Disclaimer: I do not own MHA nor am I earning money from writing this. As a rule of thumb, if you recognize something in this fic, I probably do not own it.

"I might be going insane" – Normal speech
'It isn't normal to have voices in your head' – Thoughts, Writing
True – The voices in your head

Chapter 6

Two days later, Izuku was in the living room again, reading "Path of the Swordsman". He and Katsumi usually played together on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday as well as one of the weekends.

Yesterday they had been at the Bakugou's house to play. Izuku had offered to finish the drawing that he saw hanging on the fridge, but for some reason that Izuku couldn't guess she refused the offer. The two spent their time running around the house, playing games of hide-and seek with the twist that they could move so long as they weren't found. When Izuku was the seeker, he often used his quirk to guess where Katsumi was hiding in a less algorithmic way.

He had read about the difference between algorithms, the method that he had previously been using, and heuristics, the method that he was currently using. The algorithm would eventually find Katsumi no matter how hard she tried to hide, but it could take much longer than using what he knew about his best friend – her favorite hiding places, spaces that she could fit into, spaces that she had or hadn't previously used, and so on – to find her without exhaustively checking every spot in the house.

At first, this method was much slower than the algorithm – he was unfamiliar with using it and the fact that his target could move around made things much harder. Towards the end of their playtime that day, however, Izuku had grown much more competent, usually needing less than five guesses to find one of her hiding spots with the new method.

This improvement did cause her to move between spots much more, causing a new style of gameplay to emerge. Izuku, on the other hand, tended to use his quirk to find spots where Katsumi wouldn't look until she had looked nearly everywhere else, causing a prolonged search for his easily frustrated best friend.

This afternoon, however, Izuku had all of the free time he wanted to finish the fantasy novel that had plagued his dreams for the past two nights.

The story progressed slowly, with the main character finding a group of people who had known him before he lost his memories, only for them to die before he reached them. He slowly got stronger as his opponents quickly scaled in power, causing him to work on his skill instead of his physical ability. By the end of the novel, the rest of the world was just recovering from the apocalypse caused by the descent of his strongest foe – his own father, who had caused his amnesia and the death of his family in the beginning of the book.

Izuku thought that the plot twist was entirely unexpected, but he would come to realize that the reveal had been foreshadowed extremely hard throughout the novel by characters who claimed to know him. As he shut the book and placed it to the side, he began drawing a landscape for his exhibition in the coming summer while thinking about the point of the book.

It was no literary masterpiece, nor did it contain obviously useful advice for him that he could easily find out. The protagonist could be analogous to him, he thought, a normal person in a world of superpowered individuals that held minimal respect for those weaker than them. Passing this to his quirk, he received an affirmative reply.

This was interesting, but it didn't reveal anything truly new to Izuku. He thought back to his opinions on the book when he had just started on Tuesday – that the takeaway that was most useful to him was the determination that the main character possessed and his perseverance. This, according to his quirk, was not the case. In the time it took him to finish his current drawing and begin and complete a portrait of his mother, the young boy pondered the deeper meaning that his quirk knew the book held for him.

Everything he tried looped back to the link between himself and the protagonist, even though it was not the main takeaway. Finished with his art for the day and bored of sitting still, Izuku held the pencil he had been using in both hands and began to swing it around like the hilt of a sword, re-enacting one of the fight scenes from the middle of the book where the main character fought against a horde or tiger-like enemies.

As he swung the writing instrument around, keeping as accurate to the book's description of the protagonist's style of sword fighting as he could, he began to think about the sword fighting itself. Stabbing a hole in an imaginary tiger before swinging his pencil to block another's attack, he asked his quirk whether the swordplay was an important takeaway. When he got a positive response, he asked the two questions that had killed so many other attempts at deciphering the higher meaning of the book.

'Swordfighting like the main character is the most important takeaway from the book.' False.

'Swordfighting like the main character will directly lead me to the most important takeaway from the book.' True.

The positive response from the second question caused him to stop swinging his pencil around, focused in the most promising lead over the past two hours. This interruption caused one of his imaginary foes to score a solid hit on his chest, causing him to fall over dramatically on the couch. Mentally dismissing these imaginary opponents, he concentrated on the path he had found.

'I can learn to swordfight like the protagonist.' True.

'This is the most important takeaway.' False.

After several more minutes of repeated guesses, Izuku finally found the most important takeaway.

'I can gain inspiration from books for things like sword fighting that will help me become a hero.' True.

'This is the most important takeaway.' True.

Izuku collapsed on the couch, happy that he had finally found the most important message. There were likely others, but for now all he could think about were the possibilities before him. For the first time, Izuku began to think about the future seriously. With his quirk, his strength scaled with the amount of time he had to prepare for future events that he could predict. Swordplay was just one of the many skills he could learn, and it was probably more important or useful than the others, considering that his quirk had guided him to a book about a swordsman rather than an archer, a wizard, or any other set of abilities that a protagonist could have.

This definitely warranted another search in the library, to find skills that would be useful to him when he became a hero. There was no doubt that Izuku would become a hero in his mind – even though the rest of the world would likely try to stop him, he could almost see the path in front of him and he had his mom with him every step of the way.

Inko was currently off at work, having left Izuku to his own devices. In any other scenario, leaving a child at home with nothing to do would be neglectful, but she knew that Izuku was fine with being alone for the few hours between the end of school and dinnertime.

Izuku walked to the kitchen and pulled a butter knife from the drawer of utensils. Holding it in one hand, Izuku began to experiment with the way he was holding it, using his quirk to check whether his grip was "optimal". In the time before his mom returned home, Izuku had figured out how to properly hold his sword and had replicated the very basics of the style described in "Path of the Swordsman".

Izuku didn't want to go further than this, as the protagonist had mused upon the differences between people reflecting in their styles throughout the book. His style was described as "domineering", aggressively cutting through anything he swung his blade at. Izuku was neither domineering nor aggressive – he was a four-year-old. He also couldn't just cut villains in half for no reason, as that would be greatly frowned upon by the rest of the world.

If Izuku had to guess, his style would be built upon knowing everything that the opponent could do or was going to do. With his quirk, he could predict entire battles before they ever occurred and know exactly what to do in order to survive and win. Even if he couldn't predict everything beforehand, if he got better at using his quirk he could predict where his enemy was going to strike mid-battle and counter it or spot weaknesses.

He would be weaker but much more precise by necessity, debilitating but not lethal strikes to incapacitate his foes. Just to be sure, he confirmed this with his quirk.

Suddenly, inspiration struck. Thinking quickly, Izuku went through the list of more superhuman abilities exhibited throughout the novel. Though many were impossible, achieved as a result of a bloodline or other magical ability, there were a select few that were possible for Izuku to achieve according to his quirk. He wouldn't be throwing blades of energy comprised from his will or sinking his opponents in a field of lava, but he could build a sword that vibrated at a high frequency to cut better or train his reflexes and quirk to automatically dodge attacks.

As he was writing down the list of achievable goals, the sound of the front door unlocking caught his attention. He ran to the door, reaching it just before it opened and jumping towards his mom who caught him deftly with her Quirk before hugging him. As the two walked into the house and Inko prepared to make dinner, Izuku told her about what had happened while she was gone in the rambling manner he had.

She zoned out for most of his description of the book, nodding along and making the appropriate follow-up questions. When he got to the end of his story and was talking about the lesson he learned from the book, she focused on what he was saying.

"And so I asked it a million questions trying to find out what was important about it and guess what? I can learn to sword fight like the main character! It's awesome! I got one of the blunt knives and practiced holding it until my quirk told me it was good, and then-"

Here Izuku was cut off by Inko. "Izuku," she said in a deathly calm tone, "did you just tell me that you took out a knife while I wasn't home and tried to practice using it like a sword? Without checking that you wouldn't get hurt first or waiting until I got back?"

Izuku, having a modicum of self-preservation, knew that it was best to stop talking before he made things worse for himself. After an instructive lecture on how to and how not to wield knives, Izuku tentatively continued his story, telling her about the true meaning of the book, having previously gotten caught up in the swordfighting.

"So I found out that I could learn things from books, like how to fight with a sword and stuff. I checked with my power, and I can do some of the things that the characters in the book did! I can't do any of the really cool magic stuff, but I can make a sword that cuts through anything and it'll be really cool! I know I can't use it on villains, but if I need to rescue people it will be really useful!"

Inko, being an adult who had read her fair share of fiction when she was a child, immediately thought of the possibilities. Barring the extremely unrealistic abilities that many a book featured, there were a great many characters who had no extreme talent or supernatural ability but still were far better than anyone in the real world by their feats. Her mind immediately went to characters who had built wonders of technology in the pre-quirk comics, devices that would make anyone into a hero if they really existed.

As she listened to Izuku talk about the ideas he had and (under her supervision this time) wave his butter knife through the air like a sword. Being able to use a sword would definitely help him become a hero, she thought, but he was still vulnerable to anyone with a greater range then him.

As they ate dinner and Izuku showed her the artwork he had drawn for the exhibition in the coming weeks, Inko planned out another trip to the library for the two of them and thought about her son's future for perhaps the thousandth time this week.

Two Days Later…

Izuku and Inko crossed the threshold of the library once more. As Inko put the books Izuku had already finished in the book return, Izuku began to use his search method once more, collecting three books before Inko caught up to him.

This time, Inko had planned their venture much more than the last. The library allowed every customer to take out a maximum of ten books for a two-week period. They currently had one book out and Izuku wouldn't be eligible for a library card until he was eight years old, so they would only be able to take nine books home that evening. In the first half hour the two spent there, Izuku had collected the nine most useful non-fiction books in the library, according to his quirk.

He had also scoured the fiction section with his mom, with him looking for books that would be useful but specifically excluded any books that Inko would pick up from his search.

The two had collected far more than they could check out even if Izuku had a library card, but the two readers had planned for this. They had fortified themselves with a much larger breakfast than normal, and both were willing to be hungrier by dinnertime for the sake of their time at the library. They were going to spend the entirety of the library's hours there, from 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM.

The mother and son found a table in a corner of the library where Izuku's quirk assured them nobody would disturb them or even come near them for the next three hours. Inko removed two notepads from her bag, setting one in front of each of the two chairs at the table. She pulled a pencil from the bun she had put her hair into, while Izuku pulled his ever-present pen from his pocket. The two smiled at one another, Inko's smile full of care for her son and Izuku's with enthusiasm and determination.

Izuku made his way through his selection of books slowly, asking what a certain word or phrase meant every once in a while. He slowly accumulated a list of abilities that he could perform, important lessons, and applications of said abilities. By the time he first got up to use the bathroom, he had finished two books and used just over half of a page.

Inko, on the other hand, tore her way through her pile of books. She was a much faster reader than Izuku for the time being, and she had read quite a few of her books before. She quickly skipped through them to the chapters where abilities were exhibited in their fullest – one character's precognition, another's technical skill, and so on. Her notes were much denser by necessity, including things like the book titles, chapters, characters, and other relevant details. She tried to stick to feats performed by normal people, but erred on the side of including a more fantastical ability on the off chance it was possible.

She had filled nearly four pages by the time Izuku took his first bathroom break.

Their day continued on, with Izuku taking breaks at times to draw a picture or two before going back to reading. By closing, the two had gone through nearly thirty books, just under twenty-five of them from Inko and five from Izuku. They also had their nine new "most useful" nonfiction books, with titles ranging from "Advanced Quirk Theory" to "Basics of Programming" to "Bodily Systems of Quirked Individuals in Relation to Quirkless Individuals: A Medical Textbook", with some particularly odd topics like "Metallurgy of the Middle Ages".

The two had filled close to forty pages combined on their notepads, six of them guaranteed by Izuku's quirk while the rest were Inko's unverified notes. When they arrived home, Izuku stacked the books in order of usefulness, with the still-unread "Quirk Analysis for Beginners" at the top of the stack. While Inko prepared dinner, Izuku flipped through his mother's notes, marking them true and false as he had days before.

After they finished dinner, Inko got to work typing up the confirmed abilities as Izuku read them off to her, sorted by their usefulness to him as perceived by his quirk. Excited by the possibilities that lay before them, neither of the two wanted to go to sleep then. They made another list, sorting the skills by the time it would take Izuku to master them to the extent that the characters had in the books. Another, this time sorted in the most efficient order to learn all of the abilities. They had moved the lists to a spreadsheet by this point, and having numbered the skills Inko could sort them as fast as Izuku could with the wonders of copying and pasting.

Izuku, by this point, had begun to read the first quirk analysis book and note down anything he didn't know that his quirk confirmed as useful. This set of notes was much larger than the book on asking better questions or the children's encyclopedia. It made sense, though – this book was much more dense in information and Izuku had no medical background to draw from.

He only made it halfway through the book before he began to feel sleepy, and the two Midoriyas made their ways to bed.

The Next Morning…

The two occupants of the house were woken up with a knock on the door. Inko made her way out of bed, still dressed in yesterday's clothes, and went to answer the door. As she approached, she spotted spiky blonde hair through the window that she could never mistake for anyone else's – Mitsuki's.

As she opened the door with a yawn, Katsumi slipped between Inko and the doorframe and made her way to run towards Izuku's room. Kicking off her shoes as she went, she practically floated up the stairs with a sound like a steamroller flattening bubble wrap coming from her feet. Turning her head away as the young girl set foot on the second floor, she turned back to her old friend before asking the questions at the forefront of her mind.

"Not that I'm disappointed to see you, Mitsuki, but why are you here so early? And what did Katsumi-chan just do?" Inko would have elaborated but was cut off by her own yawn.

Mitsuki had previously pulled long nights with Inko in college, and immediately recognized the tell-tale signs of sleep deprivation. From how tired Inko looked, she had probably stayed up until sometime between midnight and 2:00, which was going to be fun for her to play with.

"What do you mean, Inko-chaaaan?" Mitsuki began, a smile on her face as she dragged out the honorific. "It's 8:00, like normal. I wouldn't call that early, but I do understand how you get if you don't get your beauty rest." Her smile widened from a teasing grin to a full-on grin as she needled her friend about her coffee dependency, shutting the door behind her as the two walked into the house.

Upstairs, Katsumi pushed open the ajar door to Izuku's bedroom and tackled him to the floor. The two struggled for a few seconds, with Katsumi's greater strength aiding her until Izuku used his free arm to tickle her, causing her to lose her grip as she laughed. She waited outside the room while Izuku got dressed before the two headed downstairs for breakfast.

After the meal, the group of four went out on a walk through the nearby commercial district. Out of the corner of his eye, Izuku spotted a toy store with stiff foam swords in the display case. After confirming that they would be better than the butter knife to practice swordplay, Izuku tugged lightly on his mom's arm and pointed to the display.

Fifteen minutes later, the two families left the shop, Inko holding a bag with Izuku's green sword and Katsumi's red one as they walked to their favorite park.

Removing the packaging, both mothers instructed their children to avoid hitting each other anywhere above their shoulders and to stay in sight before letting them loose.

Over the three hours they spent at the park, Izuku rapidly improved. Katsumi initially had the advantage, being stronger than Izuku and much more aggressive in her random movements. Izuku was unfamiliar with the weight of the sword, and his two-handed grip required much more refinement than his one-handed grip on the butter knife had. Once he got his bearings, however, the tables began to turn.

Izuku began to last longer and longer, no longer getting his sword knocked aside by one of Katsumi's errant swings. He began to redirect the red sword away from him, uneasily at first but skillfully as he gained more experience. He could hold his sword in ways that forced his impromptu sparring partner to swing predictably, and as he gained experience, he began to guess where the next swing would come from with higher and higher accuracy.

His learning curve was not alone, however. Katsumi was also learning, swinging her sword with more force to try and disarm Izuku, moving around much more, and making use of her physical advantages. Her defense suffered, causing Izuku to get off a few hits, but she shrugged them off and kept going.

There was a ten-minute stretch where Izuku's quickly increasing skill and experience balanced out Katsumi's strength and speed, where the two attacked and defended with neither landing a hit.

From that point on, they fought as equals, with Izuku trying new techniques with the guidance of his quirk, his ability increasing faster than Katsumi's. The two remained in a stalemate imposed by Izuku, who suppressed his ability so as to not cause his friend to get upset.

The stalemate was eventually broken as Katsumi threw her sword to the ground and leaped at Izuku. His strategy of preventing her from getting upset had clearly failed, something easily apparent in her rant as she pouted.

"Why are you holding back? Why aren't you giving it your all? Aren't we friends?"

Izuku relented, and less than five minutes later the two were resting again, with Katsumi having been hit nearly a hundred times in the intervening duel. Izuku, noticing her discomfort, showed her how to properly hold the sword, using his quirk to work out the difference between their capabilities.

There was an immediate spike in her ability, and the two quickly went back to their play-fight. When the two eventually got hungry, they walked over to the observing mothers on the bench.

At the beginning of their visit to the park, the two had been talking about various inane topics, but when Izuku's stalemate began, the conversation dropped off as they watched their children. Izuku was as elegant as a four-year-old could be, moving in a very calm manner as he dodged Katsumi's swings and redirected those he couldn't, tapping her with the foam blade when he saw an opening.

Katsumi, on the other hand, was much wilder. Her movement and swings were erratic, almost random at times as she moved around Izuku and made longer swings to build up force. She was by no means less skilled, however – there was a method to her madness that caused her to hit Izuku with a sweeping blow every once in a while, causing the two to stop as she dropped her sword and made sure that Izuku was okay.

As the two mothers witnessed the argument between the two, they could make out the reason that Katsumi was frustrated. Neither of them could predict, however, the devastation that Izuku unleashed on his best friend after he agreed to stop holding back.

What had been a fair fight turned into Izuku's refinement showing through, redirecting his opponent's blade turning into a hit on her shoulder as she over-extended, spotting holes that neither mother had seen before he gently poked his friend with the blunt foam tip of his sword.

They had been getting ready to intervene when the fight ended, before they noticed Izuku showing her how to hold the sword.

The fight immediately re-balanced itself, though Izuku's skill continued to increase alongside his variety of moves. Izuku had tried showing her how to use his style, but it quickly became apparent that Katsumi possessed neither the patience nor the passivity to fight like Izuku did. The two stopped shortly afterwards, with Katsumi popping her sweat as the two children approached them.

Before any words were spoken, Mitsuki and Inko took the swords back from their respective children, Mitsuki with much greater apprehension than her counterpart.

As they walked out of the park and towards the Bakugou's house, the pair of children explained in as much detail as they could how to use a sword, each trying to teach their own mother how to fight in their childish way. While they were walking, Mitsuki took her daughter's advice and poked the red sword into Inko's side. They descended into a scuffle for a few seconds, before stopping as their children began cheering them on.

Bakugou Masaru, Katsumi's father and Mitsuki's husband, was there to greet them at the house, the smile he presented to the public fixed on his face in a way that only the adults in the room could know.

The man was one of a great minority of fathers that still existed in the world, and he was happily married with a child. He worked from home, his technical know-how in forgotten computer languages giving him a job security that many wished for in the current day and age. He worked from home as often as he could, only going in to the office for meetings with other employees.

Lunch that day was cheerful, with Izuku and Katsumi talking loudly about their day so far and the mothers corrected any exaggerations for Masaru. Today's story, however, they interrupted much less frequently, leading the man to wonder how much of their tales of swordfighting at the park were true.

He quietly asked this to the only other witnesses, and didn't know what to make of the reply he received.

"The two of them were really going at it, honey," Mitsuki began, "You really need to see them sometime. The two of them are already going at it like pro heroes, if there were any that only used swords to fight." Her tone was at once hopeful and melancholic as she looked at the children in the other room.

The two wanted to keep play-fighting in the house, but this idea was quickly vetoed by every adult in the room for fear that one of them (Katsumi) would break something while running around in a more confined space.

As the two talked and played with the weathered toys that the family had collected, all three adults watched with similar expressions. Both mothers looked fondly at their children, happy and unburdened by the rest of the world in their innocence. Masaru, however, had a different feeling running through him – hope.

He knew firsthand how harsh the world could be to someone without a quirk, and had watched his few male friends go through horrible experiences after they left school, unprepared for the harsh reality of the world. He had been lucky enough to meet Mitsuki while they were in college and ask her out, leading to a successful relationship. He had also found a job that kept him occupied, looking through and maintaining the work of men and women that were long dead or retired.

Isolation and boredom were the largest killers for both men and quirkless women, far higher than the casualties from villain attacks in Japan. Seeing Izuku, who was like the son Masaru had never had, happily playing and getting into activities like art and swordplay gave him hope that Izuku would live a long and fruitful life like he had so far.

Eventually, the Midoriyas had to return home. With the promise that they'd meet again tomorrow, Izuku gave his best friend a goodbye hug before going, looking back and waving at times.

When he returned to his own house, he set himself up in the living room, ready to dive into quirk analysis once more. Inko went to her office, finishing up the paperwork for the most recent move that she had facilitated.

An hour later, Izuku shut the introductory quirk analysis book aside, thinking about what he had learned. The book, like his quirk, was a lot of information without any explanation. It stated that only women could have quirks but didn't state why, what the different categories were but not how such abilities could exist, and gave descriptions of powers that Izuku could barely guess the mechanism behind.

Still, it was certainly a good introductory text for someone who had minimal knowledge of how quirks worked in the first place. As he opened the much larger book, he hoped that he would find the answers he was looking for here.

Three and a half hours later, Izuku was even more frustrated that there were still unanswered questions he had. There had been come explanation for how quirks worked – apparently people had things called "chromosomes" and girls had one that boys didn't, causing them to develop quirks, but there was no mention of how or why they caused quirks or even worked differently in the first place. There were three categories – Mutant, Emitter, and Transformative, but no reason that someone manifested one over another.

Pulling the medical textbook from the middle of the stack, he quickly realized that it was the medical equivalent of a picture book – images like the posters he had taped to the wall of his room in the hospital but different, with labels pointing to certain sections with speculation on how they worked.

Turning to the back, he realized that these were dissections of fallen heroes and villains, with the notes being the result of years of theory on how their quirks worked or their bodies differed from one another, with some quirks being so esoteric that there were no accepted theories on how they worked at all.

The book was great for someone like Izuku, who could confirm or deny theories with a thought, but incredibly useless for the purpose he had.

'There is an explanation for all of my questions.' True.

Izuku sighed in relief, before he realized the vagueness of his question.

'Other people have found an answer to all of the questions I have about quirks.' False.

'Other people have found an answer to some of the questions I have about quirks.' False.

Izuku's relief was short-lived. Now he had questions with no answers and three useless books. He took a deep breath, calming himself before standing up and leaving the room. He had already written the questions down and asked his quirk about them, so there was no chance that he would forget his questions. As he walked to his mom's office, he thought about other topics – his swordplay, his art, his friends, the skills he could learn, and the bright future that awaited him.

When he entered the office, he noticed his mom was engaging in her favorite method of completing paperwork – throwing pens away from her towards pieces of paper and pulling specific parts of them towards her while in contact with the papers to fill out written forms. When she noticed Izuku entering the room, she stilled all of the forms before moving them back to her desk in an orderly fashion.

Checking the time, Inko realized that it was already past their usual dinnertime and quickly stood up, pulling leftovers from the fridge and heating them up. While they waited and they ate, Izuku vocalized the problems he had with the quirk analysis books he had read. As his questions processed in Inko's mind, she realized that quite a few of them applied to her as well.

She had very little idea of how her quirk actually worked, with a precise understanding of its limitations and results but no idea how she actually controlled the objects that she pulled towards her. Was it magnetism? Some strange mental energy that she had never run out of? Some other force? For the first time in four years, Inko found herself at a loss to how her quirk worked.

Thinking about all of the quirks she remembered, less than a quarter of them were understandable, and a majority of those were mutant quirks like Mitsuki's. She had a friend in her teenage years that let her see dead people that she had met before they died, and she had no idea how it even began to work.

During her pondering, she had a flash of insight as to the point of the books on quirk analysis. Waiting for a break in Izuku's list of grievances, she composed her statement for Izuku to verify.

"Izuku, could you check what I'm about to say?" she asked. Izuku nodded, breaking off from his previous train of thought to pay attention. "The main point of studying quirk analysis is to help you identify quirks more quickly using your quirk."

Though the initial response was False, Izuku asked if in a different way to check, because it made sense.

'A major takeaway of the quirk analysis books is to help me identify quirks faster.' True.

He asked a few more questions, trying to get some understanding of the main point before he remembered that his mom was waiting for an answer. Scratching the back of his head, he relayed the information.

"It's not the main point, but it is a major point. I'm trying to figure out what the main point is, and unless it's to make me angry about how little other people know about quirks…"

Izuku trailed off. Asking whether that was the point with his usual set of questions revealed that while it wasn't the main point, as he expected, it directly led to the main point. After several more minutes of questioning while he ate in silence, he found the main point of the books.

'The main point of the quirk analysis books is to cause me to find out how quirks work in general.' True.

Izuku relayed the finding to his mom, who leaned back and began to think more about that. It was true that learning more about how quirks worked in general would be beneficial to both himself and, given his disappointment earlier, the rest of society.

Thinking about how quirks broke the apparent rules led her to the most obvious and present example – her son. Izuku's quirk could determine if something was objectively true or false, could affect whether people had free will, could tell the future, helped him learn things faster, and probably had applications that the two didn't even know about yet. Most importantly of all, it was Izuku's quirk, and it was the first quirk that had ever shown up in a man according to both official records and a confirmation from his quirk.

"Izuku," she began, "Have you considered how your own quirk works? It's by far the most 'rule-breaking' of all of the quirks I've ever seen, so maybe that's an application of the 'main point'."

Izuku jumped on the suggestion, quickly confirming it before asking all sorts of questions about how his quirk worked. Oddly, anything he asked gave him a False, even the most basic questions that had already been confirmed.

Apprehensively, he returned to the very basics.

'You, the voice in my head, are my quirk.' False.

'You are a quirk?' False.

'You are similar enough to a quirk that I couldn't tell the difference.' True.

Grasping onto the last question, he thought about what had changed between the initial confirmation that it was a quirk from his first day in the hospital. As he went through the days, all of the questions regarding the voice in his head had accepted the word "quirk" in reference to it. The only time it wasn't working that way was right now, after he'd learned about… the medical definition of a quirk.

'You are not a quirk in the medical sense of the term.' True.

'You interpret my questions based on my understanding of the words I use in the question.' True.

Izuku slid off of his chair in silence and walked over to the most securely magneted drawing on the fridge. Removing the frame, he took the drawing to his place at the table and flipped it over. On the back was the list of rules for his quirk, condensed by his mom from the first paper and disguised by him.

Pulling a pen from his pocket, he wrote underneath the existing rules, in his best handwriting.

'My quirk uses my definitions of words when asking questions to answer them.'

Ignoring the response of False from his quirk, he wrote underneath it 'The voice in my head is not a quirk.' True.

Inko, who was watching as she moved her dishes over to the sink, noticed the last line and froze. Izuku continued to write.

'There is no practical difference between the voice in my head and a quirk aside from the medical definition.' True.

Izuku set the pen down and leaned back in his chair. As both he and his mom stared at the latest expansion to the list of rules, one thought ran through both of their heads.

'What are you?'