Shahryar - Those two are made of the same clay, so don't worry :P
(***)
Governor Yagi knows that he should go with all those revelations straight to Prime Minister Shimura. But even for her closest protege, getting a meeting with the person in charge of the nation isn't a matter of just taking a train to Tokyo.
There are procedures. And timetables to be cleared, even when the 'we need to meet' was accompanied by a slightly more diplomatic version of 'the fate of Japan fucking depends on it happening as soon as humanly fucking possible'.
Thankfully, there are people whose timetable is much looser. Or, to be exactly, there are people that are ready to throw theirs out of the proverbial window at a single word of his.
"Toshinori, you son of a bitch!" Cathleen Bates, the general in charge of the US presence on Japan Isles and a former poster girl of the US Marines (literally and metaphorically) announces while entering his office. "Still kicking, eh?"
"If the APC I was in getting hit by the Chinese anti-tank missile didn't kill me, nothing will." Yagi announces while standing up, just to vigorously shake her hand over the desk. "Sorry for telling you that we need to meet on such short notice, but…"
"No, fucking, problem, Toshinori." General Bates replies while sitting down on the chair. Rather vigorously. Thankfully, the chair survived having to hold her massive frame. "If you told me to jump out of the fucking window, I'd jump without a second of hesitation. I know that you're not one to bullshit when you say that something is urgent."
"Still talking about it, huh." Yagi smiles faintly at his memories. Cathleen spent a few weeks in a hospital after NOT jumping out of the window the last time he told her to do it. That missile strike at her command post was no joke. "Look, I'm about to say some really fucked-up things, because honestly, someone just rocked my world with a single presentation."
"Had to be one hell of a presentation." Cathleen comments. "What is it? Is it about the mess in the Nabu Mountains?"
Of course she knows that something happened. But it looks like the Knights of Amakusa didn't tell her any details.
"Actually, yeah." Yagi replies. "I was visited this morning by the head of the prefectural police, who told me that the reason for this clusterfuck was because a police raid escalated into some all-out battle, which included dozens of supervillains and superheroes."
He doesn't mention the dragon, the zombies or the magical girl because, yeah. Cathleen is going to need a drink after this, and he needs her sober for now.
In the meantime, she blinks at him a few times in obvious surprise.
"Is he on drugs or what?" She asks.
Yeah, Bates would have violated any NDA she was told to sign whatsoever when it would be Yagi Toshinori asking. He knows that much. So, she doesn't know.
"I wish he was." Yagi groans. "He brought me recordings, a pamphlet about the superpowers, a vocal equivalent of a powerpoint presentation concerning the local police preparations to deal with the End of the World as We Know it, and then, once the meeting was over, he had someone fucking teleport to my office to prove a point."
He is never going to admit it, but Aizawa Shouta earned some endearment from his governor with that stunt. That was quite a power move, and Yagi respects people who don't waste time and go straight to the point.
Cathleen Bates stares at him with an open mouth.
The nice part of being war buddies? The other side knows when you're kidding. And Cathleen realizes immediately that Yagi isn't kidding.
"What?" She finally manages to utter. "Wait, Shield isn't bullshitting us?"
Looks like Yagi just dug out some US military secrets. Cool. Fuck secrecy, there is really no time for it right now.
"Okay, I'm afraid you're going to have to be slightly move specific." Yagi comments dryly. "Who is that 'Shield' person?"
"David Shield." Bates wakes up from her shock finally. "A scientist. Was running a meta-abilities weaponization program for DARPA during the Third World War. We had some minor successes, but the meta-abilities were goddamn weak and they couldn't be replicated, so most of the budget was cut and moved to more conventional research."
Well, talk about making a wrong budget decision. Looks like even the US military isn't immune to fuck-ups when weaponizing things is involved.
"And what was that about bullshitting you?" Yagi asks.
"Well, he is rather vocal nowadays that his lab needs more money because meta-abilities are apparently no longer super weak." Bates replies. "No one's really listening to him, and I only know because he tried to beg me for support when I was back in the country for a while two months ago. Wait, wait, wait, you're telling me he is right?"
"One of the supervillains active in my prefecture can apparently create a mile-long death ray of fire so hot that it's blue." Yagi replies dryly. "If that's 'super weak', I dread to learn your definition of strong."
"Oh." Bates blinks at him. "President Skyline is going to get a brain aneurysm."
"Why, is it because he tends to not use it?" Yagi comments. "I swear, if he ever had a brain cell, he probably sold it to some corporation ages ago."
Cathleen sighs.
"Yagi, we had that talk already." She replies. "He is a moron, but he is popular, charismatic and people believe him when he says that things will be better. Also, thank God, he knows he is a moron and listens to his advisors, and by a miracle he picked relatively decent ones. I really think that he was the better option during the last elections."
Yagi makes a 'agree to disagree' face.
"The point is, I was really, really hoping that the United States had some sort of technological way to counter meta-abilities." Yagi replies. "Like, keep them off-line on someone. Because I just discovered that our entire penal system is made of cardboard, and it's so bad that said Commissioner is almost openly admitting that death squads and a 'kill-on-sight' policy on some of the supervillains might be necessary. No, wait, it gets worse: the head of the local metahuman community appears to be in agreement with him on that. That's how bad it is."
He is yet to meet the teenager (teenager for fuck sake) in question, but he had a long phone call with Mirai Sasaki. One full of pent-up frustration and general displeasure, but also rather constructive.
"Unless Shield managed to cook something up in his lab while being permanently underfunded to an extreme, I think we're kind of broke on that field." Bates replies. "I'm going to rush back to the States to try to find someone who knows anything at all and probably have a long, heartfelt talk with Skyline."
"Well, my local police unit was underfunded to the point of having to draw operational plans with borrowed crayon, but they somehow ended cooking up a nationwide superhero system without telling the government about it." Yagi replies flatly. "And that's without mentioning the unconstitutional detention facilities for supervillains and some sort of fledgling, civilian equivalent of military-industrial complex that's supposed to finance and equip heroes in exchange of fucking product placement and probably some moderate tax breaks, so I think that I'm going to stay hopeful. Just be so kind and tell us what you'll find, because otherwise we're dead in the water in the current situation."
He also ends up copying all the data he got from Aizawa and sharing it with Cathleen. Who is also - gently - informed that the Knights developed their own metahuman department, without telling her.
Needless to say, Paladin has a very bad day as a result.
(***)
"We just got an update from Kuroiro." Defiant informs Principal Sasaki and Commissioner Aizawa later the same day. "It seems that he grabbed the dragon and his passengers for himself."
The only positive of that statement, Aizawa thinks, is the fact that Shihai Kuroiro was clearly NOT ready for a face-off with the Metahuman Network. He was taking full advantage of their temporary ceasefire to build-up his organization…
…but also clashing heavily with Shie Hassaikai in Shizuoka. In fact, the unofficial coalition was soon going to end, by the virtue of the Shie Hassaikai losing its bridgehead in that prefecture quickly.
Overhaul couldn't fight on two fronts at once. His only chance of developing enough firepower to do that was killed by Rabbit on the Gunga Mountain. And when forced to choose between Shizuoka and Musutafu, he clearly chose Musutafu.
"Well, it's great that it's not Overhaul, at the very least." Aizawa says. "How bad is it?"
"Vantablack is being careful about not saying too much about his new recruits, so we won't know for sure until they are deployed somewhere." Defiant replies. "First of all, there is the dragon herself. Apparently goes by Conqueror."
"If she is a first gen, then we can guess from the name alone that she acts like a stereotypical dragon." Aizawa comments. "So greedy and power-hungry. Any chances of her trying to usurp the seat from Kuroiro?"
Silence in the room for maybe three seconds. Aizawa spends that time day-dreaming about Kuroiro's death.
"I have a feeling that if Kuroiro didn't manage to beat her into submission properly, she wouldn't be on the list." Sasaki comments, ruining Aizawa's hopes and dreams. "And the local police would or would not find her body further down the line."
Well, shit.
"Great, who else?" Aizawa decides to go through it in one sweep.
"Then there is Hypothermia, but all that Kuroiro wrote in the report is that she can generate and control ice." Midoriya replies. "Which isn't much, but if she is anywhere close to Amplitude's cold side in firepower… she's probably an S-Rank."
"That's absolutely stellar." Aizawa comments. Sasaki looks at him, appearing vaguely worried. "Kuroiro is getting more S-Ranks. Because the dragon is probably there as well, especially if she can breathe fire. Please tell me that it's all the new S-Ranks for the day, problem teenager."
Midoriya says nothing. Aizawa groans.
"Who next?" He asks.
"Tremor." Defiant replies. "Ability to generate and control vibrations. Apparently to the point of being able to generate an equivalent of a localized earthquake."
Aizawa groans again, but louder.
"And that's naturally all of the new S-Ranks that Kuroiro managed to grab, right?" Aizawa then asks.
Because, honestly, that was Overhaul's only advantage over him. The number of available heavy-hitters. Carnage alone would have mowed down most if not all of what was left from the League of Villains after the Shizuoka Massacre.
Okay, unless Kaminari would manage to blast him with his power discharge. Enough to paralyze him and allow Cloud's warpgate to sever him in half. That would work. But if he had people like Duststorm, Mustard, Kurogiri and Dabi next to him, League was going to lose any open engagement easily.
Of course, Duststorm and Mustard were now arrested, Kurogiri was nowhere to be seen and Dabi was a moron that somehow lost to Goto Imasuji of all people in terms of the capacity for logical thinking.
Unless Overhaul managed to grab a few more heavy-hitters among the crowd of people he 'rescued' from Gunga Mountain, then his boat was sinking and he was surrounded by very hungry sharks.
"... he got an intelligence quirk user too." Midoriya announces, looking slightly to the side. "Apparently they get a boost to intelligence depending on what they drank most recently, with tea working especially well. Goes by Mastermind."
Aizawa groans once again.
He spent a SINGLE OPERATION alongside Chancellor, and he already knows that intelligence quirks of this magnitude are either equally valuable to the warp quirks or pretty damn close to them.
Aizawa Shouta is intelligent, but those people make him feel stupid. And that's NOT good.
"Anyone else, Midoriya?" He asks.
"No more supervillains, I believe." Midoriya says beautiful words. "Seven more villains, three of which appear to have higher than usual potential. First one is Juggernaut, apparently some recoil-negating quirk that makes him impervious to physical damage. Second is Fleshshaper, apparently with a meta-ability that allows him to temporarily reshape flesh of living organisms without causing their demise. The final one is Glamour, who can create visual and auditory hallucinations. Questions?"
"What are the chances of Fleshshaper creating more supersoldiers, like Overhaul did?" Aizawa asks.
"Low to zero, but I won't be able to tell you more until I see him in action." Midoriya replies. "Kuroiro has been… vague, and badly so."
"Alright." Aizawa takes a deep breath. "So it seems that Kuroiro will probably attempt to kick Shie Hassaikai out of Shizuoka sooner rather than later. He'll probably wait for a larger clash between us and Overhaul to figure out if Chisaki got some serious reinforcements out of Gunga Mountain."
"The question is whether he did or not." Sasaki comments. "There is a large chance that the Conqueror grabbed members from some 'troublesome fellows' ward of Nedzu's laboratory, especially as she was clearly a first gen up for experimentation. That would indicate that what Overhaul got was mostly weaker quirk holders."
"Weaker or not, they can be a problem when we don't know anything about them." Aizawa comments. "We've looked through the inmates we've recovered, and most of them are sidekick materials, not supervillains."
"Did any of them show any indication of wanting to become heroes?" Midoriya wakes up. Of course he does that over this particular subject.
"They are still processing the revelation that they weren't held by the government." Aizawa replies. "For now we're focusing on getting them back to their families, if they have any. I assume that at least those who don't really have a lot to go back to will be more receptive, so to say, but that's something to happen in the future."
They don't have an awful lot to talk about. Aizawa is left being happy that at the very least Shizuoka isn't his problem, because that prefecture is going rapidly downhill.
A day later, Nana Shimura goes through several stages of grief when confronted by Yagi Toshinori about the meta-abilities getting a massive power boost when no one was looking.
NOT being receptive towards the proposed idea of the establishment of a Hero Association really wasn't an option. She didn't even realize that she was manipulated into this by a quirk superposed on her cognitive process by All for One.
The eventual intent was to change the Hero Association into a government agency or at least install some permanent government oversight body over it. But that was left for the future, once the initial impact of the meta-abilities on the society would finish.
Nana Shimura had some sort of vague feeling that the best way to avoid the metahumans rioting against the government is to let them self governs themselves for now and only intervene if its leadership starts doing questionable things or if they start going to do crimes.
In other words, the situation when the remaining metahumans will feel like the leadership of said organization was sacked not because they were metahumans and the government wanted to put them all on the leash, but because the government really had to do that.
In that one way, the existence of the Meta-Liberation Army was a blessing for the metahumans as a whole. For as long as they loomed on the horizon - with enough firepower to become a menace - the government had to do their best to appease the metahumans in order to not add fuel to the fire.
"This is a goddamn nightmare." Nana comments. They are in private, so it's none of her standard political public smiles. "But if we play it out well enough, it might end up being helpful in the end."
Yagi Toshinori nods. This is a large risk large reward situation to deal with. The thing is, the government needs a large reward to survive, so the whole clusterfuck might be a blessing in disguise.
"There are two options right now." Yagi replies honestly. "Option one, be hostile to an extreme and hope that they'll stop being born in a while, which is something that I personally find unlikely AND the whole idea to be evil, distasteful and generally impractical. We don't have assets to deal with them all, especially in our current state. Besides, we can expect the political fallout of taking such an option to be nothing short of apocalyptic, unless that will be the reaction of every or almost every government worldwide. Option two, support metahumanity to the largest possible degree without enraging the rest of the population, and hope for the best."
He is honest enough to admit that the former is an option. He is also decent enough to be the first one to tell the government to fuck off if it tried to make that into a policy. He wasn't reduced to a half-dead state while fighting one tyranny to be alright with another being born.
Then again, Shimura knows that much.
Unfortunately, there is a problem.
"One of the supervillains incarcerated by the police and heroes from my prefecture during that raid…" Yagi says slowly. "... is your grandson."
She stares at him in shock over the desk. Yagi was trying to figure out a good way to tell her, but…
"Tenko is alive?" Is the first reaction. Immediately followed by the realization of what Yagi said as well. "S-supervillain?"
"S-Rank villain by the name of Duststorm." Yagi replies. It hurts, seeing his political mentor like that, and delivering the news to her. "According to Commissioner Aizawa, he manifested a first generation quirk that… messed him up in the head. We believe that Kotarou and the others died as a result of its awakening. Tenko ended up joining the Shie Hassaikai, and... He is responsible for the assassination of Assistant Commissioner Mera and deaths of several of police officers from his precinct, hospitalization of the superhero Split and death of villain Chart during the Shizuoka Massacre."
Kotarou… had a complicated relationship with his mother. In the end, he had enough of being potentially connected to politics, even by proxy. He changed that by moving with his family to the other side of the country and officially severing all familial ties.
It was a miracle he kept the surname. But he kept acting as if the surname's similarity was a coincidence. He kept no contact with his mother, despite Nana trying to change that several times.
Then he and his family died. It turned out that the attack came from the inside, not from the outside.
"I… I see." Nana replies, looking down. Her face is a poker face, but Yagi knows her well enough. "What's going to happen to him?"
"For now, he's kept in Tartarus, the local villain prison." Yagi replies. "I believe that they'll be trying to rehabilitate him, because… well a good lawyer could probably argue successfully that he can't be held responsible due to being clinically insane. If my chief prosecutor is to be believed, it depends entirely on the legal reception of the meta-abilities and on whether the early scientific consensus concerning the meta-abilities will include widespread acceptance of treating the side-effects of the first gen meta-abilities as akin to insanity."
The alternatives were treating them as having unstable meta-abilities due to being insane OR the whole 'insanity' being a lie supposed to improve the metahuman reception by making them supposedly NOT at fault despite slaughtering a bunch of people.
None of those alternatives were even remotely logical, but…
"Keep me updated." Nana replies. She sounds… burned out. Even more than she already was due to being - in Yagi's opinion - the only person who was holding the whole shitshow afloat. "How much time do we have before the Reveal Day?"
"According to Sasaki, maybe a week." Yagi replies. The name of a certain machiavellian schemer is accompanied by a lot of venom. "This isn't much, we would need years to prepare accordingly, but if we hurry, we can at least slightly lessen the impact."
"True." Nana sighs, leaning back in her seat. "I'll get the Diet together to have a closed session, try to wring out something resembling logical law projects out of them. We'll start from establishing the framework for the 'heroes' to be employed."
"So, their initiative is going to be accepted?" Yagi asks for confirmation.
"I don't see other options, unless we want to lose gods know how many soldiers and police officers trying to contain supervillains." Nana replies. "It might sound bad, with or without context, but having a single superhero die while taking down a supervillain will cost the government much less than losing dozens of trained soldiers and police officers. In terms of the training and equipment cost, in terms of political fallout of the disaster AND in terms of the loyalty of said soldiers and police officers."
It does sound bad. But it's a realistic approach. Musutafu Police Department was only doing so well after the casualties of Gunga Mountain because its morale was extremely high beforehand - due to being the one prefectural police department that was actually winning.
Shizuoka in the meantime… The Shizuoka Massacre was a disaster on so many levels that the whole prefecture was in the process of collapsing into a hive of scum and villainy.
"We'll probably end up having to restrict the civilian usage of meta-abilities to non-commercial purposes." Nana continues. "Maybe even to private property." Yagi opens his mouth. "I know that this is going to inflame the response, but if what you just told me about the meta-abilities is to be believed, attempting to make more precise laws is a folly. If it was just a list of a few stock superpowers, like superstrength, telekinesis or telepathy, we could somehow divide it into categories and make separate laws for each. But here, we would have to create a separate set of laws for almost every metahuman, and this is impossible."
She sighs loudly, looking to the side. Calculating something in her head.
"Our economy is hitting rock bottom, the recession is killing it and the debt is going to drive the government bankrupt in a few years, at best." Nana announces. "Allowing commercial usage of meta-abilities is going to kill many companies, send thousands of people into unemployment and make the crash happen faster. We can't have that happen. Maybe in a few decades, once we recover, but certainly not now."
Yeah, he agrees. He hates it, but… in all honesty, they both suspect that there'll be no deregulation of quirks in a few decades. Because this feels like a source of major societal upheaval, and that's not liked by politicians in general.
Oh, well. That's for the future politicians to figure out.
"It's all going to be written down in a hurry." Nana continues. "I expect the laws to be full of holes that we'll have to patch up in an even worse hurry. Frankly, judging from what you told me about the meta-abilities, I expect the next few decades to be worse than the aftermath of the Second World War. The fact that the entire world is going to suffer equally is of little help here."
No one will be in a shape to take advantage of the chaos in other countries for their own nefarious benefit. That concludes the list of positives.
"What about…" Yagi articulates the words slowly. "... the Meta-Liberation Army and a certain vague governmental conspiracy?"
"I'm getting the Public Security Intelligence Agency head here right after you leave." She replies. "We're tightening the security, and preparing for a potential coup. Plus, of course, trying to deal with the problems. Most likely in tandem with the heroes, because I certainly don't want to lose half of PSIA over trying to storm the MLA base without superheroes, whether or not the PSIA ends up grumbling about information leak risks due to involving 'untrained amateurs with secret identities'." That's reassuring to hear, in Yagi's opinion. "What's the status of the head of the local SAT?"
"Apparently enlightened, and highly supportive towards the Tokyo branch of the Metahuman Network." Yagi replies. "Unless it's some sort of galaxy brain scheme of either Destro or whoever is behind the conspiracy, we can trust at least him."
"Good, because I plan to boost my security with his men from now on, starting from my little introductory talk with the PSIA head." Nana announces dryly. "Including borrowing some of his pet heroes to serve as living proof that I'm not bullshitting him. Anything else you need to talk with me about? I'm going to be very, very busy from now on."
"What the hell am I supposed to do with Commissioner Aizawa after this whole mess?" Yagi asks. "I decided to default to you, because I'm at such a loss of words over his hijinks that I don't know if I should fire him or promote him."
"Promote him." Nana replies without a second of hesitation. "I'll probably end up making him the Commissioner General eventually, once he gets some more experience with administrative work of this scale. Because if we want to avoid the Network defecting to the Meta-Liberation Army following the first moment of tension between them and us, we need Aizawa in a governmental position of power due to the Network leadership clearly trusting him. Besides…" She sighs. "... if someone can stop Shizuoka from turning into a postapocalyptic wasteland, it's probably him."
(***)
RIP Aizawa, but that's what you get for letting Kuroiro out xD It worked, but... the side effects are pretty bad.