LoamyCoffee: Understandably, Hitomi noticed Takei's behavior due to their closeness.
Hoping she and Smith can get him somewhere safe.
He was certainly letting his perceived guilt get to him during this chapter but in comes a surprise Gran Torino! And Takei's distain towards the emphasis on Quirks, and his respect for Wild Tiger. Can't blame him on either count.
Reincarnation and taking over for someone in a coma, getting their memories and traumas melding into your mind. Takei's questioning himself. His personal effects are very fitting considering his new power.
I'm very glad, that he's choosing to move forward and that saying will fit very well with his path. I'm getting chills of excitement of what's to come!
Re: Yeah, since a lot of this story is told from a first-person POV, it felt important to address something most Isekai ignore. The closest to that being brought up I can think of, is when the guy that Thor bodyjacked back when he had a "secret identity" got his life back and turned into a Villain; but that's neither here nor there.
As for his "Origin", that actually relates more to his Name than to his "Quirk", like how most of the named characters hint at their power.
"Takehiko" has 2 meanings in Japanese; one is "Hero Prince", the other "Mountain Prince". The second doesn't really apply but the first definitely does to an Isekai Hero. "Tokei" is the Japanese word for a clock, a watch, a timepiece, and/or a timekeeper.
"Takei" is a reference to George Takei of Star Trek fame, but in-universe is a piecemeal of "Takehiko" & "Tokei".
The fact that Takehiko Tokei is alliterative too is another reference to Stan Lee's naming convention; just like I did with Gokiburi Genki in my other My Hero Academia story Vigorous Vitality, as well as my Teen Titans and Young Justice stories.
Harleking31: Silverman gym hey?
So how heavy are the dumbells the MC lifts?
And will we get get Rivet? Since This is a rift apart crossover?
Re: Ah, glad someone caught that reference~
As for how-heavy… once he's 100% recovered from that year-long nap he took, he'll definitely be more-athletic than the average Quirkless person; I mean seriously, does anyone even remember how-scrawny Izuku was before he stated actual training?
As for Rift Apart, I have a plan for that~ And it'll be a doozie~
*AHA*
Sorahiko Torino was definitely an interesting sort. Like expected of any retired Hero who actually lived to retirement age instead of "heroically sacrificing" themselves, he had his fair share of war stories. Unlike the interviews and talk show specials filmed in Sternbild, with him I could ask specific questions, press him for more details when a story started to get interesting. And sometimes the tangents he went off on were more-interesting than my original question.
I never did find out what his Quirk was. Wasn't all that important. Everything he achieved belonged to him, not his Quirk, which he too asserted was only a 'tool'; just one that was a part of your own body.
As for who that 'student' of his was, he never got around to telling, I certainly didn't ask, but he made no secret that this "Toshi" guy went on to become a real juggernaut in the industry.
He also never shied away from telling me how much of a meathead his student was, irregardless of his professional successes, but that was neither here nor there.
It was still kinda hard to wrap my head around, people completely eschewing secret identities; back in Wild Tiger's time, secret identities were still the norm, corporate sponsors notwithstanding. In fact, Barnaby Brooks who I would always call "Bunny", was the first government-sanctioned Hero to really break the mold. I don't know if he started the trend of Heroes having their identities become part of public domain or if he was just the first to do so, but it certainly offered many fiscal opportunities. Way more than you could've back-then while still being in costume.
In the few days he was at the hospital with me, Sorahiko taught me a great deal about how to fight, even how to fight Quirk users. Wasn't sure if I would stay in touch with the guy once I left myself, but it couldn't hurt to have someone on call who wasn't completely enamored with the Commercial Age of Heroes.
As for my newfound hobby, whenever I wasn't working out, I was getting "reacquainted" with the craft.
Though at first glance it was all new to me, practically 'Greek', like unlocking the 'nodes' in a Skill Tree, I rapidly grew to understand the context of what I was reading. Though Takehiko's memories weren't inherently my own, I could still make use of them like they were my own; only real issue was I didn't have access to the Table of Contents, so I had to sift for those memories the old-fashioned way.
I still wasn't sure what my future held, or if the eventual, inevitable collapse of Hero Society would happen within my lifetime, but in those few days I found more purpose for myself than I ever could've on my own.
Though it was cheesy as hell to admit this, friendship really was power.
*AHA*
"Takehiko-kun!" a voice whispered into my ear.
"What… What time is it?"
The fact Hitomi was using my real name meant it was something serious.
"I need you to come with me," she whispered as she kneeled at my bedside, a birthday balloon blocking the camera up in the corner.
"But it isn't time for my therapy yet…" I said shaking the cobwebs as the clock on the wall flitted into view.
"Takehi… Takei-kun. Do you trust me?"
"Always," I replied immediately.
"Good. Then I need you to come with me. We're getting out of here.'
Ah, okay. What the heck.
*AHA*
Pretending to be a dead body as I'm wheeled out of the hospital…
I'll admit, that's definitely a new one.
The body bag I'd climbed into at a security blind spot was a little disconcerting, a little claustrophobic, but Hitomi cracked the zipper just-enough that I could still breath and catch a ray of artificial lighting. And if it got to be too much for me, she'd handed me a pink yandere-style boxcutter for that exact occasion.
When it came to the timing of this Shawshank Redemption-esque escape, it was still dark outside the window when she'd come in, but the fact that there were still people out in the halls shuffling about yet groaning like the undead, had me thinking that maybe it was so-early that not-everyone had gotten their morning coffee yet. If you were smuggling a "dead body" out of the hospital, it certainly made sense to do so when everyone's attention was lax, but why couldn't she just take me out for noodles or something and then escape? I mean it wasn't like the HPSC would try and keep me here against my will, right?
. . .
Right?
. . .
Oh shit, they really might, wouldn't they…?!
"Hey, you! Where're you going? The incinerator's the other way!" someone from back in the hallway shouted a few minutes into our exodus through what I assumed to be the ground floor.
The fact that the wheels under my gurney were rattling louder than before, was proof enough that Hitomi was starting to lose her cool.
"Hey! Get back here!"
And that was proof the 'bad guys' were on to us.
"NRRRGH!"
With what I could only assume to be adrenaline coursing through my veins, I flicked the blade of the box cutter out of its plastic sheathe and got ready to do something incredibly stupid.
*AHA*
"NEVER! You'll never take me alive!" the would-be runaway said after cutting his way free of the body bag he'd been hiding in. Tossing his nurse onto the gurney and getting in a pushing position himself, with what the HPSC's president could only assume to be adrenaline fueling him, Tokei Takehiko and Hitomi Manaka left their pursuers firmly in the dust as they shot down the hall.
If the President hadn't known any better, she'd have though Takehiko were an Olympic Athlete-aspirant.
From back when the Olympics were still "a thing", at least…
She'd been keeping an eye on that young man since he'd come into their care a year ago, and while the genetic material he provided had the potential to become the 'magic bullet' that'd stop Him in his tracks, it shamed her to admit that Dr. Shiga's more eccentric tendencies fell to the wayside in the presidential shuffle.
The President watched the two's escape attempt with rapt attention through the security feed connected to her desk monitor. Disturbingly-enough, all Takehiko had to do to clear a path was scream- "VILLAIN!" -at the top of his lungs like a complete jackass, and anyone they did come across in the hall parted before them like the Red Sea.
She'd heard the boy was alarmingly-shrewd after waking up from his year-long coma, but to see him so-blatantly take advantage of the average person's knee-jerk reaction to the V-word… Truly, it said a lot about the society they lived in that you could "cry wolf" and it be so-effective.
Whatever the boy had experienced during his coma, it must've been a hell of its own if an eleven-year-old could become so-jaded upon awakening.
At the home stretch, the final door featuring a red EXIT sign, Hitomi dismounted the gurney and held it open. Takehiko on the other hand, gave the gurney a mighty shove back the way they came, sending it whirling down the hallway with the force of a small motorized bicycle. A moment later, the President could only wince as the gurney struck the two guards, completely upending them in a tangle of limbs and a capsized gurney, Hitomi and Tokei making good their escape.
Switching over to the most-external feed, in a show of her own adrenal response, Nurse Hitomi threw Takehiko over her shoulder, vaulted over the exit's railing, and bolted toward the exterior wall where a large black van with tinted windows had either just pulled in, or had been idling for a few minutes.
If there was any secrecy concerning the vehicle's driver, any such mystery was swiftly abandoned as the driver's side window rolled down and a cup of coffee flew out into the nearby dumpster.
And of course, it didn't help that Kuroko Smith leaned out of aforementioned car window to do so…
By the time Hitomi had tossed Takehiko into the side passenger door, the guards from before had recovered and were already out the door. By the time they spotted her, the van was already pulling away.
"Dammit, they're getting away!"
"If we put out an APB, we can still-!"
"Let them go," she ordered through her comm. system, having seen enough.
"Huh? But… But ma'am, we can still-"
"That won't be necessary. They have my permission to leave. Please return to your regular posting."
"I… But… Okay, you're the boss."
With a nod, the president looked out her window, eyeing a speck of black driving speedily away before rounding the corner and vanishing. Maybe it was Smith's van, or maybe it was another identical van, but she felt confident that Takehiko would be in safe hands. Anonymity was the best security, after all.
'Of course, this'll be a pain in the ass to explain to the others, though,' she thought to herself as she fell into her chair with an undignified grunt, her mind racing.
Thanks to Dr. Shiga's Quirk, they'd been able to harvest DNA samples from the child's body every few days for about a year, so they definitely had plenty in storage. And All for One was still out there, she just knew it; he might not've been in any shape to get up on his own after his last battle with All Might, but All for One had definitely had a cadre of allies willing to spirit him away after his defeat. Whether it was All for One himself, a clone and/or that Quirk-stealing Supervillain they'd lost track of a year ago, they needed to prepare something for when the time came.
They had no idea when they'd need the 'magic bullet' by, if they could even make it in the first place, but the loss of Takehiko's biomass would definitely impact research on that front. And she was doubtful they could convince him to cooperate even if they could find a Medical Quirk that would cover up any scarring, because the fact that Dr. Shiga had tried to dissect him under their watch, would definitely do nothing to ingratiate him toward the HPSC's goals. Nor would it assuage him of their competence in keeping him safe from future like-incidents.
As for why she hadn't told All Might about All for One's body going missing after their 'final battle', or the fact that there was a Quirk stealer running around, the man had already given so much of himself for Japan, for the world, even as his health continued to deteriorate beyond the ability of modern medicine to remedy. She owed it to the Symbol of Peace to let him find and train his successor at his own pace. Telling him without being able to do anything about it would only hurt his morale.
She would of course have to personally ensure that Hitomi wasn't punished for what she had done. As the boy's nurse, it was her ethical and moral duty to ensure his safety and health. And if she allowed him to be experimented upon now that he was awake, she'd have failed in both regards.
Not to mention, if the HPSC did try to experiment on a living test subject, the whole thing could devolve into a PR nightmare. Though what had truly transpired with Lady Nagant had been covered up under the pretense of her 'going rogue', the bigger problem was that they'd had more failures and scandals of epic proportions since then, and though they had a Spy, they no longer had an Enforcer of equivalent caliber.
If the public ever found out they'd experimented on a comatose body, that they could get away with. What they couldn't get away with was if it got out they were carving up a live person; doubly-so if they tried to do so against his will. America, Russia, and China could get away with shit like that, they were big countries with lots of places to hide their dirty little secrets, lots of people to do the actual hiding, and Quirk users ran amok doing as they pleased creating plenty of distractions; but in Japan, there was no way they could do so for very long. It was a miracle they'd been able to keep the truth of All for One as nothing more than an urban legend parents told their unruly kids to make them behave.
Truly, the Quirk-reliant society they all lived in, was a double-edged sword.
She could only hope that Tokei Takehiko, even bereft of his Quirk, would be able to make a peaceful life for himself. After all the boy had endured, he deserved nothing less.
*AHA*
"Stop looking out the back. It looks suspicious," Ms. Smith replied from the driver's seat.
"Oh believe me, I would if I could, but I can't because there is some… luggage in the way."
"Mou…! You big meanie, calling a delicate maiden 'luggage'!" aforementioned 'luggage' pouted from the rear of the black van.
She was a very tall woman, dressed almost identically to Ms. Smith, her skin a luscious tan, her eyes a lovely red, and her flowing hair an elegant blond going down to her waist. She had fangs, pointed ears, breasts bigger than my own head apiece, but more-noticeable even than that… probably… was a single large red horn protruding from her forehead. I couldn't tell how tall she was because she was sitting with her ankles crossed and her body stooped forward in the van's spacious rear, but she was definitely more than seven feet tall, and very curvaceous.
It also made me think that this van must've been modded out the wazu, otherwise there's no freakin' way the rear bumper wouldn't be dragging across the ground. She wasn't fat by any means beyond her breasts which technically were fat, so I could only assume she was crazy-strong since 'muscle weighs more than fat'. The fact that she likely wielded the massive 'anti-tank' shields flanking her in the back of the van was the only evidence I had to go on, though.
"Why is she here, exactly?"
"In case we needed a little muscle~" Ms. Smith replied casually.
"I mean, sure, if we needed to flip an Abrams tank over. Anything short of that and…"
"Tionishia. My friends call me Tio~" she greeted sweetly.
"And Tio would be quadruple-overkill," I finished. " . . . Thank you, for extracting us from that… sticky situation."
"You're welcome," Ms. Smith replied.
"I didn't get to do anything though…" Tio pouted cutely.
Jeez, was everything this lady did cute?
"Maybe next time," Hitomi replied kindly. "Although… I might be out of a job by now…"
"Just tell them I put you up to it," I replied. "Say all my working out and eschewing my hobbies was 'a desperate cry for help' and it should blow over."
"I can't ask you to do that for me."
"You're not. I'm telling you to tell them that of my own volition. Of course… They might drag me back anyway…"
"Well then, it's a good thing we have a workaround~" Ms. Smith grinned.
" . . . Well that doesn't sound ominous at all…"
"Hey!"
*AHA*
Leaving the Chiyoda Special Ward in Tokyo behind us, our ultimate destination was Asaka-shi in the nearby Saitama Prefecture.
A spot of research with my tablet, which I guess I wound up taking with me without even realizing it, told me that Asaka-shi was known for having a higher percentile of Heteromorphs per square kilometer than was the norm, architecture tailored toward "plus-size body types", and little else besides. Crime rates were low, more a result of the increased concentration of Heteromorphs than anything All Might did, since Quirk Restriction Laws had less bearing on Heteromorphs whose Quirks couldn't be "turned off" like Transformation or Emitter-Type meta abilities. Amazingly-enough, Quirk Bias was lower than normal as well, though that may've been born of a community that remembered when the inverse was true, and an unwillingness to repeat the mistakes of a storied past.
With an hour's drive between here and there, barring any Villain-related incidents on the highway, there was more than enough time for me to ask-
"So… What happens now?"
"Now?" Smith hummed. "Now we stop you from becoming a ward of the state."
"And how do we do that exactly?"
"By making you a ward of me~"
" . . . Is there a third option?" I ask hopefully, since something in my gut tells me this woman is a bit of a "slacker".
"Hey, that's not very nice~" Smith pouted.
"Don't worry, Takei-kun, everything will work out!" Hitomi said earnestly beside me. "There are good people waiting to take you in, and we've got you set up to go to Damoto Junior High in the spring along with Mitsumi-chan! Soon enough you'll have loads of friends!"
"I don't need 'loads of friends' to be happy. Just a few really good ones," I say letting my thoughts on the matter slip. Something I learned a long time ago was that being "the popular kid" didn't mean jack shit outside "those doors", it was what you knew, now "who knew you", that would have any bearing on your future. No-one reading your resume cared if you were "the cool kid" or if you were declared "Most Likely to Succeed" in the school yearbook, since stuff like that was completely arbitrary.
"Awwww! You sounded so mature just then!" Tionishia squealed with twinkling eyes, reaching up and mussing my hair… and almost breaking my neck in the process.
"Anyway, glad you made it out in time for Thanksgiving~" Kuroko grinned. "We were going to just grab a chicken from KFC, but I think this year we'll go all-out and treat you as a way of celebrating you getting out of the slammer~"
"Will there be rice stuffing?" I found myself blurting out loud, my hands going to my lips as my cheeks reddened.
"Never heard of it, but sure, we'll whip some up for ya. You know the recipe?"
" . . . Yeah," I returned awkwardly, hoping no-one would dig too-deeply into what Takehiko's family had for Thanksgiving, since this was exactly the sort of inconsistency that'd oust me as an impostor.
Did it count as being an "impostor" if you were reincarnated…?
"Are you worried about something?" Tionishia asked aloud. "Don't worry, there's nothing to be scared of moving to a new place. We'll keep you safe!"
"It's nothing like that. Just… a crisis of identity I guess…"
"Well, don't you worry about that. Every boy going through puberty feels that way," Smith hummed cheekily. "And hey, if you have any 'awkward questions', you've always got a hot nurse on speed dial you can call~"
"Yeah, just one problem with that. I don't actually have a phone," I said off-handedly.
" . . . "
" . . . "
" . . . "
"SHIT, you're right!" Kuroko swore, my face hitting the window as she suddenly veered off toward an exit.
*AHA*
Thirty-seven minutes later…
"Are you sure that's all you want?" Kuroko asked as we walked out of the electronics store, an ordinary-looking touchscreen phone equipped with a screen protector and phone case in my hand. "I can always get you something a little more expensive, charge it to the Agency's flex account."
"Is that really something you should be telling me as your 'ward'?" I deadpan at the suit-clad woman as I compare the phone in my hand to what I had in my previous life.
Even though it was the "22XXs", the only major advancement in commercially-available cellphone technology was that the highest-end models had free-floating hologram projection technology like something out of Yu-Gi-Oh!. While currently-available models were thinner and more-flexible, and even smaller in the case of some Support Items used by Heroes, I didn't count those as "advancements" because those were more about the form of the cellular phone, not the innate function.
For my purposes, all I needed was something functionally equivalent to the iPhone 11, which I remember having before I got 'Isekai'd'. I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find all my favorite artists on this alternate Earth, but seeing as how I'd gotten my fill of App Games and didn't want to go down that rabbit hole again, all I'd really use this one for was Music and Phone Calls, maybe a bit of Wireless Internet.
Something else I idly noticed while we were inside getting a phone for me on the "Hero Agency Plan" was that VR technology from a recreational standpoint was practically Ready Player One or Sword Art Online level; albeit, the digital infrastructure wasn't quite up to fictitious standards, and the level of immersion wasn't as-deep. The sales rep tried to sell us on a model that Hero Academies were beginning to use for their training regimens, allegedly, but annoyingly-enough, I was the one who had to keep us on-task and stop Ms. Smith from buying one under the guise of Christmas shopping.
All this talk about VR Games did have me idly curious what kind of console and PC games there were out there in the world, but given how much time I'd sunk into t in my previous life, I figured I could hold off on that sort of thing for a while yet…
But first, I'd have to make peace with whatever it meant to become the ward of Kuroko Smith and this "Mon Agency" she'd brought up when it came time to assign phone plans on my Sim Card.
*AHA*
AN:
For those of you who may've noticed I've begun using the Western convention for named characters (Given Name, then Family Name), the reason for that is because keeping everything straight (i.e. the Japanese naming convention of Family Names first, then Given Name) was giving me a massive migraine, so I decided to stick with what was familiar.
In spoken dialogue (or internal monologues), it'll still be Family Names first unless the people speaking are on friendly-enough terms that the informal use of one's Given Name is applicable, but for anything strictly "written", it'll be the Western naming convention.
Next chapter will take place immediately after this one, but once I have the foundational stuff like setting and routine and character introductions done, I'll be able to do a little timeskipping since it's roughly 3 years until the events of Canon, and I can afford to be a little more freeform and "episodic" with story events in Another Hero Academia: Out of Time, in comparison to my other works which have a "day-by-day" sorta vibe going.
Anyhow, tell me what you think of the breakout from HPSC HQ, and I hope to hear from you soon!