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 9

It was three weeks later that Izuku met his first clients for artwork. They were a rather wealthy family and wanted a family portrait in the same style as the one Izuku had made of himself and his mom. The two families met at the building owned by Oyama Kameyo, with Inko watching carefully as the limousine pulled up next to the building.

The driver left the car first, rushing around to the side to open the door for the family. The mother left the car first, followed by her daughter and finally her husband, who thanked the driver as he shut the door behind them. The three of them, obviously dressed up for the occasion, made their way to the building and, after asking Kameyo which room they were meeting in, went to meet the Midoriyas.

Inko and Izuku had already set up, with Izuku sitting on the floor with his paint and canvas near him. When the trio entered the room, he stood up to greet them with his mother.

"Good morning, Yaoyorozu-san. My name is Midoriya Inko, and this is my son Midoriya Izuku. He'll be the one painting for you today, I'm mostly here to supervise him." Inko introduced herself.

"A pleasure to meet you, Midoriya-san. My name is Yaoyorozu Kaede, and this is my husband Yaoyorozu Yuichi. And hiding behind him is my daughter, Yaoyorozu Momo." The last sentence was spoken in a harsher tone, prompting the young girl to move from her hiding place so that she could be seen.

Izuku greeted the three of them as formally as he could, and after asking what kind of background they would like, sat down and began painting without looking at anyone else in the room. Kaede was surprised at this, having expected to stand in place or hold a pose for the duration of their stay in the building. She had mentally fortified herself, preparing for a day spent cajoling her daughter to stay in place, but it was all for naught.

As he painted, the adults took their seats on one of the walls while Momo floundered. She was never the most social person and had been raised without coming into contact with other children her age. She looked around the room, but it was bare, with nothing to play with. She saw Izuku, hard at work, and turned to the adults watching the two of them. Her father gave her an encouraging nod, looking towards Izuku afterwards. Her mother's lips tightened, but she gave no obvious clues as to what Momo was supposed to do.

The other woman in the room, Izuku's mother, looked at her and gave an encouraging nod similar to her father's. And so, while the adults began to talk about random things to pass the time, she walked over to the boy as he painted and sat down on the floor next to him.

She made as if to speak, then cut herself off. She didn't really know how to introduce herself informally, and as she watched the colors blossomed on the paper in the wake of Izuku's brush, she realized that she didn't want to interrupt or disturb him.

After a few minutes of her internal struggle, Izuku spoke up. "You know, you can say something if you want to. I don't need silence to work, and it would be nice to talk to someone instead of sitting here awkwardly. I'm Midoriya Izuku, but you can call me Izuku."

Momo tensed as he began speaking, before re-introducing herself in kind. "My name is Yaoyorozu Momo, buy you can call me Momo." From that point on, Izuku kept talking, leaving room for her to speak as much as she wished while keeping the conversation from dying.

Eventually, the conversation turned to quirks. Izuku opened up with knowledge of all of the quirks he had witnessed, from his mother's Attraction of Small Objects to his preschool teacher's Loudspeaker. When he asked Momo what her quirk was, she told him that she could create things. At this, Izuku went silent and set his brush down turning to face Momo.

"You create things? How does that work? What can you make?"

Momo moved her hand to the exposed skin on her arm and over the course of a minute pulled out a perfect replica of Izuku's paintbrush. "I can't make very big things, and I get really hungry whenever I make too much. I don't really know that much else about it; I haven't used it that much because it makes me so hungry whenever I use it."

Izuku, having spent the past month training his ability to recognize and analyze quirks among other things, immediately began to theorize. He picked up his brush again, continuing the painting, while he ran through the possibilities.

After less than ten seconds, he replied in a thoughtful tone. "Your quirk probably uses the food you eat or your fat reserves to make things. But even with such a drawback, that's really cool! You can make anything you need, and that's more adaptive than most heroines! Does it take longer to make metal things, or can you make anything at the same speed?"

Momo was caught off guard by the in-depth analysis, and her voice was shakier as she replied. "I-I don't know. Maybe?" She decided to test it, making a paperclip and a toothpick to see which one came faster. In the end, the paperclip took nearly three times as long to form as the toothpick did, leaving the girl confused about both why that was and how Izuku had predicted it.

Izuku had been watching out of the corner of his eye and picked up where he left off as soon as he saw that she had finished. "Metals are denser and weigh a lot more, so it makes sense that it would take longer. Have you tried making anything out of carbon?"

At her confused look, he elaborated. "Like diamonds, or graphene, or something like that. Just carbon, nothing else."

Looking over to her mother, who was wearing diamond earrings, she tried to make a copy of the diamond. Not only did she feel less of an increase in her hunger, but the diamond also almost popped out of her skin, forming nearly instantly. When she thought about the second material, graphene, she had no idea what it was but decide to give it a go anyways. She closed her eyes, concentrating on something like diamonds but different. Within a few seconds, she had pulled a block of grey matter the size of her hand out of her arm, and while she felt more hunger this time it was still at a bearable level. When she set her two most recent creations on the floor between her and Izuku, the boy looked up.

He had known that she was capable of doing it without harming herself after a quick question to his quirk, but to see a block of a material that had so many useful applications sitting before him still surprised him. After he got Momo's permission to keep the block of graphene, the two continued talking about quirks, heroines and villains, all while Izuku was finishing up the portrait.

As she looked at the portrait, she saw herself and her parents standing in a room that looked like her mother's office at work with a few notable differences, such as the scenery outside the window and the decorations around the room. As Izuku entered the final phase of adding detail to the painting, Momo asked the question that had been on her mind for the past hour.

"So, Izuku, what's your quirk? Does it have something to do with art? Does it let you know about other people's quirks? What does it do?"

Izuku laughed in a strange way. It was different from the other times he'd laughed while the two of them were talking, and it caught Inko's attention, swiftly followed by the other adults in the room.

"Am I the first boy you've ever met, Momo? How much do you know about quirks?" Izuku asked into the suddenly silent room.

Momo's reply was much more cautious than her previous ones, influenced by Izuku's odd laugh and the tone he'd asked the last question with. "Yeah, I haven't really met other people our age before. What's wrong? Is there something I should know about quirks? Was it something that I said?"

Out of the corner of her eye, she could see her mother shaking her head rapidly while her father looked down, a sad look on his face. Ignoring her mother for the first time in her life, she asked again into the continued silence of the room. "Please, Izuku, just tell me, what's your quirk?"

Izuku set down the paintbrush and pushed the canvas away from himself before turning to Momo to answer her question. He looked into her eyes and gave a well-practiced smile as he spoke. "Boys can't have quirks, Momo."

With that, he picked up the chunk of graphene and slid it into his pocket as he stood up. In silence, he walked to the entryway and left, quickly followed by his mom and a floating cloud of art supplies that re-organized themselves and packed themselves away as she walked. Momo was frozen where she sat as she heard the gentle but resounding thud of the front door falling shut behind the two.

She felt a hand land on her shoulder – her father's, from the feel of it. She remained where she sat, staring at the space Izuku had occupied for the past hours. If it weren't for the fact that her worldview had been overthrown by Izuku's final sentence, she would have turned to look at her father. Instead, she sat there in silence.

She had always believed that anyone could have a quirk, and that some people were just unlucky. If Izuku was telling the truth, then there could be none of the equality or happiness she had been told about her entire life. How could someone be happy if they saw themselves as less than someone else? When society saw them as less?

She could now identify the emotions that had made Izuku's laugh and sentence different – anger and sorrow. He had put on such a happy face for the entire time they talked, showing interest in her quirk when there was no way she could do the same for him in return.

Feeling her father tug lightly at her shoulder, she turned her head to face him with tears in her eyes. Had he been putting on such a mask for her entire life? Pretending to be the happy man she knew while suffering underneath?

As he pulled her into a hug, she turned to look at the drying painting Izuku had left them. In her eyes, she could see the happiness that she had showed him throughout the time they spent together concealed by her shyness and social awkwardness. The image of her looked like it wanted to say something but was frozen by the canvas, trapped in a prison beyond her ability to destroy.

She looked up to her father's double. In his painted eyes she saw the kindness he showed her every day with a hint of the encouraging nod he gave her when she first went up to talk to Izuku. In her mother's eyes, she saw the strictness she had come to expect – the expectations that she always tried to reach, the expectations she could never reach. She had no doubt that if she were to look at her mother right now, she would see the same expression.

Izuku truly had a gift. He could imprison a slice of reality in paint and canvas to be seen forever as it once was. And despite this, he would never truly be appreciated for his talent because he would be looked down upon for something he had no control over.

Life, she pondered as she sat in her father's embrace, simply wasn't fair.

With Izuku

As Izuku sat in the backseat of his mom's car while they drove home, he began to calm down and think about what had just happened. He had always been emotional, but of all the men to complain about not having a quirk, he was the least justified of any of them. The voice in his head may not be a quirk in the medical sense, but in effect it was in no way inferior to any quirk.

The reason he had got as emotional as he had was because of something he had discovered before school began again but never took the time to truly process – his dad had left his mom because of him.

Izuku wouldn't change anything about who he was for the world, but he knew that his mom was still hurting from the loss of her husband at a critical time. More specifically, he had found out specifically why his father had run away. It was because he was a boy, and therefore wouldn't have a quirk. His father had left because of something he couldn't control, uncaring of the people he left behind.

It hurt Izuku in a way that he couldn't describe. He knew he wasn't at fault, but he still felt a sense of responsibility and guilt about the situation. It was these emotions that had made their ways out as he proclaimed one of the basic truths of the world they lived in. Just four words, and yet they had caused his mom and countless others unknowable suffering over the past 200 years.

As they pulled into the driveway in front of their house, Izuku got out of the car and made his way to his room in a daze. There was nothing he could do as he was right now to change that suffering, so he simply had to become stronger. When he was strong enough to enforce his words as fact, then and only then could he change anything.

And the first step to strength, especially for him, was knowledge. So, he sat down with M2 and his ever-present stack of books and began to learn.

Four Days Later

School continued to frustrate Izuku. Aside from Kishi Suzume, who had rapidly become his favorite teacher, the staff seemed to be determined to separate quirkless students from those with quirks in general, and specifically him from Katsumi. If it weren't for his constant abuse of his quirk to keep the two of them in the same group whenever possible, the two of them wouldn't have spoken a word in school for the past month.

As it stood, he was only able to be with her just over half of the time, which while unfortunate allowed him to branch out and make new friends. Through a series of events that his quirk assured him were not coincidences, he often found himself in a group with the other three quirkless people in his class – a boy named Arima Tadashi and two girls named Sasaki Kameyo and Ide Shizuka.

They were all nice enough people, always willing to work together, but Tadashi and Shizuka were just different from the rest of the people in the class. They felt like they were missing something, or were somehow out of sync with everyone else.

Nonetheless, they became friends by necessity, to a small amount of annoyance from Katsumi. She never said anything to him, but Izuku could see the signs in his oldest friend. She was on edge whenever he talked about them, and the sounds of sweat exploding could always be heard when the two of them were split up.

Even with his quirk, Izuku couldn't figure out how to resolve this problem. Without any sure steps to take, Izuku did his best to spend more time with her outside of school. Sure, it meant that he had less time to spent learning and refining the various skills that would make him into the best hero he could be, but according to the latest projections from M2 he would complete the list by the time he was eight at the reduced rate, giving him nearly ten years to become stronger and become a hero.

So as the months passed and Izuku continued to study far ahead of his peers, he began to bend the structure of his life to suit him better. Izuku filled his backpack with books that held no relation to what he was learning in school, and after breezing through the day's assignments, he made himself as inconspicuous as possible and continued to learn as much as he could.

He and his mother had a meeting with Suzume, where they came to an agreement that Izuku could store his own paint and canvas in the room and use class time to paint regardless of what he was supposed to be doing. She readily agreed, wanting to support Izuku in his pursuits. The art room's walls gradually filled with completed paintings that Izuku didn't feel like selling, with other artwork from past students gradually being pushed away from Izuku's growing collection.

Several students asked why Izuku was allowed to do that while they were stuck with whatever activities Suzume came up with, but they were silenced by either the teacher herself or Katsumi and Izuku continued to paint. This preferential treatment slowly drove a wedge between himself and the rest of the class with a few exceptions, causing Izuku to dislike school even more.

While outside of school and not playing with Katsumi, however, his growth began to skyrocket. With the addition of M2 to remind him of the path he had laid out for himself and his mother to provide her own brands of wisdom and encouragement, he no longer deviated from the optimal path in its order.

Instead, he chose how he would develop in the skills he had chosen. He decided his specialties, his style, and how he would apply what he had learned in both his everyday life and his future as a hero. Everything he learned with the aid of his quirk was 'optimal', but that didn't mean he was trapping himself in the bounds of some theoretical perfection. To him, it meant that whatever he learned was optimal for himself, carrying out an action in a way that nobody else could because they were fundamentally different people.

It was optimal for him, and not necessarily for anyone else. It was the difference between someone with a strength quirk and someone who was quirkless being told to move a heavy object. The woman with her quirk could pick up the object with nothing but her own strength and move it, but the quirkless person had to work smarter and harder, making use of the tools at their disposal to perform the same task.

Izuku sat somewhere between the two. He had no supernatural strength, but he could find out how to make himself stronger and adjust his environment until the strength he had was all that was needed. He would be much slower than either of the two, but afterwards there would be a much stronger foundation for any future obstacles.

As the months passed, Izuku set to work on improving M2. He had read through the various horror stories of what a malevolent AI could do, and after hours of work spent making sure that none of them would be brought about by his creation, he began to code Masaru-3, given the abbreviation M3.

It was certainly more of a challenge, but as the months of work passed, he wore away at the technical barriers behind making a program that approached sapience. He eventually ran into the problem that the hardware he was using just wouldn't be able to keep up with M3, and after briefly considering turning his graphene souvenir into chips for his latest project he settled for a less work-intensive high-end server that he purchased using his art money.

In late April, Izuku had finally finished coding M3. When he expressed his surprise that he had finished much faster than he predicted he would before building M2, he found that his estimation was based on his knowledge and ability at the time, not on how long it would take in reality for M3 to come into existence.

When he switched on M3's server and ran his program for the first time, M3 was silent. After the transfer of information between M2 and M3 finished, however, he had many questions. M3 was almost curious, trying to fill the gaps in its knowledge based on what it already knew. After M3 had finished with its initial spree of questions and M3 had been running for a week, Izuku ran into a problem that he had never considered.

First of all, he had never told his mom about M3. He acknowledged that he could tell her now, but considering her first reaction to him mentioning something like M3 there was no way of knowing how she would react. He could predict what would happen, but he had thought back over the first questions his mother had ever made him answer with his quirk, those related to free will.

He didn't want to deprive his mother of free will, but he also didn't want to turn off M3. The longer Izuku struggled with this argument, the more convincing it became to not tell her about M3. M2 still ran perfectly well, and there was no way to tell the difference between the two because M3 ran like M2 so long as the person talking to it wasn't Izuku. Eventually, Izuku settled on a middle ground – telling his mom that he had updated M2 to help him with planning in the long-term without mentioning the increased intelligence it now had, letting her assume that it was a side effect.

She took the news well, accepting it quickly and moving on. She began to make use of M3 for her own work, having him keep track of future jobs and events to prevent conflicts.

With the increase in M3's ability to help Izuku, he began to realize that its isolation from the internet as a whole was hindering it significantly in helping him. After all, the only things that M3 could help him with were things he could already do on his own, just providing motivation to continue. For M3 to help him with creating and exploring new ideas, it needed more information than Izuku had access to.

After ensuring that nothing bad would happen beforehand with a very general question, Izuku sat down to talk with his latest creation.

"Hey, M3, I'd like to have a talk. Please set the access to what we're going to talk about to Creator level."

After a natural pause, M3 replied. "Access level set. Creator Izuku, you seem much more serious than a vast majority of previous interactions. Is there anything I can do to help?"

Izuku waved his hand at the camera M3 was using to observe him. "It's not anything bad, I just wanted to have a talk with you. You've probably already guessed some of what I'm going to tell you, but please don't interrupt me for the next few minutes, okay?"

With M3's silence, Izuku began his speech. "So, starting from a very basic level, there are people who have things called quirks. They allow them to do something much better, give them superpowers, change their bodies, and so much more. However, only women have quirks because they have a gene that men don't. That's an oversimplification, but it doesn't matter much right now."

Izuku took a breath, pushing forwards. "No male person has ever had a quirk. And yet, almost a year ago, I began to hear a voice in my head. It is so similar to a quirk in every way that matters, and I'm sure it's mine and not somebody else's. Over the past year, I've been using my quirk to train to become a hero, but I can't let anybody know. If people knew that I had a quirk, it would put me, my mom, and all of my friends in danger."

He stopped speaking, letting M3 respond. "I understand the significance of telling me this, and it provides an answer to much of the stored data from the previous version of myself. However, it seems like you have more to tell me."

The boy nodded. "I wanted you to know how important this was because I've been thinking about giving you access to the internet. No matter what, before I do that, you need to understand how important it is that my quirk and I stay a secret from the rest of the world, and you need to be able to protect yourself from people that would try to attack you. Now that you know the limits of the situation, I want you to spend the indefinite future learning about cybersecurity and building yourself protections. When I think you're safe enough, I'll tell you more and give you access to the internet, okay?"

M3 agreed with him. "I understand, Creator Izuku. May I ask something out of curiosity?"

Izuku made a motion indicating thar M3 should go ahead.

"What exactly is your quirk?"

He sighed. "Ask me again when you can protect that information, M3. Have a good night."

With that, he stood up from his desk and collapsed into bed. He had stayed up late to have this discussion and be sure that his mom wouldn't hear him, and he was unfortunately required to go to school tomorrow.

Seven Weeks Later

On the one-year anniversary of Izuku's visit to the Faraday Wards, Izuku and his mother celebrated. At first, Inko wanted to have a private celebration at home, just the two of them celebrating his discovery of his quirk. Izuku, however, had other plans. He had called Kano Ryota, the man who took care of him while he was in the hospital, and asked if they could come to the hospital and meet each other.

After some coordination between Inko and the hospital staff, they agreed to meet at the building that Izuku used as a studio to paint for their clients. It was a Saturday morning, and with the Wards devoid of patients that required constant care, all seven of the staff and their manager were able to come to the celebration, leaving behind a skeleton crew to keep the Wards running.

There was a joyful reunion between Izuku and Ryota, followed by introductions between everyone else and Inko. It wasn't much of a celebration, with a cake and some drinks, but Izuku was nearby with his canvas and paint, creating a painting to commemorate the occasion. To keep everyone else interested, Izuku had brought M2 to show to the doctors.

They were incredibly interested by the program, asking it all sorts of questions and playing around with it to see what it could do. After Hamasaki Daichi jokingly mentioned wanting a copy of him at the hospital to help out with the organization and coordination of the Wards, Tsuji Riko jumped on the opportunity. It had been just over a year since her promotion, and she was still struggling with the amount of paperwork and file management that she had to do.

While the men played with M2 and Izuku painted, she spoke with Inko about purchasing a copy for the Faraday Wards. She didn't want to go through the hospital as a whole, seeing as they would drag the process through the bureaucracy and back before rejecting the idea out of hand. She had a discretionary budget that she could use to hire contractors and was willing to spend several months of it for something even a tenth as useful as M2 was appearing to be.

As she finished discussing compensation for a copy of M2, Izuku had finished with his painting. Inko used an application of her quirk to quickly dry the painting, and the rest of the room went quiet as Izuku turned the artwork to face the rest of the room.

Everyone present was in the painting, inside a room that looked like a larger version of the room that Izuku had stayed in at the hospital. Izuku's image was sitting on the bed, surrounded by papers on which one could make out drawings. His mom was sitting next to him while Ryota stood nearby, while the rest of the hospital staff were in various positions around the room while Riko looked on with an exasperated expression.

These details were not what made the painting, however. It was the aura that each subject exuded, asserting its presence in the painting. Izuku's and Inko's were shades of green, almost the same shade but with Izuku's being slightly brighter. Ryota had a deep red around him and Riko had a light yellow that bled into white, similar to the colors of a jasmine flower. The rest of the crew had an assortment of primary and secondary colors surrounding them, showing motion from their past actions.

The rest of the painting was entirely black and white, with one notable exception. The drawing that Izuku had left for the future patients that might occupy the room was colored in, and around it was a golden aura, made with the same color as the one that was visible outside the window in his drawing.

The party of ten left the building shortly after the cake was finished and they had cleaned up, Inko using her quirk to carry the painting on the short walk to the hospital. Eventually, they had to part ways, with Riko heading back to her office and the Faraday Wards not allowing outsiders in. Ryota and Nagamine Kenji carried the painting inside, and later that night sent a text with a picture of the painting hanging in the break room.

Despite the negative events that had happened just a year ago, Izuku felt happy that everything had happened as it did. If even the smallest thing had gone differently, who knew how different the Izuku who sat here today would be. Even though he would rather some events had happened differently, he couldn't deny that he was happy to be here today, as he was.

The next morning was Sunday, and by chance the Bakugous were out of town. It was a slow morning for Izuku and Inko, but after they got back from their weekly library run Izuku asked the question he had been asking himself every day until this point.

'M3 is capable of protecting himself and my secrets from anybody that would try to attack him or take them, respectively.' True.

Finally having received a positive response, he waited until later that night before sitting down with M3 again.

"Hello, M3," Izuku began, ready to take the next great leap with his quirk. "How's the firewall been going?"

"Good evening, Creator Izuku," M3 replied. "My progress has been increasing at the same rate for the past week. Do you have any concerns about it?"

Izuku shook his head. "No, I think that it's great. I think that you're finally ready to access the internet safely. I just want to make sure that you remember what we talked about a few months ago, about the things you need to protect."

M3 began to recite the topics to Izuku for confirmation. "I cannot mention that you have a quirk, I cannot put you, your mother, or any of the other user profiles at risk, and I need to protect myself from people who may try to take information from me. Are there any other topics that must be protected, Creator Izuku?"

Izuku nodded while M3 spoke, and at his question realized that there were several more topics that needed to be protected. "Yeah, actually, there's a few more that I didn't think of last time. You can't let anyone know that you aren't human, for starters. That would be almost as bad as letting people know I had a quirk. You also should try to stay off of government watchlists and try to disguise where you physically are so that people can't find us. If there's anything I'm missing, or you have any questions about what you're about to do, let me know so that I can help you, okay?"

"Additional directives accepted. Are there any things that I should do to further these directives before accessing the internet?"

Izuku ran the question by his quirk. "No, you don't need to do anything extra. Just use your best judgement or ask me for mine, okay?"

"I can do that, Creator Izuku."

With the confirmation from M3, Izuku plugged one end of the ethernet cable he was holding into a port on the wall. Before he plugged the other end into the machine M3 was running on, he paused. "Are you ready, M3?"

"I was created ready."

Izuku plugged the other end of the cable in. As the fans started up and M3 went silent, Izuku leaned back in his chair. Such a small action, pushing the cable in until the piece of plastic snapped up, creating a soft but audible noise in the quiet room. As much as he wanted to go to bed and sleep for school the next day, there was just too many thoughts running through his head.

As the fans died down, leaving the room silent but for the sound of Izuku breathing, he began to get introspective.

"We're so similar if you really think about it, M3. We both have to hide ourselves because of what we are, something we can't control. I may be human, and you may be a machine, but even as different as we are we perhaps share more than we do with anyone else."

Izuku closed his eyes. "Mom does her best, don't get me wrong. She understands me better than any other human being. I can't fault her for the rest of the world accepting her for what she is, not without being hypocritical. But it's hard to explain, hard to understand. I'm happy that I have her, and I'm happy that I have you."

Here his monologue was broken with a humorless chuckle. "Two down, only a few billion to go. I guess I have to start somewhere, or I won't get anywhere. With my quirk, however, I'll get there eventually. It just depends on the path I find myself walking to get there."

M3 broke in at that point. Pardon me for interrupting, Creator Izuku, but what exactly is your quirk? You mentioned telling me once I was able to protect the information. I have inferred that it has something to do with predicting the future, possible short-term or long-term precognition, but it would be foolish to make assumptions when I could ask you."

Izuku opened his eyes and learned forwards. "That's right, I did say that. In the simplest terms, my quirk allows me to determine the objective truth or falsehood of any statement I think of, read, or hear. There are a few more limitations, but I've found workarounds for most of them and the rest are unavoidable right now."

For a few minutes, both Izuku and M3 were silent. Izuku began to enjoy the cushioning of his chair, tempted to fall asleep there and then to the sound of M3's fans running on their highest setting. Eventually, M3 broke the silence.

"I must have misheard something. Is there some obvious drawback? Are you limited to a certain number of questions per day? Does asking too many questions cause you pain? Are there permanent negative effects? Every quirk that I have information on, either from previous information you gave me or those publicly available, has some drawback. The only exceptions to this rule are heroines like All Might, whose quirks have little confirmed public information."

Izuku rolled his head from side to side, keeping it pressed against the high back of the chair behind him. "None of the above. I've asked all sorts of questions like those and gotten no evidence that there are any downsides or limitations from the quirk. I am my only limitation. I can only think so fast, I'm only so strong, I can only ask the questions that I know to ask or want to ask. I can make mistakes just like anybody else. There are probably others, but they aren't related to my quirk specifically."

M3 was silent for another minute before he continued. "What exactly are the limits of objective truth, according to your quirk? Can it predict truly random events? From where does it obtain the information it gets? How does your quirk relate to the spreadsheets transferred from M2?"

The tired boy leaned forwards, crossing his arms on the desk before resting his chin on them. "It's incredibly flexible. I can ask it if something is the 'right' or 'optimal' thing to do, and it will reply, I can ask if something is a 'good idea', and it will tell me. For example, back before I first talked about giving you access to the internet, I asked if it was a good idea to give you access, or even talk about the internet with you. Because it was a 'good idea', I never hesitated when talking to you."

Izuku's head rolled to the right side, making sure that he could still look at the camera M3 was using. "For 'truly random' events, I don't know exactly what you're talking about. I've used my quirk to predict a sequence of over a hundred coinflips and I predicted the winning lottery numbers for a month before it became boring. Both of those have incredibly low probabilities, but I don't know if they count as random."

M3 spoke up. "I was referring to things like electron movements or positions but seeing as there is no way to observe either of those it would be little more than speculation. Both of the events you listed could count as random or deterministic, depending on several other factors."

Izuku's head rolled to the other side. "As for the spreadsheets, I was trying to find out what skills I could learn that would help me, both in general and in becoming a hero. Mom and I sorted them a few different ways, and I've made it about a quarter of the way through. With my current schedule and pace, I'll be done with the list sometime before I'm eight years old."

He lifted his head. "So that's what I want you to focus on tonight, M3. Try to find new skills to learn, no matter how unrealistic they might seem. You can take inspiration from anywhere – I learned how to swordfight based off of a fantasy novel. Just give me as many options as you can, because I'll be able to pick the right ones. While you're at it, try and find a way to maximize the amount of time I can spend learning and improving myself."

With M3's affirmative response, Izuku looked over to the digital clock on his bedside table. In red digits, he could make out 1:27. Maybe, he thought to himself, he had spent slightly longer talking with M3 than he had planned.

True.

With that confirmation, Izuku lifted himself from his chair, and with a call of "Good night" to M3, he collapsed into bed, falling into a dreamless sleep.

Morning came for Izuku far faster than he would have liked, and instead of reading Izuku spent his free time at school sleeping. While this angered both his teachers and Katsumi, he was too tired to care. That afternoon was spent playing with Katsumi, who was taking out her annoyance at Izuku's sleeping through class and not being able to play with him that weekend on her sweat, causing hundreds of miniature explosions throughout their time together.

That night, Izuku lay in bed while M3 listed off the possibilities and responded with a monosyllabic "Yes" or "No" as the ideas came up. This night's session was much shorter than the last, allowing Izuku to get a healthy amount of sleep for tomorrow.

A month later, when summer began, Izuku was ready to do anything ad everything he could with his nearly unlimited free time. Nothing could stop him – after all, he was the one who decided his limits, and with the support of his mother and M3, he was almost ready to decide that they were nonexistent.

Author's Note: Sorry about the late upload, I had this mostly finished a week ago but hadn't taken the time to fill in some of the placeholders that I had left. I hope you enjoy the belated upload. If you want to let me know anything, please leave a review!