Finally, we're at the interesting part. We'll be diving head-first into canon and then rip it into shreds!

A small info-corner about Japans government structure:

"The National Diet (国会 Kokkai) is Japan's bicameral legislature. It is composed of a lower house called the House of Representatives, and an upper house, called the House of Councillors. Both houses of the Dietare directly elected under parallel voting systems. In addition to passing laws, the Diet is formally responsible for selecting the Prime Minister." - Wikipedia.

Review-corner:

Crowdust: Haha, thank you! I hope it'll catch on.

Shadowing: Then I hope you'll find this chapter adequate enough :D

Guest: I aim to please :) Thank you!

RandomDude: Thank you very much for your review! We're slowly progressing to the more interesting parts and now you've gone and put more plot bunnies in my head with the All Might comment. I'm actually rather curious about what he'll be doing myself... Some of my characters kind of have their own life and do whatever they want to.

[edit] I edited a few misspellings. Kinda didn't notice that maiming and crippling are essentially the same - sorry, I'm not exactly a native speaker. I also want to say I'm really thankful for any and all suggestions for grammatical, spelling or inconsistency errors in the story. And also suggestions to the story itself naturally, I'm all to happy to adopt your ideas :D

Much much later I'm probably adding a little sprinkling of romance - any suggestions for pairings? I'm open for anything.

"You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere."
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Nine

12 years

When she visited on a sunny winter day to distribute a few blankets that she'd stolen from veranda chairs in her immediate neighbourhood, she found a nightmare.

Her people, her kin, lay on the ground, motionless. Something in her brain didn't, couldn't process the sight. There was no blood. No sign of why they did not stand when she entered, because they always greeted each other heartfully. And then she noticed the man.

Standing smack dab in the middle of the warehouse, back hunched, grey hair pulled up in a tight bun, and eyes razor-sharp and assessing. He reminded her of an old Chinese dragon, preening in the face of his enemies defeat – standing guard over his hoard.

She didn't run at him in a rage - like she really wanted to, because how dare he? Instead, she carefully placed the blankets beside herself and closed the door without leaving him out of her eyes.

A cold fury wound itself down her back, made her stand straight, made her eyes gleam and made the drums start pound pound pounding.

"What happened to them?", her voice was without infliction. She had to take a few deep breaths to make the red clouding her vision recede slightly, when he let out a nonchalant:

"Me, obviously. I happened to them, girl."

She couldn't lose her head. She wouldn't lose her head.

She slowly drew closer to one of the smaller children and knelt to check her pulse. It was there and seemed to be normal - she was no expert, really, but in her view it seemed to be okay that it was even there.

"What did you do to them?", hastily she stood again when he took a step near her and almost without thought she fell into the tight, ducked form of the freestyle fighting form Munchkin taught her.

"Oh- what's that supposed to be?", he twirled his thin moustache lazily.

"Do you perhaps want to fight me? I heard there were fighters here - people who were interested in freedom, in equality and in fraternity."

His eyes twinkled ominously.

Where did he-? It was much too soon. Much too soon for them to gain notice. They had only just started infiltrating smaller groups of yakuza, of corrupt vendors, of a court agency where they needed someone to file papers ASAP - and they had started growing - what with their introduction of the internet, a slow, inconspicuous search for followers in their ranks on social sites. And they didn't even have a name yet.

And then she realized, paling dramatically, that she needed him to keep silent. And there was only one real way for her right now to silence him. Permanently.

He needed to die. And she needed to kill him.

Because he knew.

Her hands were shaking, and she felt her heart beating like that of a frightened rabbit – not the comforting drums of conviction, but panicked beats that made her feel light-headed and weak.

She didn't want to kill him. Killing was final. It would be a stain on her soul and she'd never be the same again. That, she felt in her heart.

But she needed to do this, she needed to stop him from giving them away – since he very obviously was an enemy of their cause. Why else would he knock them out? Did he do this alone? Were there others?

And then, she would need to find out who leaked that information – traitor? Victim? Friend or foe? They needed a new base, they needed medical help probably- oh god what did she do now?

She felt the world shift slightly around her and took a deep breath. This was not the time to panic. These were her people lying on the ground and their very dreams, their very worlds were hinging on her. And she would protect them and their ideals and dreams.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, she thought.

"Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ", she breathed.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – she felt.

And finally, the drums started beating again.

"Ah. Finally.", the man mused. "You're the leader, the visionary of this farce, aren't you? Let's see what you can do." And he smiled with far too many teeth – like the great maws of a beast, mocking and so very confident of his victory.

She leaped at him then, teeth bared, and fists clenched tightly. Her first wild swing sailed past him harmlessly, the second underhand fist aimed at his solar plexus easily redirected. She used the momentum and tried to plant her elbow into his back, but he just stepped away form her attack.

His hands were behind his back and while his eyes burned with fire, his face was tranquil.

He was playing with her.

And after three more attempts at knocking him out – stalling, stalling, stalling – she didn't want to kill – she was no murderer – what would All M- no no no what would her mother think of her? She understood that she was in over her head, that they were in over their heads. He was in a whole other league and it was really no surprise how he could knock out the whole warehouse full of people, when there were no guns around, when the only thing the people here had were knifes and pipes – weapons were expensive, and they had only just really started.

He huffed, slightly put out, and closed his eyes for a second – and that was an opening if she ever saw one. She grabbed her trusty knife, smoothly lifting it out of her pocket and sprang, feinted to the left when she saw his eyes open and widen with realization and felt a sharp, jarring jab at her wrist and her the knife fell out of her hand, suddenly numb – suddenly useless. She rolled once and lurched to her feet, left hand unable to move and a slight graze on her shoulder burning under her shirt. Her eyes zeroed in on her knife and she moved, intent on getting her only realistic way of protection back, because he was just so very fast.

And because he was so very fast, it looked completely effortless how he swiped the knife up and in the same move planted his elbow into her spine.

She felt numb. She couldn't move.

Izuku felt panic clawing at her throat – she'd lost. This couldn't be their end. They were needed. Someone needed to change the world, someone needed to help those who couldn't, wouldn't help themselves.

In this very moment, for a millisecond of a thought she hoped – for help, for a hero, before she squashed this thought – this manifestation of an illness – violently, because they didn't need heroes, not her- not now, they needed no person with a sparkly quirk to save them- never-never-never.

She roared internally, because no muscle in her face moved, no muscle in her body obeyed her command. She felt trapped.

A face appeared in her vision.

"Ho?", the man smiled, wicked wicked wicked.

"Hello, little lioness. I think I would very much like to talk with you now."

The man vanished for a few seconds and returned with a chair, rickety and old, but one of the most comfortable parts of furniture around here.

"I disabled your ability to use some of your muscle-groups by jabbing one of the máxué points near your spine. Don't worry, the effects will wear off after a while."

She tried to move enough to see a little more than his pant-legs – they looked kind of like a part of old shaolin monk robes, only in dark grey instead of bright orange – and accomplished exactly nothing with her attempt.

"So, you see, I am here because we have kind of a predicament on our hands with you rallying the youth, infecting them with ideas of grandeur and making a complete mess out of the whole thing, by being far too predictable. We of the Zìyóu Operation, situated in parts of China and Japan, would be interested in reaching out a helping hand – so to say."

The old man smiled and she shuddered – in anticipation, in horror, in hope.

An ally?

He was, they were and the revolution grew that day – in man-power, in dreams, in hopes.

And Fan Jian-long turned out to be an excellent teacher.

And a mind reader.

Ten

13 years

Dim Mak, the touch of death or the death-point striking, was an old Chinese art of fighting that was said to be unrealistic, because most meridian points were about 1-3mm wide and it was almost impossible to strike the right points while in motion.

Almost impossible.

Zìyóu as a whole became a constant in her peoples' life and they brought with them years of underhanded tactics already in use with their own government, weapons, money, influence and Dim Mak – a way to effectively take out quirk-users with only precision and speed.

They didn't have a leak like she first suspected, Sifu Jian-long had been searching for like-minded individuals in Japan, sifting through minds and trying to find people who wanted to join their forces. It was pure luck that he had found Ki, ambling along and thinking intently on his role in the revolution, the liberation.

And he needed to make an impression, he needed to appear strong and he needed to know how resolved they were to fight against almost impossible odds. Because it was an uphill battle and there would be many people standing in their way, they wouldn't want to budge an inch because they were comfortable like this and the quirkless, the lesser people were too few and too weak to rebel – or so they thought.

Izuku brainstormed with her people for a few nights over their name – now that they had a sister-organisation that had their back, they needed one for obvious reasons. During their discussion she quite often looked back in her minds eye at the painting of the free people – and who were the ones feeling suppressed then?

"The Sans-culottes mostly.", she murmured and after gaining a few curious looks she explained. "The Sans-culottes – or rather the 'without knee pants' were the poor worker class in France."

"So we could call ourselves Sans-culottes?", Kokoni offered, but most faces looked doubtful.

"We don't want to be known as the people without pants on.", Munchkin quipped and there were a few snickers exchanged.

"No, no, we want to be known as something positive, something that we have rather than something that we don't have. Zìyóu is Chinese for 'Freedom', so we should probably go with something similar. What do we have, that the others might be lacking in?", Izuku mused.

There were a few proposals – reaching from 'Courage', to 'Fearlessness', to 'Strength', to 'Cunning' and then…

"What we have… is hope. Hope for a better future, hope for freedom, hope for the world to see us as more than useless baggage.", Ami, a tiny girl with too big and too old eyes for her face murmured and gained nods and words of agreement.

"Hm… so in French, if we follow along with the French revolution theme – that would be 'L'espoir' – the hopeful. In Japanese, it would be called ‚Yūbōna'."

There were sparkles in Munchkins eyes, her one white and one red eyebrow narrowing and a challenge in her eyes when she raised her hand high up in the air and shouted:

"I'm all for Yūbōna! Who's with me?" The majority raised their hands and a shout rang out:

"We are the hopeful! We are Yūbōna! For a better future! À votre santé!"

Cups of all sizes and shapes clinked together and Izuku felt a warm glow in her chest.

This was her home, this was her famille.

Fan Jian-long was a patient man, so when his disciple returned a little later than expected to their third hideout – shared currently by fifteen Yūbōna and five Zìyóu, he calmly set down his tea and rose from his relaxed lotus-position to greet her properly. Both organisations had taken up a habit of grabbing the other by the shoulder, pressing both ring finger and middle finger just a little harder into the flesh than the others. They were positioned right behind the collarbone and it would only take a little more pressure to bring the other to their knees. It was a show of respect and trust between the individuals and also between the two organisations and could easily be mistaken for a simple pat on the shoulder.

"You're late.", Fan stated and Izuku had the decency to look slightly guilty.

"I was followed for a while, one of my classmates, he's had it out for me for a while. I shook him off.", there was something wistful, nostalgic in her gaze and Fan made a point of not looking her directly in the eyes as to not pry into her thoughts.

"You are sure of that?"

"Yes, absolutely."

Izuku had been minding her own business after school, just drifting through the crowd, avoiding the most popular hero-villain fight hotspots, when Katsuki – the damn branleur - ran into her and started ranting at her because she was standing in his way. It dissolved into his usual shouting and her usual slinking away at the first notice of his inattention. He'd followed her for a while and she'd made sure to include some extra detours into her normal path. He stopped following her when he noticed that she'd made her way to her own neighbourhood, obviously sure in the knowledge that she wasn't doing anything interesting with her life.

Izuku returned her attention to her Sifu who had returned to his place on the soft pillow placed in front of a traditional low-table. She joined him and absentmindedly grabbed one of the cups set out and filled it to the brim.

"How are the operations processing?", Jian-long asked and settled back a little.

"We infiltrated the human trafficking ring in the east-city and managed to help 20 people escape, five of them joined us right off the bat, another two said they'd think about it. The heroes apprehended the rest of the ring a few days after our people fled. There are also people running around with the kanji for 'Hope' (希) on their clothes – which could be unrelated to our cause, but I really rather think that our debut on YouTube made a few people think."

They'd opened an account on YouTube and were now supplying the channel with videos that questioned the government and the way the quirkless and the ones with lesser quirks were pushed to the outskirts of society – forced to work with a smaller wage, forced to work in the positions at the bottom of the food chain. They encouraged people to think for themselves, to research, to try to find evidence behind the propaganda that was spread by the main media.

And all of their videos featured people clothed in long white pants – a homage to the Sans-culottes, a plain black hoodie and a white Noh-mask that featured only the kanji for 'Hope' centred on the forehead in blood red colour and provided two slits to see through.

They were certainly gaining popularity with the masses with their announcements, with their sabotage of big companies discriminating their less fortunate employees, with their disregard of societies crates, with their black-mailing of the higher-ups, with their pure conviction that the quirkless and all those that were seen as less were in fact not.

Their ranks were still growing in size, some only silent supporters off the site, some actively helping with the planning, the gathering of information, the strategizing. They were planning not only a revolution, but also as a possible brute-force solution: a coup d'état. Which would really be the most unreliable way to get the quirkless to be accepted – it would be the way to cast unnecessary suspicion on people who had it hard anyways – without them trying a violent take-over. So that would be their last stand, if all else failed.

Which it wouldn't. She hoped.

They planned to make a bigger announcement soon and try a bigger way to be seen. And really, they didn't want to hurt anybody, they just wanted to make a statement. To show people that they were there and they were watching and they were waiting.

And in the next two years, the House of Councillors would burn.

And then, they would make their first demands of the government.

And they would listen, because they already had so much dirt on every single one of the Kokkai.

Eleven

14 years

"Okay, you are all in third grade now! In other words, it is now or never that you should think of your future! Here are your Career Aspiration Documents!"

Izuku stared at one of her many notebooks, encrypted to hell and back, seeming like nothing more than an ordinary journal from a middle-school hero-worshipping girl. Which it partially was, only with a few additions in the form of complex Dim Mak moves, and all vital points of the body: hūnxué – for making your opponent faint, yǎxué - muteness, máxué – paralysis and sǐxué - death, with observations of her classmates, teachers, other staff members and everyone she deemed to be interesting – for blackmail or recruiting purposes alike.

It also had the tiny difference that she wasn't exactly worshipping heroes – she wasn't, never again, she wouldn't - and rather held an intense analysis of their moves, of their habits, everything she could dig up on them. Because it was better to know your enemy.

And that would be what most of them would amount to be at one point. She didn't think that the people that earned their living with crime-fighting would be all that enthused about the people uprising to gain a better standing in their society, which would make their precious balance tip into other directions and probably cause unsuspected changes that could make their standing as upstanding citizens crumble and break.

Because there were statistics that showed that heroes were faster in helping people with quirks, people who had a high standing, people who were worth more in their eyes.

A cacophony of noise crested over her head like a tsunami and she raised her eyes to her classmates showing off their quirks in tandem - flinging objects in the air, unnaturally stretching their extremities, coating their bodies in rocks, bursting fire from their fingertips.

And for half a second, she felt pitch black jealousy rise up her throat, leaving a foul taste on her tongue and burning in her nose like sulfur and acid. She squashed the feeling, bundling it up tightly and stuffing it into the farthest reaches of her mind – into the little black box that only she knew about – that only she could know about and no one else, because what would the others say if they knew-? Knew that sometimes she wanted to be like those other ones-.

"Don't put me in the same box as these weak secondary characters!", Katsuki crowed and jumped on top of his desk.

"Ah yes indeed, Bakugou, you want to go to Yuuei Highschool, don't you?"

"Yeah and I'll leave my name forever in the Annual Ranking of the Richest People in the world! I will surpass All Might himself!", he shouted.

Disgusting, Izuku thought, her jaw set. And this would be protecting people – this thing, this disgrace, this absolute bâtard. He's just in it for the money and fame. I could do it better- I would do it better, if I just- she gritted her teeth. No. Even without quirk, I could make him eat his words. Her fists clenched under the table.

She wasn't only Izuku, most importantly she was part of Yūbōna and she was stronger for it- this was what mattered.

"Now that we're talking about it, I think little Midoryia would also like to go to Yuuei, what with her being such a fan of heroes? Am I right?"

The room was deathly silent, every single eye fixed on her and she felt a sharp stab of annoyance lance through her – even the teachers tried to make her miserable.

And her reaction was only born out of spite when she gave the class a gullible smile and said:

"Maybe."

It really was no surprise to her when the class burst out into laughter and voiced their doubts. Or when Katsuki, ever the charming gent, violently blew up her desk.

"What are you capable of anyway?"

She was capable of killing him in over thirty ways and maiming him in over seventy more right at this very moment – and he wouldn't be able to stop her.

Someday, they would see… oh they would see.