Waking up the next morning, Izuku turned to look over the right side of Mom and Dad's bed, smiling softly as he caught sight of Mahorou and Kazuma Shimano as the pair of them slept on the futon he'd pulled out. Sitting up in bed, Izuku paused to let himself wake up, before teleporting to the bathroom so he could start getting dressed. He'd left his costume in there, so that he'd be able to shower and brush his teeth before dressing in his costume. He was going to be pretty much living in his costume for the week, which while it still felt pretty strange was still something he was going to have to get used to.

Not just for the week he was going to be staying here on Nabu Island, but for when he was going to be joining a Hero Agency; either Uncle Toshi's, Uncle Mirai's or the one that had been formed for Dad by more than a few of the Pros who had looked up to him.

"Are you really going to be here for the whole week, Zuku-nii?" Mahorou asked, looking like she couldn't quite decide if she was going to be happy or annoyed at the prospect.

"Yeah," he said, picking up the last of his food from the buffet-style setup he and the rest of Class 1-A had put out as soon as it'd become obvious that no one could entirely agree on just what they wanted to have for breakfast. "Both of U.A.'s Hero Course classes are going to be helping out here for the week, or at least until a successor for the retired Hero who used to work on this island can make it out here."

"Oh. Well, I guess it's okay if it's you guys, Zuku-nii," Mahorou said, settling down at the smaller table that'd been set up for her and Kazuma to eat at.

"I'm glad you guys are going to be here, niisan," Kazuma said, smiling up at him in that soft, gentle way that Tenko-nii had said so many times reminded him of Izuku himself when he'd been a little kid.

"Yeah, I guess it's good that it's you, and not some other losers," Mahorou said, nose in the air as she continued to eat her breakfast.

She really does act more than a bit like Kacchan, sometimes, Izuku found himself reflecting, as he settled down for breakfast at the table with the rest of Class 1-A.

~MHA~

"You know, this technically counts as kidnapping," Avion said, even as Cho manhandled him into a large, brightly-colored folding chair.

"It's a surprise vacation, now shaddup an' enjoy it," Cho said, opening a chilled bottle of his favorite cherry soda and setting it neatly into the chair's built-in cup holder.

Rolling his eyes, Avion settled down into his seat, glancing over when he heard Kiruka and Hoyo talking about Hoyo's idea to go into the city and play tourist for awhile. Kiruka was reminding him that their job was to look after the kids, while Hoyo was arguing that he could handle that kind of thing better if he was actually in the city while those U.A. students were there. Kiruka didn't seem particularly impressed with Hoyo's declaration, but after Nine – who didn't really seem to want any other name than that; Avion sometimes wondered if it had something to do with how he'd grown up – had told her to trust that Hoyo had a workable plan, she relented.

Avion shared a commiserating expression with the only level-headed person on their respective crews; God knew more than a few of the scientists on I-Island needed an engineer like him and his people to knock some sense into them.

As Nine and his people started splitting up for the day, Avion leaned back in the chair he'd been so unceremoniously plopped into, tilting his head back as he took a long drink from the cherry soda that Cho had brought for him. It was kind of funny, how many times he'd found himself being dragged off on some kind of hare-brained scheme or other, ever since Cho had decided that the both of them were friends. Watching as Hoyo left, riding an animated table that he'd strapped a cooler full of drinks and ice to the top of, Avion chuckled as he leaned back in the chair Cho had dropped him so unceremoniously in.

Even in spite of how determined Cho had been to bring him out here, he'd still had the chance to make sure his shifts were going to be covered while he was away; he could be pleased with that, if not entirely happy.

~MHA~

Moving through the darkened corridors of the building, his cover discarded and only tenuously useful insofar as none of the cult members had actually caught up to him at present, Stalker widened his eyes as he activated his Meta-ability. Precision allowed him to determine a great deal: the quickest route between two points, pressure-points that he could use to incapacitate anyone who didn't pose too much of a threat to him or his mission, and just where to aim his darts to kill quickly if not painlessly. For the moment, Precision was showing him the quickest route out of the stronghold he'd infiltrated not long ago.

The initial plan had been for him to stay longer, to find out if Humarise was truly an international organization, the way more than a few of the cult members had boasted, or if those boasts had merely been the efforts of the kind of self-deluded cultists that every one of the Humarise members had proven themselves to be. However, after what Stalker had discovered…

"How's he holding up?" Stalker, turning to look back at the men he had sacrificed his cover to extract from the Humarise compound.

"He's holding on, though if we don't get him to a hospital soon, he won't make it much farther," Alan Kay said; he was one of the two who had proven themselves integral to the success of Stalker's new mission.

The mission he was going to need to complete quickly, if he and the rest of Metahuman society were going to survive the mad scheme of these cultists he'd discovered.

"All right," he said, nodding sharply as he spotted the next door along their path.

Stalker had just begun to wonder when those who had dedicated themselves to Humarise would find the trail that they had inadvertently been leaving behind, attempting to drag the bleeding man between them, before Stalker had taken point to guide them out of whatever dangers might confront them within the walls of this cult stronghold, when one of the robed cultists jumped out in front of him. With his Meta-ability already activated, Stalker was able to target the carotid artery of his opponent, sending blood fountaining across and down their neck and drenching their collar in it.

"I don't think I'm ever going to get used to seeing you do that," Alan Kay said, hurrying to keep up with him as he dragged the other man in their wake. "You're a mercenary, aren't you?"

"In a sense," Stalker allowed; there were few enough outside of the Liberation Army who could know their true name, or the goals all of them fought for.

Alan Kay and the fellow scientist he had acted in defense of were not yet among them.

~MHA~

Hunter Marion, the man leading him and Eddy Soul out of the Humarise compound where the pair of them had been trapped for such a long time, seemed almost deliberately mysterious. Still, the fact that the man had also leaped to their defense when even the Heroes in the area hadn't seemed to have taken any interest in the kidnappings throughout Otheon was a strong point in his favor. Hunter very well might have been trying to deliberately ingratiate himself to the pair of them, but for the moment Alan didn't care.

Hunter Marion could have been the worst sort of Villain, and Alan wouldn't have cared at the moment; for all their professed hatred of society, none of the Villains Alan had heard about were nearly as outright murderous as the fanatics he and poor Eddy Soul had been forced to work for when they had been kidnapped by Humarise.

Another of the cult members leaped out in front of them, and Hunter put them down with a needle through the eye-slit of their mask; Alan winced, trying not to turn away from the scene. Narrowing his eyes as he forced himself to think of what Humarise was planning to do with the Trigger bombs he and Eddy had been kidnapped to work on, Alan braced himself against Eddy and kept dragging him along. Looking up again, Alan saw Hunter reach up to tap something on his right ear.

A moment later, the three of them reached the main entranceway of the compound, and Hunter reached into his right pocket for some kind of device that he then used to override the locks and actually open the doors for them.

"Stay close," Hunter said, pausing for a moment while the doors slowly opened in front of them. "Hold onto my cloak if you need to."

The three of them slipped out through the double doors of the main compound, just as they stopped in their tracks, scraping their shoulders as the doors began closing again. Something on the ground caught his eye, a lot of things, that looked like bright, glowing silver spots on the ground. Hunter's shadow, along with his own and even Eddy Soul's, seemed to spread outward until it looked like there was an entire crowd of people standing all around them.

The crowd of shadows seemed to envelop them then, and Alan reached out to grab the flapping hood of Hunter's Humarise cloak before he could lose sight of him in the artificial darkness.

The sound of more people – more cultists – stampeding out of the building, drew Alan's attention, though he couldn't see a single one of them through the enveloping darkness that had spread out from their three shadows. Gripping more tightly onto Hunter Marion's hood, as the man continued running, Alan found himself wondering just what Hunter's Quirk actually was.

At first, all it had seemed to do was enhance his vision, but the writhing shadows with the silver eye-spots didn't seem to be at all connected to a sensory-type Quirk like the one Hunter had demonstrated; Alan truly didn't know what to make of the man, but he was the one rescuing them, so that counted for something, at least.

~MHA~

Controlling his breathing, the way he'd trained to during countless sessions where he and Shadow Walker would work to refine the Meta-abilities that worked in tandem to make them such a worthy, reliable team, Stalker widened his eyes as he walked within the patch of darkness that Shadow Walker had extended over the three of them. He'd previously signaled for pickup, and with Shadow Walker's Meta-ability to disguise his movements, Stalker was able to quickly eliminate those cultists that had been dispatched to recapture him and the pair of once-captured scientists he was escorting.

Once he'd managed to deal with the last of his attackers, Stalker took a moment to refill his store of throwing knives, and then to contact the approaching MLA transport to let them know that he was traveling with a pair of escapees, one of whom had been potentially critically injured.

Finished with that, and thankfully having managed to outpace the remaining cultists, Stalker checked the GPS built into the night-vision goggles he'd been supplied with for this mission. Turning his path so that he would be on a more direct course to meet up with the transport carrying his allies, Stalker smiled as he caught sight of the large transport.

A force of Skeptic's puppets, as well as Shadow Walker himself, awaited him inside the van. The puppets were quick to emerge, forming a perimeter around him as he and Alan Kay helped Kay's compatriot and fellow scientist into the van. Shadow Walker stood with them, helping to stabilize Eddy Soul so that the man would survive transport, and also released the three of them from the influence of his Meta-ability so that Alan Kay would be able to see again.

"I can't thank you three enough," Alan Kay said, once the three of them had managed to ensure his colleague's survival. "Those fanatics… What they're planning would be the end of superhuman society."

"We'll cover that during the debrief," Shadow Walker said, looking up from where he had been strapping Eddy Soul into restraints so that his injuries wouldn't be jostled during transport.

As he watched Alan Kay settle into a seat nearby his colleague, strapping himself in as their transport set off, Stalker heard the man sigh.

"Thank you, Hunter," Alan Kay said; the man still didn't know his true name or the ultimate aim of the organization he served, but Stalker hoped to tell him both, in time.

"I'm glad I could help," was all he said.

~MHA~

Running their own Agency – even on a comparatively sheltered place like Nabu Island – was a bit more hectic than any of them had been expecting, though Izuku thought that that was mostly all of the administration they were handling themselves, too. For the most part, the Pro Heroes who worked at the various Agencies – even the ones they'd formed themselves – relied on their staff to keep the Agency running. And while there was paperwork to be done for general Heroing and stuff, without their own group of dedicated support-staff, he and the rest of the Hero Course students were a lot busier than they would have been otherwise.

Since he was one of the fastest, as well as the only one capable of teleportation thanks to the various Quirks he'd collected, Izuku was one of the ones who'd been sent out to investigate the reports of someone either planning a kidnapping or someone who'd been kidnapped.

The reports hadn't been that clear, and the kids who'd given them had sounded worried enough not to be entirely coherent, but every Hero knew that none of them could overlook something like a kidnapping. Even if it did turn out to be nothing, they had to be certain. Even on a peaceful island like Nabu, things could always go wrong.

He, Iida-san, and Ochako-san had all volunteered to head out to the location that the kids had described to them.

"All right, here we are," Ochako-san said, crouching behind the between the trees and behind a barrier of large bushes that separated them from the place that the kids had described to them.

They were far enough away not to be spotted easily, but close enough that his heat-vision could determine just how many people were actually there.

"It seems like there's just one of them," he reported, once he'd finished checking for any other heat-signatures. "That's all I was able to see, at least."

"We'll keep an eye out for any more allies these kidnappers might have," Iida-san said, an earnest look on his face, right arm making the short, sharp motions that he always seemed to make when something struck him as particularly against his principles.

"Right," he and Ochako-san said, their voices overlapping in a way that Izuku hadn't heard in some time.

The three of them pressed onward, passing around the bushes so they wouldn't alert whoever it was that they were investigating by making the bushes rustle, and as they came into sight of the heat-form he'd previously seen, Izuku found to his surprise that it was someone lounging in a reclining beach chair. The "someone" had a Heteromorphic-type Quirk, one that made them look like some kind of strange, human-sized tropical bird.

Whoever it was had pure white feathers all over their body, a bright yellow beak that couldn't help but remind him of Tokoyami-san's, and a crest of white feathers down the top of his head that looked more than a bit like a feathered mohawk.

He didn't look like any kind of kidnapper, and the fact that Izuku had only spotted his heat-signature in the vicinity suggested that the reports they'd gotten had been exaggerated somehow. Straightening up, Izuku made his way into the clearing where the reclining beach chair and its occupant had been laid out.

"Sir, we received reports of a kidnapping in this area," he said, making his way over to the figure who reminded him more than a bit of Tokoyami-san; there were differences, of course, since Tokoyami-san's Heteromorphic-type Quirk was limited to his head. "Have you heard anything about that?"

"Kidnapping?" the man with the Heteromorphic-type Quirk asked, sitting up in his chair, even reaching down over the left side of the chair so he could stand the back of it up again. He seemed surprised enough at hearing that that Izuku didn't think he'd been involved at all. "Wait," he said, then chuckled. "Ah, someone must have overheard me talking to Cho."

"Private joke?" he asked, having more than a bit of experience with things that would be misunderstood if someone outside the family heard them; sometimes wildly misunderstood.

"Yeah," the man said, white-feathered crest twitching slightly as he chuckled. "Cho keeps dragging me off to all kinds of places, ever since we met."

"We're sorry for the misunderstanding, sir," Ochako-san said, sounding both amused and rather contrite.

"It's all right, kid, you had no way of knowing," the man said, offering a smile that reminded Izuku all the more of Tokoyami-san.

Iida-san was standing toward the back of the group, the stern look on his face beginning to become more than a little disapproving; Izuku had a feeling he knew why that was, considering the kind of person Iida-san had proved himself to be.

"I guess we should introduce ourselves," he said, shifting slightly on his feet and feeling the urge to rub the back of his head for a long moment. "I'm Myriad," he said, bowing slightly to the man in the beach chair as he turned to regard them more squarely.

"I'm Uravity," Ochako-san said, bowing as well.

"And I am Ingenium," Iida-san said, bowing deeply to the man in the beach chair.

The man who'd just stood up, a smile on his beak that actually reminded him more than a little of Kacchan, funnily enough, bowed slightly as well. "I'm Avion Skye, I-Island engineer at large."

"You're from I-Island?" he asked, finding himself surprised at the reminder of where he and the rest of Class 1-A had been, not all that long ago. "How'd you end up all the way out here?"

"Cho insisted I take a vacation," Skye-san said, settling back down on his beach chair with an almost explosive sigh.

"Ah, so that's probably when you made the joke about being kidnapped, right?" Izuku asked, finding himself reminded of the way that Dad and Kacchan would both make sarcastic jokes.

"Yeah," Skye-san said, chuckling. "It does technically count as kidnapping, when Cho drags me off to all these places, and I do have an actual job."

"Yes, you're making important contributions to the Hero profession," Iida-san said earnestly, right arm chopping the air as though for emphasis.

Biting back laughter, Izuku turned to see Skye-san leaning forward in his beach chair. "So, would you kids like some soda?" he asked, opening the cooler on the left side of the beach chair he'd settled back down on, beak twitching slightly as though he was trying to hide a smile. "I have cherry, and cherry," Skye-san said, beginning to grin, as Izuku found himself struggling not to laugh again. "And look, I have cherry."

"Gee, it's a tough choice, but I guess we'll take cherry," he said, grinning and playing along with Skye-san's joke.

As Ochako-san started laughing, Izuku grinned wider. Skye-san really did remind him more than a little of Dad; Skye-san was just a bit too low-key to remind him of Kacchan.

~MHA~

Sweeping his right arm in a wide arc, Touya called up Cremation to incinerate the group of puppets in front of him, then glanced over to where Tenko was. His partner had just grabbed one of the remaining puppets in front of him, Decay already spreading, before he threw it into the group of puppets. The Decay spread through them, as well, and the area was finally clear.

"You'd think they'd stop using puppets, after we'd cleared out so many of them," he said, rubbing his tingling hands as he made his way over to where Tenko was standing, pale white scarf wrapped tightly around his neck.

"Yeah," Tenko scoffed, rolling his eyes as he grabbed the end of his scarf and used it to clean the dust from his polarized visor. "Still, it's not like we're going to be able to get any rest, with all these attacks going on."

"I wonder how Keigo's doing," he said, keeping the musing to their own, private channel; no sense letting anyone uninvolved know what was going on. Any one of the Villains who might have been spying on them.

"He said he was going to check in on that guy they had to take into protective custody since whatever Villain group keeps attacking tried to frame him," Tenko said, eyes sweeping the spent battlefield around them for signs of anyone else who might have gotten it into their heads to attack them. "You know, that one with the doubling Quirk?"

"That one your uncle was looking after, yeah?" he asked, having a vague sort of recollection of a blond man that Tenko's uncle had mentioned awhile ago.

"Yeah, that's him: Jin Bubaigawara," Tenko said, moving to stand closer to him so that the pair of them would be better positioned for one of Kurogiri's Warp Gates if they needed a pickup.

The sight of a charging figure, as well as the long, thrashing something trailing behind him – something that looked entirely too much like Eraser Head's capture weapon; a thing he'd noticed the first time this desperate fanatic had attacked him – visible out of the corner of Touya's left eye drew his attention in just the same kind of way it had the first time. Crazed fangirls, rabid 'shippers, and I still have to deal with this asshole, Touya groused, calling out Tenko's Hero name, since there was no point in letting this desperate creep know any more about them than he already did.

Igniting his right arm to draw the fanatic's attention, Touya extinguished the flames just as his fist slammed into the crazed Villain's face.

He'd clearly been using those puppets as cover, hoping for Touya to inadvertently Cremate him without being aware of it; he'd probably decided to declare himself when Tenko had started using his Decay to clear out more of the puppets. For whatever reason the fanatic wanted to die at his hands, ever since the pair of them had encountered each other on one of Endeavor's patrols.

He'd been interning with the man, wanting to have at least some grounding in how to use his Quirk – it was the one thing he couldn't actually learn from Dad, since none of his stored Quirks worked quite like Hellflame – and the pair of them had gotten into some kind of argument. After so long Touya couldn't recall the specifics, what he and Endeavor had been arguing about, but it'd drawn the Villain's attention like blood in the water in front of a shark.

Ever since that day, the fanatic had been determined to die at his hands; Touya didn't know if he'd chosen the name Ending before or after that day, but either way it pissed him off.

"Oh no you don't," Tenko snapped, grabbing the long ribbon of controlled road paint thrashing around in the air towards the pair of them, Decaying it in an instant and leaving Touya free to close with the idiot fanatic who was still so determined to try his patience.

"Thanks," he called back, closing with the Villain and slamming his right knee into the twitchy man's crotch, grabbing him by the back of his prison-striped jumpsuit, then cuffing him to an intact lamp-post with a GPS tracker slapped on him so someone else could come pick him up.

Grumbling under his breath as he caught up with Tenko again, Touya found himself hoping to find some more of those puppets. If there was anything guaranteed to make him feel better about this whole debacle, it was the chance to literally burn off some stress.

~MHA~

As soon as he'd had the chance, Keigo Takami had called up Kurogiri to ask for a Warp Gate to the safehouse where Jin Bubaigawara, his clones, and those adorable little duplicates he'd made of Tenko's baby brother had all been taken as soon as those weird puppets that looked like him had started showing up. Keigo was glad that Jin and the rest of his people were safe, and he'd even made sure to take a Warp Gate in so there wasn't any risk of someone following him there.

He wasn't about to repay the kindness that Jin had shown him by bringing those Villains down on his head.

"Hey!" Keigo called, making his way deeper into the safehouse that'd been designed for Jin, his clones, and that group of miniature versions of Sensei's kid.

Keigo still wasn't quite sure about how the little tykes had first been "born" – for lack of a better word – but he also didn't know just how open Jin was to talking about that kind of thing. Helpful as he'd tried to be to the man, the simple fact was that the pair of them weren't that familiar with one another.

The sound of running feet, the light steps too small to belong to any of the full-sized clones he knew that Jin had made of himself, drew Keigo's attention just in time for him to be jumped by the tiny forms of the clones Jin had made of Izuku. At least, Izuku when he was as little as all of these kids. As the seven of them all piled in on him, Keigo waved his arms, laughing.

"Oh no!" he exclaimed, waving his arms and deliberately swaying on his feet. "Help, it's an ambush!"

The tiny little Izukus all laughed, and what seemed to be Jin Bubaigawara made his way into the room.

"All right, kids, frisk him for food and then turn 'im loose," Bubaigawara said, grinning as he made his way into the room.

"Oi!" he exclaimed, as the little tykes not only grabbed the chicken bucket he'd carried into the house with him, but his goggles and the radio mic he used to stay in contact with his partners. "Give me that!"

Sending out a pair of larger feathers to lift the little Izuku up off of the ground, flipping him around so he could take back his radio goggles. And then pinched the little Izuku's tiny, button nose.

"All right, that's enough of that," he said, tucking the little tyke under his right arm and made his way into the dining room so he could have some food before he left for the battlefield again.

~MHA~

Having spent a whole week helping out around Nabu island, Izuku had found himself meeting with more of the group who seemed to have come with Skye-san to the island. Including the man who'd seemingly been so insistent about Skye-san taking a break from his work that he'd been doing on I-Island that he'd been willing to basically kidnap him. His name was Chojuuro Kon, and he had a Heteromorphic-type Quirk, just the same as Skye-san did.

Though his seemed to have the characteristics of several animals, not just the single kind of bird that Skye-san's Quirk made him look like.

"Thanks again for setting all of this up," he said, smiling at the mayor as he caught sight of him in the midst of the crowd.

"It was no trouble at all, after all you've done for us over the past week," the mayor said, smiling widely at him from his place at the center of a small crowd.

"Still, this was a really nice thing you did for us, sir," he said, offering a respectful bow to the man, smiling even as he did so.

Making his way into the crowd again, Izuku looked around for the other members of Class 1-A or Class 1-B, curious to see what the rest of them were doing. He also wondered if they were going to be doing anything special for Christmas, since the holiday was so close, as well. He also wondered just how many of their respective family members were going to be able to attend any kind of celebration.

Considering everything that was going on in the world, and how many of them were following in the Heroic footsteps of one or more family members, Izuku knew that anyone else in his position would be wondering just the same.

A flash of fire visible in the corner of his left eye drew Izuku's attention, and he turned to see Kon-san was showing off a bit by toasting kebabs with the fire-breath that his Quirk – one of the coolest that Izuku had seen in a really long time; Kon-san had been more than a little surprised when Izuku had asked for a piece of his fur – granted him, and Skye-san was right there with him, eating a kebab of his own. Smiling softly, since it was good to see that Kon-san and Skye-san – who both had Heteromorphic-type Quirks – were getting along so well in a rural area like Nabu Island. Uncle Toshi had told him that rural areas weren't the best places for people with those kinds of people to live.

Of course, it might have helped that neither of them actually lived there, or maybe it was because the both of them obviously worked in the Hero industry; possibly both.

Continuing on his way, Izuku kept his eyes peeled for any more of his fellow U.A. students, wondering how the rest of them were all doing. He hadn't been expecting anything like this open-air party when the mayor had contacted the temporary Hero Agency that classes 1-A and 1-B had established for themselves on Nabu, but it was a nice change of pace from working all the time. And, for Izuku in particular, a nice break from worrying about what might be happening to Dad, Uncle Toshi, and the rest of his family.