"So," Fukusei said, with a clap of his hands. Everyone looked at him.
"Thoughts?" he asked. Mystified expressions faced him. He chuckled lightly. "No? None at all?"
"You're pretty good, I'll say that," said the boy with the impossible strength. "It's been a while since I had some fun."
This statement was met with agreement from the rest of Class 1-S. Hashimoto was looking away and pouting. Fukusei glanced at her, grinning.
"By a strange turn of events," he said exaggeratedly, "Hashimoto got beaten, although by herself or by whoever she was possessing I can't say." He looked back at her, as if for a reaction, which he got. Hashimoto sank slowly into the ground. He waved a hand.
"Don't mind her. She's embarrassed."
"Am not," Hashimoto said, her voice muffled by concrete.
"You are," Fukusei told her. He turned back to them.
"So, you'll be wanting to know everything, yeah? Quirks, names, hero names, that sort of thing?"
Class 1-A nodded, with the exception of Bakugo, who merely huffed, although that too was a form of approval. Midoriya, on the other hand, nodded so fast the rest of his body vibrated.
"You're eager," Fukusei remarked, addressing Midoriya. He blushed. Fukusei turned and pointed out Aoyama, Sato, Shoji, and Sero.
"And you lot," he said. They looked at each other, then back at him.
"What?" Sero said.
"Teamwork wasn't allowed, remember? I didn't say anything then, because you'd done all that to set a trap, but maybe remember the rules next time?"
The four of them looked crestfallen, and mumbled their apologies. Fukusei waved them away. "It's fine. Just reminding you. Good effort, by the way. I think all you need to do is work on how well you can adapt to a situation."
Now they mumbled their thanks.
"Miss Invisible! Good effort on your part too!" Fukusei waved cheerfully at the floating gloves that were Hagakure. "I'd recommend wearing some clothes though. Just saying."
Hagakure made a strangled sound as Ashido giggled in delight.
"That's everyone I fought, then," Fukusei said, stepping back. "Touma, you got a bunch too, didn't you?"
Ayatsuru held up four fingers. "I got Earphones, Ponytail, Pink Skin, and Bomb Boy."
"The fuck you say?!" Bakugo yelled, struggling to move forward as several classmates combined their efforts to hold him back. "I'll kill you!"
"Now now, Bakugo," Kaminari said with a mischievous grin, "it's not like you don't do the same thing."
"I do not, Dunce Face!" Bakugo yelled.
Kaminari pointed. "Case in, haha, point."
Bakugo screamed in rage.
Class 1-S just watched silently.
"Is this just how things normally are with them?" Ayatsuru whispered discreetly to Fukusei.
"Seems like it," Fukusei whispered back.
Jirou smiled privately. Oh, it was a lot more than just that.
"Girl, tell me the joke," a voice beside her ear said. Jirou whipped around to see Hashimoto floating beside her.
"H-how didn't I hear you?" Jirou stuttered.
"My quirk's Ghost," Hashimoto said over the sounds of Bakugo violently attempting to free himself, with some success. "I can do anything a ghost can, which means I could just walk around without being seen or heard if I wanted to."
"Oh," Jirou said, trying to breathe deeply to get her heartbeat back to normal. "Okay."
Hashimoto leaned in with a smirk.
"So what's the joke?"
Jirou turned away to obscure her face. "Nothing."
"Come on!" Hashimoto leaned in closer. "Tell me, pretty please with a cherry on top?"
Jirou attempted to back away a little. "It's nothing. Really."
She huffed.
"Well, okay then," she said, and popped out of existence.
She reappeared a moment later behind Fukusei. The girl with shoulder-length pink hair jumped when she whispered in her ear, and turned to face her with a smouldering expression, which Hashimoto managed to deflect with a mischievous smile that held a slight trace of sadism.
Or at least, that was the only way Jirou could think to describe that pitch-perfect rendition of an anime expression in real life.
A clap of Ayatsuru's hands, accompanied by a wave of complete silence that engulfed them, brought their attention immediately to him.
Jirou clutched at her ears. For someone who had spent their entire life listening to even the slightest sound, to hear nothing at all was extremely unnerving. All noise was gone. There wasn't a trace of rustling clothes, or even the somnolence of a slight breeze.
Just nothing. A void of sound.
And then it went away as Ayatsuru flicked his hand.
"Right," Fukusei said. Their eyes flickered to him. "Thanks for that."
Ayatsuru shrugged.
"So," Fukusei continued, "you were saying?"
"Earphones and Ponytail, nice try but treat an exercise as reality, please? It helps prepare you better for the real world situations. Pinky-" he began, then stopped as Ashido squealed. He quirked an eyebrow. "Something I said?"
"You got my hero name!" Ashido gasped. "You got it exactly!"
"What, Pinky?"
Ashido nodded, laughing. Ayatsuru shrugged.
"Well, okay then. Anyway-"
"Pretty sure she didn't choose the name, though," another boy cut in, wearing white armour with a blue background glow. "Midnight was kind of pushy when we chose ours, remember? I don't think someone like her would take Pinky over the other available options, to be honest."
"Ask her yourself, why don't you?" Ayatsuru said irritably. "Anyway, Pinky, you tried, but I think you need to brush up on your reflexes. If you'd reacted properly in time, maybe you could have taken me out. Bombs-"
"Fuck you too!" Bakugo yelled.
"-you should get some control over your enthusiasm," Ayatsuru continued, unfazed. "You have the drive but you've got to get a better grip on your quirk. I can see that you've already done pretty good, but there's still a bit of a way to go."
Bakugo hmphed and turned his head away.
"Wait, I forgot the introduction. You know my name and quirk, and I haven't decided on a hero name yet. Okay, that's fine, then."
Ayatsuru looked around. "Neru, you got a couple as well, didn't you?"
"Yup." The boy with strength to rival All Might stepped up.
"Ikari Sokoneru. My hero name and quirk are both Collateral Damage. What that means, basically, is that I have super strength, but I can concentrate the power into a single point. That sort of thing gives you this."
He turned, and gestured at the boy in armour, who responded by reaching behind him and retracting his hand with a small white disc in hand. He threw it to the ground.
Ikari watched it for a moment before frowning at the thrower. He smiled and snapped his fingers, and immediately the disc opened up, whirring, and then unfolded in an instant, becoming a smooth white wall.
Ikari punched.
There was no whoosh of air, no strong winds, but in a second there was a fist sized hole in the wall.
Ikari stepped back, then turned slowly to Ayatsuru.
"You took care of the excess, right?"
In response, Ayatsuru held up a hand with two outstretched fingers, around which two yellow lights were circling. Ikari examined it critically.
"Where's the rest?"
Ayatsuru snorted, and immediately the light grew white and blinding. Ikari stepped back, shielding his eyes.
"Fine, fine, I got it. Put it away now."
The lights disappeared from Ayatsuru's hand, and he held it behind his back. Ikari turned to face Class 1-A again.
"I got you and you, didn't I?" he said, pointing at Midoriya and Kirishima. They looked at each other, then nodded to him.
"Right. Green hair, I know you have some tricks you didn't get to show off. Next time, don't wait to see how strong your opponent is, just go all out from the get-go. Red hair, work on dodging and minimizing damage. If your quirk isn't enough to stop a blow, don't get hit too much. Got it? Okay. Yamaguchi, you want to go next?"
The girl with pink hair stepped forward as Ayatsuru moved aside.
"I'm Yamaguchi Hoshiko. My hero name and my quirk are called Portal, which does what it says on the tin. I can make portals. Okay, so I got you," she pointed at Ojiro, "and you got disqualified." She directed this to Asui.
"I can't really say anything about either of you, you both did okay, I guess."
"But I lost…" Ojiro trailed off.
"I mean, I can't actually think of anything you could have done better," Yamaguchi shrugged.
Fukusei frowned. "There's gotta be some feedback you can give there."
"Can't think of anything," she said. "I've been trying to think of something the entire time and I'm just coming up blank. Sorry."
"Well," Fukusei shrugged, "if that's how it is. Who's next?"
"I'll go," said a girl with golden eyes and blonde hair. Kaminari seemed to stiffen at the sight of her. Jirou remembered seeing her lead him through the portal after he, probably, electrocuted himself.
She smiled at them. "I'm Ito Fuyuko. It's nice to meet you. My hero name is Disaster. My quirk is Natural Disaster. That means I can summon, well, natural disasters. Lightning strikes, thunderstorms, earthquakes, tornadoes, eruptions, you name it."
She looked at Kaminari. "I took you out, right? I think you were doing pretty well. You could probably have taken me out if my suit wasn't insulated. If we're going by sneak attacks, I think you just need to be prepared to bail if it goes wrong. That's all."
She smiled at him as she stepped back, and Kaminari turned slightly red.
"Who wants to go next? Gravy?" Fukusei asked with a subtle grin.
"Stop calling me Gravy," the girl in gray said irritably.
"But you're gray all over. Grayvy. It's perfect! And if you put an 'I-T' in the middle, you get 'gravity', which is your whole thing. It's the kind of opportunity that doesn't come twice," Fukusei pouted.
She huffed in good humour. "Fine then."
She turned to everyone else and waved. "I'm Ando Chiaki. My hero name is Gravity, and my quirk is Gravitational Manipulation. It means I can increase, reverse, or negate gravity in a specific area or on a certain object."
She pointed at Koda. "You're the only one I got. My advice to you would be… uh… make sure you have multiple options? It just looked to me like you were getting the animals to do your work for you. I'd say you should keep some kind of weapon with you."
She shrugged. "You seem like you're better suited to information gathering, anyway, so I don't blame you."
Ando stepped back and tapped the nearest person on the shoulder. Hashimoto stepped forward.
"You know my name, my hero name is Phantom, my quirk is Ghost. I can do anything a ghost can."
She looked boredly at Iida. "You did good. Not much I can say. Be faster, maybe?"
Iida stood as straight as he could, hands flat like an ironing board.
"I shall do my utmost to improve with your advice in mind!" he yelled. Hashimoto looked taken aback, but nodded.
"You… do that."
She edged backwards and nodded to the last girl in Class 1-S, who had black hair, a black costume, and an entirely neutral expression on her face.
"I'm Hayakawa Yami," she told them. "My quirk is Shadow Manipulation, and my hero name is Lady Darkness. I took you out."
Tokoyami inclined his head in a show of respect.
"You need to be more versatile, and have more options ready, like Chiaki said. Maybe you should also improve on your quick thinking so that you can analyze the situation right there to come up with the best solution you can think of."
Tokoyami nodded. "I shall do as the darkness instructs me."
"Okay," she said, and turned to a boy in a red and gold suit with white hair and gray eyes and the best poker face anyone could ever have. He took a slow step forward.
"My name's Kaneshiro Kazan," he delivered in a flat monotone. There was no change in pitch, not even an attempt to speak normally. Just the same level tone, no personality to the words.
"My hero name is Blaze, and my quirk is Spectral Flame. That means I can create different kinds of fires. I got you," he said pointing at Todoroki. "You need better quirk control. Your flames are a little lazy and you don't have good control. I think you also need to improve your ice, because you tried to cover yourself in ice but you didn't do it quickly enough or in a good amount. Using your quirk should be second nature."
He bowed, then stepped back and pushed the boy in white armour forward. He smiled at them.
"Yasuda Rikugo. My hero name is Hammer and my quirk is Hammerspace. That means I can pull out anything I can think of from a pocket dimension into the real world. I have my limits," he added, catching the look of shock on everyone's faces, "but I'm not telling you here and now."
He pointed to Mineta and Uraraka.
"I got you, right? Grape dude, be faster and quicker on your feet. And you," he said to Uraraka, "go for the kill quicker. Don't waste time."
He stepped back.
"That's everyone then," Fukusei said with a clap of his hands. "Now if you could all just do me a favour…"
A few minutes later, they were all lined up, while Fukusei tapped each of them on the forehead, copying their quirks and adding them to his list.
"This is a useful one," he remarked after tapping Bakugou. "Lots of potential applications."
Each of them was treated to a light smile and an observation about their quirk. Midoriya was last, and when Fukusei tapped him, a lot of things went wrong.
Fukusei frowned.
"That's a huge mass of genetic data," he said. "Your quirk feels like it's kinda complicated."
He pressed his fingers to Midoriya's head, still frowning.
"Ah."
He made a strange hand gesture at Ayatsuru, and then suddenly there was a lot less sound around them. Midoriya couldn't hear anything except the sounds of himself and Fukusei, as well as a slight breeze.
It looked like Ayatsuru had encased them in a private, soundproof bubble. What would Fukusei have wanted that for?
"Tell me," Fukusei said, "how many quirks do you have?"
Midoriya froze.