragged clothing… and a muzzle. Plus handcuffs (though at the front of her, very rookie mistake when it comes to binding people) and leg cuffs.
"Hey, what the hell…" It's Ashido that's the first to react. Considering the snippets of her past that Shino heard about, it's not surprising.
"There is an excellent reason for that AND she agreed to that." Kyoka replies quickly. The girl in a muzzle gives them a thumbs-up gesture. "Her meta-ability makes her a vampire. She can also shape-shift into whoever's blood she drank recently, which is pretty cool. But the problem is that when she isn't satiated properly, she goes berserk when she smells or sees blood. And we didn't have enough of it to keep her satiated. Shinsou can pacify her when she goes into a frenzy, but sometimes she is too lost in it to reply, and despite looking thin, she is strong and fast."
"Name's Himiko Toga." Shinsou adds. "Or the famed Hosu Vampire, although that's something that happened involuntarily."
"Well, finding a less… uhm… weird way of pacifying her is certainly going to be a priority." Izuku comments. Shino decides that 'weird' is a much better word than 'fetishistic'. Then he moves over to introducing the people present in the room.
(***)
Once her brief breakdown ends, it takes Mei about ten minutes to figure out a way to deal with Toga's issues. Namely, she just needs a mask that covers her eyes and nose. One that can filter both the sight and smell of blood.
It will require some fine-tuning and a lot of densely packed electronics, but it should be done within a week.
The Hosu metahumans are clearly relieved. Especially the vampire herself. In the meantime, she is going to be restrained in one of the empty apartments.
They are also deeply freaked out when Izuku Midoriya takes his mask off, revealing the perpetually smiling kid their age underneath it. Uraraka shoots him an 'I told you' look.
(***)
"Alright, so do any of you want to give the hero business a shot?" Izuku asks at some point of the unofficial welcome party. "Don't get the wrong idea. It's still optional. BUT some of your powers… hell, all of your powers sound like something incredibly useful. I'm also about to talk with the police and I hope that we'll be actually paid for the heroic activities. Also, neither of you has an explicitly combat ability, except for Jirou-san but hers isn't THAT powerful, so we talk about support, not direct combat."
"I'm in." Mieko Eto replies immediately. "I mean, I get that my power is valuable." Mei shivers in the background suddenly. "And I suspect people will be after me eventually. Having the police in my corner sounds like a good idea."
"Hero codename?" Izuku asks her back. She thinks about it for a few seconds.
"How about Eclipse?" She replies. "I mean, that black surface kinda looks like the sun during an eclipse."
"Cool!" Izuku beams at her. Hitoshi Shinsou looks like this makes him nauseous. "Anyone else? Jirou-san?"
"Ehhh, I don't see an issue with that." She replies. "It's mostly just overhearing people either way. Just for the record, I have a family out there. So my name doesn't leave this group."
"Yeah, I understand that." Izuku replies. "Hero codename?"
"How about…" She tries to speak, but Shinsou cuts in.
"...Earworm." She looks at him like she wants to murder him, only to sigh loudly.
"I guess it's not THAT bad." She admits and Izuku beams again. He really loves the idea of getting more superheroes.
"Alrighty then!" He says. "Shinsou? And Toga too, I guess. Are any of you willing to give it a go?"
Toga only stares at him. Shinsou, in the meantime, is slightly more vocal.
"Are you insane?" He asks. "She killed two people and wounded a dozen more. I robbed like twenty convenience stores!"
"Yes, and during my first major action as a superhero, I lost control over my power and slammed a supervillain into the wall with enough strength to turn him into paste." Izuku calmly replies. "Sure, he recovered, but I realize you can wound someone with your meta-ability accidentally. And I already told you what I think about you and desperation. I'm having a meeting with a police officer soon, and I believe that I have arguments to PERHAPS persuade him to pardon you two. IF you show your willingness to cooperate and help the local police. So?"
Shinsou stares at him for a few long seconds. Some rather complicated thought process makes itself occasionally visible on his tired face. Eventually, he sighs.
"Write me down as Hijack." Izuku smirks a bit.
Toga grabs Shinsou's hand and gestures something. He takes out an empty page ripped from some notebook and a pen. She writes something on it and hands it back to him.
"She wants to be Carmilla." Shinsou says.
That's one crazily successful recruitment drive. Especially when it inspires Mina to announce her desire to pick up Pinky as her hero name and join the Network as a regular - which happens twenty minutes later.