AN: An alternate, slower beginning to my story.
Ignoring my inaccurate science, enjoy!
(Note: What I say below is indeed a facet of the HUP. It is not entirely accurate, but when would you use a fanfic to study for a chemistry test? Thanks, random reviewer, for pointing out my inaccuracy.)
…
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: It is impossible to determine where an electron is in an atom because even by looking at it, you are changing where the electron is.
"Wait a minute… that isn't right. What about atomic radius and the probability stuff with the energy shells?"
"Nobody cares. This is a fanfic, for god's sake! Chill!"
…
My four year old self sat in the playground amongst the other kindergarten children, and as people fought over who were to use the slides first, showed off their newly obtained quirks to their fellows after hiding from the teachers, and making messy sand structures, one of the most important moments of my life happened.
"What's your quirk, Tenshin-kun? We've all got one now! It's just you left!" my friend said, looking at me, eyes sparkling. No, seriously. That was his quirk: Anime Eyes.
"I don't know." I said, proclaiming it dramatically. "But it'll definitely be something awesome!"
"It's obviously going to be something really cool!" somebody else said.
"His family has a ton of copying quirks! I bet it's going to be one, too!"
"No, it's going to be awesome! Maybe summoning dragons or something!"
"It's obviously going to be controlling the wind."
"Wind dragons! Wind dragons! Wind dragons!" The schoolyard chanted.
Something within me shifted, and I suddenly felt the urge to thrust my hand forward.
And lo and behold, wind dragons flew out of my palm, wreaking havoc on the playground. Sand rippled violently in the wind currents as we cheered for the chaos to continue.
Clotheslines that day suffered a great loss, pants and shirts mingling on the streets, as the crowd of rabid children ran through the streets, holding me up (somebody had a minor strength quirk) as I watched the wind dragons fly around wildly and wreak havoc. The teachers were helpless, rubbing sand out of their eyes as one of my constructs whipped up a whirlwind around them.
(Thankfully, none of us had to pay for the damages.)
…
The quirkologists gave up.
…
Initial Diagnosis
Yohaku Tenshin
Age: 6
Gender: Male
Quirk? Wind control/ Elemental summoning/ Telekinesis/ Oh god why is his quirk producing fire now? I thought it was just wind! Oh god my office is burning
What can it do?
He can create wind creatures, of any shape and size!He can't actually control them, but it looks really awesome!
Apparently he can control them. Wait, he just moved the test ball without using wind? What?
He can use telekinesis, and control nearly anything!
Oh, god it burns! Why? He just summoned fire too! And why did he just put it out with water? Is his quirk purely elemental? But then how did he move the ball without using any of the elements?
And now he can't control wind anymore?
This seriously makes no sense. Please defer to another quirkologist.
…
Second quirk report:
Name: Yohaku Tenshin
Quirk: He is one with the universe and commands the elements!
Gender: Such majesty cannot be merely contained within such a vulgar word describing the arrangement of his non-somatic chromosomes.
What can it do?
(Gibberish, followed by a picture of a pentagram, and then the following words)
Sinners, your time has come! The devil has come once more! The many-quirked god has descended and soon judgment is upon us!
(Note from the doctor's assistant: I should have been a dentist!)
…
Revised Quirk Report
Yohaku Tenshin
Age: 6 (Initial copy of quirk report is included for reference in case of discrepancies)
Gender: Male (Initial copy of quirk report is included for reference in case of discrepancies
Quirk: Quirk
What can it do?
We don't actually know. Defer to I-island. Initial observations are recorded in the rough draft. Warning: Upon no circumstances are cultists to obtain this report, lest a six year old suddenly finds themselves to possess the power of a deity.
Note: Powers change from day to day, but are all consistently emitter type quirks (at least, we hope.).
… (3rd person POV: Walking Lie Detector)…
This newest quirk report made Tskauchi Naomasa … very, well, intrigued?
And also mildly concerned?
Tskauchi made a mental note to make sure that hospital fired that second quirkologist. That really was unprofessional wording for a doctor.
Stopping himself from going down the rabbit hole of insane doctors, he turned himself back onto the real topic. All for One.
Was there a chance that this kid… was related? After all, he exhibited the signature sign of potentially being All for One's protégé or something: multiple facets of power.
Tskauchi didn't actually know, and All for One was supposedly dead, but he still had to check.
It turns out that his family had a line of… just copy quirks. Copying voices, copying height, even copying hair and eye color. There was a particularly interesting one (belonging to the boy in question's father) that was a passive empathy quirk that had an aspect of induced fractional copy quirks… for emotions.
Apparently he was licensed to use his quirk at work, and he was a comedian, albeit not extremely successful.
There weren't any real suspicions about him being related to All for One, either. The family had a well documented family tree up to the era where quirks first emerged, and none of them had died of strange circumstances or showed any criminal or sociopathic tendencies.
They were just normal service workers. Clothing line developers, comedians, secretaries, and performers were what was listed, along with a long line of hair color copying quirks, hand motion copying quirks, passive academic test copying quirks, and copy quirks as far as the eye can see.
"Well," the detective shrugged, leaning back in his chair and thinking about that next baseball game in the quirked leagues "Weird things do happen.".
…
Elementary school flew by really quickly, and I figured out something about my quirk.
It was really unpredictable
It has a set amount of energy per day, akin to a quota
It likes to make practical jokes
As the imps that were my classmates were demanded to see more wind dragons and asked how I got such an "awesome quirk", I felt my quirk shift into something it shouldn't be.
"I bet he can summon even cooler things! Ooh, maybe making ice golems?"
"Maybe he can change the weather!"
"Snow day! Snow day!"
My quirk took that personally.
It started hailing.
"Ha, ha. Very funny." I thought, face palming as children screamed, being hit by rather heavy hailstones.
And then, every time somebody hailed me as the bringer of snow days, another wave of hail appeared and rained down on our heads.
The weather report for the Saitama prefecture had its reputation dragged through the mud during those years.
Stumbling home, exhausted, I learned the limits of my quirk: I could only use so much of it every day.
…
We had to transfer schools. The quirk situation was getting too hyped up, and I was getting home every day exhausted, subject to children being children and having overactive imaginations.
The weird thing was that my quirk sort of reacted to the incessant ramblings of children and shifted a metaphysical energy that I could feel into whatever rampant topic they were discussing.
For example, mecha animes.
Having your forearms become metal claws was not a pleasant experience when you had to take a test and hold a pencil.
So, in order to minimize quirk-related mayhem, I was moved to a different elementary school from all of my fellow agents of chaos from kindergarten.
Of course, I was reluctant to go, and after one mildly snowy day (which was hopefully not caused by my quirk), I went on my daily pilgrimage to elementary school. Having an absolutely gigantic map of the Saitama prefecture and looking at the little intersections, I was not paying attention when I bumped into air.
"Owww.." the air said.
I fell onto the merciless brick road, with my map gently drifting and falling onto my face. I unveiled my eyes to see the object that I had bumped into…
"Sorry?" A floating uniform said.
"Aah!" I said, taking a step back. "Are you a ghost? Please, have mercy! I didn't mean to ruin my uniforms with my quirk! The masses demanded it?"
"…I'm not a ghost!" the uniform said indignantly and with an oddly squeaky voice. "My name is Hagakure Tooru, and I'm a human too!"
"Oh." I said, squinting and looking at the uniform. "But why can't I see you?"
"That's just my quirk. I'm invisible!" She said, throwing her arms in the air to presumably make some sort of dramatic gesture.
"I wish my quirk were that straightforward." I mumbled, picking up my map.
"What is it?" She asked.
"Nobody knows." I said, rubbing the back of my head. "All of the doctors just gave up after I- wait my parents don't allow me to talk about it."
"Your parents aren't here, right?" She said, sleeves of her uniform coming together as she leaned forward a bit. Presumably excited. "Tell me, tell me!"
Wow. Such simple rule breaking logic had never occurred to me. When the enforcers of my exile from my friends aren't here, I could go wild!
Still, my parents would probably hear about me blowing up a classroom or something.
"My quirk… just likes to play pranks on me." I said, "It's kind of a bad luck quirk." Sorry, quirk. But it was true.
"O-oh."
…
In front of an entire class of people, who were totally strangers, of course I would be a little shy.
Apparently, I was so unnaturally shy that the people thought it had to be a quirk. I didn't perform well under pressure, okay?
As I wished I could just be invisible like Hagakure, I did.
Except, well, I was entirely invisible. I figuratively and literally disappeared. Even my clothes went along with me.
For a moment, the class just looked around the room while Hagakure was just confused.
"Hey, Tenshin-kun said that his quirk was a bad luck quirk. How is he invisible?"
I chose that moment to reappear, fall forward onto the teacher's desk, make it topple forward, and send papers and pens all over the floors.
I was off to a great start. On the very first day of school, I landed with a bad luck quirk that would probably never go away. Being an emotionally fragile child, I began crying.
Looking back at it, it wasn't exactly a very good stage of my life. Still, beginning to excessively cry had its perks. At the end of the day, my bad luck ability was replaced by an excessive crying ability. And even if I may or may not have flooded a classroom, at least I wasn't tripping everywhere and sending stationary all over the floor.
(Going home with a bad luck quirk would probably make gas pipes spontaneously combust and truck-kun to send a lot of people to an alternate universe).
But soon, I discovered the glory that was anime, and then everything was changed.
…
"Your next line is… why in the world are you dressed like that?"
"Why in the world are you dressed like that?" My parents said, looking at a black baseball cap with a badly colored yellow piece of paper taped to the front. I had worn one of Otuo-san's work jackets and put yellow tape at the edges, and put on a white t-shirt underneath the coat.
"It's some character from the internet!" I said, waving my hands in the air. "Apparently he's really cool, overly muscular, and likes to predict the next thing that other characters will say! By the way, your next line will be: What are you doing on the internet, young man? You should be studying!"
"What are you doing on the internet, young man? You should be studying!"
"N-nani?"
"And to answer your last question, it's not breaking the rules if you don't get caught!" I then ran out of the apartment, suddenly filled with energy and determined to do something with it. Rather uncharacteristically.
Behind me, my parents looked at me preparing to descend the stairs of our apartment dramatically.
"… Did my son just make a Jojo reference?"
"Where did he even find out about Jojo?"
In another room, a muffle sound of somebody shouting "Za Warldo!" sounded from one of the rooms in the relatively small apartment.
"Of course his older brother introduced him to anime."
"Isn't that anime like… really violent?"
"More importantly, how has Jojo survived for over 300 years?"
…
Approximately two hours later, I had burst into the door, threw off my baseball cap and ripped off the yellow tape on my dad's overcoat, before disassembling the various bits of my horrible cosplayer before a spectral hand ground the paper into the dust and threw the yellow remains of the yellow "jacket liner" and "medallion" into the trash can.
"This just now on Saitama Prefecture: 'Star Platinum', a character from the classic "Jojo's Bizarre Adventures", has been seen fleeing from a white van along with a Jojo cosplayer as several men in dark suits with bags of candy lay on the ground, apparently in great pain."
"Did my son just almost get kidnapped?" My mother yelled as I cowered in the sanctity of my room.
The audible smack of face and forehead sounded from the living room as raucous laughter came from my brother's room.
Needless to say, I was grounded and given a long lecture on kidnappers and how to stay away from white vans and men in coats offering me candy.
…
I had regained some of my confidence after my version of Star Platinum had punched those kidnappers in the crotch, and approached the second week of first grade with a spring in my step and another oversized map in my hands.
Of course, I almost bumped into Hagakure again, our minute height difference and my oversized map making it impossible to see anything (other than maybe her invisible head), and we resumed our trek to elementary school together amidst the herd of students either running to school with toast hanging from their jaws or ambling casually, chatting with friends or comparing something with phones.
"You seem different."
"Yeah!" I said, smiling. "For once, my quirk isn't being a douche! I got this weird ghost thing that followed me around for the weekends!"
"What does your quirk do, exactly? It's literally never the same. Last Friday you had the ability to literally gape like a fish."
"You asked this question last Friday too, and I can't tell you! I'm not allowed to!"
"Uggh…" Hagakure groaned, annoyed. "You always say that, and also say that if you tell me what your quirk is, your quirk will either stop working or become even more chaotic."
I then picked up my map and continued walking, but in the opposite direction.
"Where are you going?" Hagakure said, uniform completely still in the air.
"This is where the school is, right?"
She ran up to me, took a look at the map, and turned it in my hands.
"You were looking at it upside down."
That day, I learned that I was hopeless with directions unless I had a map to guide me.
…
Elementary school passed with my fellow students growing a fear of my tear ducts, capable of flooding a classroom and rendering all of their efforts of turning in homework futile, but middle school came, and classes were shuffled. Once again put in an unfamiliar situation, nervousness was finally rising once more. Hagakure was shuffled to another class, so none were there to warn my fellow classmates of the terrors that my quirk could bring.
Terrors that, for once, didn't bring geopolitical change to the classroom. It only bought metaphysical changes to me.
"H-hello, my name is Yohaku Tenshin, and-"
"Hah! What an idiot!"
"He looks kinda like a fish, with those big, dumb eyes." Another kid jeered.
"Fish boy! Lmao!" Said one particularly "cool" kid.
I felt something change in me again, and then my quirk felt pure elation before shrinking me down, my legs conjoining into one and my body twisting 180 degrees. I felt my fingers grow some sort of film, shrink, and conjoin as my whole body felt like it was falling into the void.
"He really is a fish!" the kid that made the eyes comment laughed.
"Don't fish drown above water?"
The class then panicked, trying to find a fish tank before I drowned. I was feeling just fine, though. As fine as I could be while panicking about trying to turn back into a human.
Somebody finally liberated a plastic covering from somewhere and ran to get it filled with tapwater, while the rest of the kids ran around like headless chickens. The teacher was at a computer, casting frantic glances at me.
"We don't need to panic!" The teacher said, suddenly standing up. "He's a lungfish."
"So what?"
"Will he still drown?"
The hubbub of children continued chattering.
"Lungfish can breathe out of water, and are known to survive without water for months on end. He'll be fine."
One particularly brave student picked me up gingerly and put me back on the desk.
The rest of the class was spent with the teacher calling the police station to register my quirk while shouting "What do you mean his quirk has already been registered? Who the hell just called it 'Quirk'?".
Meanwhile, the third graders gathered around my desk, poking at my scales, as I frantically tried to turn back into a human.
The nickname fish boy was cemented into my reputation. What I didn't know, however, was that a whole new realm of pain was opened up to me.
Bullying.
And that's sort of a wrap to the first chapter.
Which beginning should be continued? Fast paced or slow paced? Do something to indicate your support for either.
That being said, please follow, favorite, or review! It would really make my day!
-Spirit