Joe's Note: In the original version of this story, this is where Carol and Yu officially hooked up for the first time. For some reason, a lot of people took offense to that because of Carol's physical age compared to Yu's, never mind the fact that there was a thirty-five year or so age gap between Yu and Carol's mental age. Let it never be said that I'm not responsive to reader feedback, though, so I went back and decided to take a different tack with relationships in this story. As Carol muses in the previous chapter, she'll be trying her best to integrate by finding companionship amongst her physical peers but from a moral standpoint - to say nothing of the legal complications - she'll be keeping her hands to herself until her new body ages up a bit more.
Dedications & Thanks: To Nicholas, Howard, Jade, Alexander, Tibor, Alonsis2, Daniel, Clark, Adrien, erlking, ridillin, Haematite, Charles, Jacky, Edward, Andrew, Roofcrawler, Wil, PbookR, Samuel, Mikey, Beverly, Daniel, Charles, Crygon20, Subtle, Christopher, Stephen, Fablesrogue, Morgan, Joseph, Jason, RileyWestfall, bloodylord, Marc, Ziryo, Chris, George, Koby, William, Devin, JJbelle, David, Gavin, TheTenthAncestor, Lookshy, Mauday, John, Roman, Warren, and Jess for sponsoring me on P treon, and making it easier for me to spend more of my time writing.

"Have you ever tried to, I don't know, synthesize your quirk factor? I'm using that term correctly, right? Quirk factor? The actual mechanism behind your powers?"

Pausing in the act of licking her cone of vanilla ice cream, Yu stared at her for a second before first nodding and then shaking her head. "Quirk factor, yeah. And I don't even know how I'd go about synthesizing it, much less why I would."

Carol sat back in her seat, gesturing to the costume that Yu was wearing. "Well for one, someone has to be able to harness your powers technologically to some degree or else you'd explode out of that thing every time you grew. Even milliskin has it's limits, and I think that would top off with six or eight inches of stretch in any one direction."

That earned her a thoughtful look from Yu. "I mean, I guess? I've always just taken my costumes for granted ever since I was in high school. The support department issued them to me to get around the giant naked teenager problem with my powers, and that was that. But to double back to your question, I've never personally looked into how my powers work or anything. Why?"

"Because you're not the first size-changing hero that I've met." Setting her bowl of wasabi ice cream down on the table, Carol twisted her wrist so that she could access the interface on her suit and tapped at it a few times. A small hologram of Scott Lang in his giant form appeared hovering over her hand and she gestured to it. "Meet Ant-Man. Him and his partner Wasp can both shrink down to tiny size and he can grow to... I think he broke a hundred feet at one point? All using technology."

Yu stared down at the hologram hungrily, watching as Carol manipulated her suit to put the hologram into motion. They stayed silent as it looped a few times, Scott striding forward to punch one of Thanos's Leviathans into the ground. "Okay so color me interested... and kinda jealous... but what does this have to do with me?"

Rolling her eyes, Carol gestured to the hologram with her free hand and then over at Yu. "Simple. We already know that technology is capable of replicating whatever makes your body grow and shrink. Your suit exists. So what if we can find someone who can isolate what your body does when it shrinks back down, pull it out of you, and then inject it back into you when you're already at normal height? And then reintroduce the part of you that makes you grow when you're shrunken down to a small size? Voila. You would never need to call for help again just because your criminal ran down the wrong side street."

"Granted I wouldn't need to call for help if I just took your advice and asked Gunhead for some lessons in hand-to-hand, but I see where you're going with this." Yu took another lick of her ice cream before tilting her head to the side thoughtfully. "What would I call myself if I could grow and shrink? Mount Lady is a great name for a giant heroine, not so much for a completely size-shifting one."

Carol offered a shrug in response to that train of thought. "Don't look at me, Scott still called himself Ant-Man even when he was a hundred feet tall. If you really wanted to rebrand yourself, though... maybe go from the Mineyama Hero: Mount Lady to the Size-Shifting Hero: Miss Measure?"

Before Yu could offer her thoughts on the matter, a new voice joined their conversation. "Ooh! Ooh! What about Miss Magnitude? Or just Magnitude? Or maybe Caliber, like how they measure bullets?" A girl wearing a hoody patterned after Carol's costume leaned over the back of her chair, waving her arms about excitedly. "Also, I wasn't eavesdropping! You guys are talking pretty loudly in a public place!"

Fair enough. Turning in her seat to face the newcomer, Carol swept her eyes up and down over her. She was definitely pretty, or at least as pretty as Carol could find anyone her body's physical age. Fluffy pink hair, slightly lighter pink skin, golden eyes with black sclera, and... were those horns? Cute. She also had a... healthy... physique, with generous curves offset by clearly defined musculature. The girl was curvy but athletic. It made her wonder exactly what the girl was into; if she got the girl's number, could she be a running buddy? Probably a better one than Midoriya, he tended to babble about the weirdest shit when they went for runs together.

A faint purplish blush stole over the girl's cheeks and Carol realized that she'd been pretty obviously eyeing the girl. And she was the only Japanese heroine who was currently openly bisexual. Whoops. Offering the girl a hand, she smiled reassuringly. "Don't worry about it. If it was a private conversation, we wouldn't have been having it in public. I'm Carol... err, Danvers Carol. Just Carol is fine; I'm still trying to get used to everyone calling me by my father's last name around her. Or if you really want to win brownie points, Car-Ell."

"I'm Ashido Mina! Call me Mina!" Mina grabbed her proffered hand and shook it enthusiastically, bouncing a bit more in her seat. "I'm a huge fan!"

Carol let her eyes wander over Mina again before chuckling and reaching out to tug at the wrist of Mina's hoody. "I can see that. This is the limited edition hoody, isn't it?"

Nodding, Mina brought her hands up to smooth over the gold star on her chest and then outward along the thin piping that ran along her collarbones. "Yeah, the general release version has gold-colored cotton instead of actual metallic fabric. I actually slept in a camp chair overnight out in front of a store to get this! I told my parents that I was sleeping over my friend's house; they were furious." Wow. Now that was definitely a level of devotion that Carol... perhaps should have been expecting given the cult of celebrity surrounding heroes on this Earth. "Oh! I promised myself that if I ever met you, I'd ask you... can I call myself Alien Queen when I become a hero or would that be appropriative from your point of view? Because, you know, you're actually an alien?"

A bit bemused by the fact that Mina didn't seem as if she intended to return her hand, Carol used her left hand to take a spoonful of ice cream and pop it into her mouth as she considered the question. Was it appropriative for a human to call herself an alien? She was absolutely the wrong person to ask on that front, considering she was currently doing that herself. Was the queen part a bit presumptuous, the former consideration aside? Possibly? She probably needed more context so that she could give an informed answer. "It's definitely an interesting name. Why Alien Queen, though?"

Finally letting go of Carol's hand, Mina turned to pick up her empty bowl of ice cream and held it out on her upturned hand. Then a liquid began bubbling up out of her palm, causing the cup to... smoke and disintegrate? Well that was an interesting quirk. "My quirk is Acid. And so I was thinking of that old pre-quirk movie, Alien. The whole acid blood thing. I could call myself Xenomorph Queen but that's a mouthful and also isn't the word xenomorph copyrighted?"

"I think it's a valid scientific term so I don't know if it was ever copyrighted. Let's say for argument's sake though that 'Xenomorph' as a name was copyrighted back when the original movie came out." Yu shifted her ice cream into her off hand as she dug her phone back out of her costume, unlocking it and prodding at the screen. "We actually learned about copyright law in school for this exact situation; some people wanted to name themselves after actual fictional characters from pre-quirk media and so we got to discuss the legalities of it. Copyright is generally seventy years from when the creator passes, or seventy years from when the movie debuted because the concept of 'creator' gets really sketchy when you have directors, writers, actors, and so forth and so on. So Alien came out in... oof, 1979. Did not know the franchise had been around that long. So seventy years from then is 2049. I think you're good... but yeah, Xenomorph Queen would be a mouthful. What about just Xenomorph or Xeno? Shorter, easier to say, not as presumptuous as anything with 'queen' in the name..."

Mina hopped up out of her chair and dragged it over to their table, attracting a few looks from other customers and a raised eyebrow from Carol. Okay, evidently they were a party of three now. "Ooh, I never thought about it that way. Maybe I could do Xeno, like in 'stranger', because I definitely don't look like your average Japanese person." To be fair, half the people walking down the street these days didn't look like an average Japanese person anymore, but Carol wasn't going to be the one to burst her bubble. "And thanks for the copyright info, that's obviously not the kind of thing that comes up in middle school and I couldn't really make heads or tails of the CRIC website. I have plenty of enthusiasm but... book learning isn't my strong point."

"It's going to have to become one of your strong points if you want to get into a good hero school." With her hands free again, Carol picked up her bowl of ice cream and went back to her dessert-before-dinner... because sometimes she just had to spoil herself. "Even if you're aiming for one of the smaller schools, there's a lot of people trying to get in and not a lot of spots. Average school is twenty to forty students a year; you're going to need to have a solid grasp of academics to rank high enough on their entrance exam to get in past everyone else."

Mina let out a despondent sigh as she flopped backwards into her chair. "I know! I'm just... there's so many other interesting things to do other than studying! And I keep doing all of them instead of actually preparing for entrance exams! Which are only six months away! I'm never going to get into U.A. at this rate!"

Chuckling softly, Carol brought her hand up to brush over the cowl of her armor that she was still wearing for its translation abilities. Tapping her forearm, she dismissed it and gestured from herself to Mina. "I no speak good Japanese. Need help. You help Japanese. I help study." Mina let out a delighted noise and replied far too fast for Carol to understand with her limited grasp of Japanese, forcing her to reactivate her cowl so that she could understand what the girl was saying. "Come again?"

"I said that's a great idea! You're new to so much here on Earth! I can help you with your Japanese and fashion and pop culture and a bunch of other things! Although it's super weird that you speak English already; is that what the entire rest of the galaxy speaks? That's completely unfair, the Americans haven't gotten any further into space than the rest of us. Why can't everybody speak Japanese?" Mina pondered the unfairness of life for a few seconds before moving on before Carol could inform her of the existence of Galactic Common, that English was an 'also' for her, and that learning Japanese was her working on her fourth language. "And you're probably really smart because I mean, you're an alien from a species that can travel to other planets. Your educational system has to be like, light years beyond ours. Pun intended." The pink-haired girl bounced in place again before holding her hand up next to her face in a peace sign. "We're going to be the best study buddies, I just know it!"

"Not that she actually needs to study. She's being recommended to U.A. by All Might; they'd probably let her wear her costume in class so that she can talk to the rest of you." Yu shook her head in amusement before pointing her half-eaten ice cream cone in Carol's direction. "You sure hit the jackpot when you impressed him. I wish I had someone like that in my corner."

Carol offered a faint shrug in response, taking another spoonful of ice cream and shoveling it into her mouth. "It's kind of surreal to be honest. He feeds me, he puts a roof over my head, he buys me clothes, he keeps an eye on my appearance so I look suitably photogenic and heroic, he trots me out for social events every now and then. It's kind of like having a sugar daddy, except he wants me to punch things instead of... you know."

Both Mina and Yu screwed up their faces in disgust at that. Mina was the first to react, waving her arms around in dismay. "Oh God, that's not a thought that I ever wanted to have. All Might is like, everyone's excitable dad. He makes dad jokes. 'All Might' and 'sugar daddy' should never be in the same sentence and now I'm very distressed because they were."

"Oh man, if you think he's cheesy in public, you have no idea what I have to put up with. He has bad puns for everything. Everything. He even got me with the 'hi Hungry, I'm All Might' thing last week." Carol slumped back into her seat and shoveled more ice cream into her mouth petulantly. "I hate puns."