Raw666 - Aye.
Shahryar - Yeah, I was actually getting worried! Also started publishing something new and didn't see you comment there, this is worrying :V
(***)
When Saiko Intelli wakes up on Lemillion's couch in the morning of the day after Death of Shikoku, she immediately realizes that she might have done something incredibly stupid yesterday.
Also, that's a lot of All Might merch.
She raises herself up while yawning loudly and looking around the room. The rational and logical part of her mind briefly pondered why he didn't put her in a guest room (no way he didn't have one), then it understood that she simply wasn't welcome.
Putting her on the couch - in his own, way too big spare pajamas - was probably the entire concession he was willing to make for her.
"Hey you, you're finally awake." Lemillion says after his head pops up from through the door to another room.
He looks… serious? Not the hostile type of serious. Is she missing a joke? Let's bet that she does.
"Alright, so what joke am I missing?" She decides to surrender unconditionally on this and admit it.
"Google the term." Lemillion replies while entering the room fully. He looks surprisingly sexy in a pair of shorts and a tank top. Really shows the muscles. "It's an early 21st Century meme."
"Yeah, you're just the person I'd expect to use 21st Century memes as a greeting." Saiko sighs while correcting her about-to-fall-off upper clothes. Yeah, he was REALLY big. A miracle she woke up still having it on her - she was probably too tired to trash in her sleep. "You know, I lowkey expected to wake up in your bed."
"I'm afraid that letting you inside in that state…" Mirio replies with a perfect poker face. "... and then screwing your brains out would have felt like taking advantage of you. And that's distinctly unheroic."
She was about to try to rise up from the couch when it hit her.
"What if I'm no longer in that state?" She asks, giving him an incredulous look.
"Then it would no longer be taking advantage of you." Mirio replies dryly.
She is so confused right now.
"Are you actually responding to my advances right now or am I too confused or busy dealing with a nascent post-traumatic stress disorder to think clearly?" She decides to ask, because honestly, this was a big what moment on her side.
"Yes." Mirio decides to be a little shit. "Also there is an option that I'm pretending to be responding to your advances in order to give you hopes before throwing them out of a window just to make you suffer."
Alright, she should probably throw his psychological profile out of the same window, because he is certainly not acting like she expected him to.
"Now, that's kinky." Saiko decides to respond in kind. Being a little shit for a little shit. "The suffering bit. I can't say I dislike that, though."
"Saiko Intelli." Mirio Toogata announces in an official tone. He gives her an 'investigator who just figured out the truth behind the case' vibes, and she is somewhat confused by that. "You are not interested in doing 'stupid things' to unwind. You're a bottom."
"Uhm, what?" This talk is really not proceeding in the direction that she was expecting.
"Just… google it." Mirio says before sighing loudly. "And probably call your sidekicks and tell them that you're alright, your phone has been vibrating non-stop for a while now. And be happy that I'm a gentleman or I'd compare it to something."
Oookay, she's really starting to fall for him, and that makes her incredibly confused. That's an awful lot of wits from a mini-All Might beefcake.
She takes a glance at her phone. Yeah, that's a LOT of missed calls. About two hundred of those.
Hopefully the Prime Minister didn't send a goddamn search party after her. She has no idea how to explain waking up on Mirio Toogata's couch while wearing a badly oversized set of All Might pajamas without ending up on the HPSC' 'uncertain loyalty' watchlist.
She sends a message to the chief of her sidekicks telling her that she fell VERY unconscious out of exhaustion and stress, and that she's alright and will show up as soon as possible.
Thankfully, she wasn't needed in the clean-up operation. It was something for the army and the government to do. The crisis averted, now it was just cleaning the mess. And yes, they have goddamn protocols for that.
Maybe not for something of that scale, but they had hundreds of planners and commanders on that. She had an edge over them in thinking speed. They could goddamn do that on their own once it wasn't a matter of life or death.
She then quickly googled the term bottom.
Oh. Oh, uhm.
"Are you sure that you aren't a tomato mutant?" Lemillion asks dryly. "Because I think that you're maturing in front of me."
She manages not to throw her phone at him, but that's mostly because she knew that it wouldn't even hit him. Goddamn Permeation.
Instead she throws a pillow at him.
"And that's what I get for being a good samaritan." Somehow he managed to stay expressionless, despite the pillow impacting him in the face and landing on the floor in front of him. How the hell is that bloke so hard to read?! "I'm being viciously attacked in my own living room. Also, it looks like Seiai Academy graduates are more innocent than I expected."
"Oh, absolutely." Saiko responds with a cold smile. "We were all super innocent. In fact, I can guarantee you that most if not almost all of my class graduated as virgins. A fact that only lasted until the post-graduation ceremony party."
"Seriously?" He seems to be suspecting that she is pulling his leg. "That had to be one hell of a party."
"There we agree." Saiko finally decides to rise from the couch. Thankfully, her clothes didn't fall off. "If your heroic endeavors will ever lead you to a situation where your survival will hinge on your ability to find a male stripper living within fifty kilometer radius from the Seiai Academy, I'm your person."
"I'll keep that in mind." Mirio replies. "Also, I think that it's time for you to start preparing yourself for a rapid exit out of my house."
"Hmmm." She glances at the couch behind her. "Don't you think that I should clean up after myself? Don't want to abuse your hospitality."
"You literally have to keep your pants and your shirt with one hand or they'd fall off." Mirio replies. "Is the 'cleaning up after yourself' an excuse to show your curves to me alongside vaguely seductive moves and some 'accidental' exhibitionism?"
Saiko gasps loudly.
"I would never do something so indecent!" She replies. One of his brows raises. "I assure you that it wouldn't be accidental at all, Lemillion."
Mirio sighs. She really isn't sure if it was disappointment or him faking it. She was leaning heavily towards faking it.
"Your clothes have been dried." He replies, while pointing at a chair beside a nearby table. "I'm planning to eat breakfast. If you're willing to suffer simple toasts instead of caviar with edible chestnuts imported from Europe or whatever your kind eats for breakfast, you're free to participate. Otherwise, you know where the doors are."
(***)
She ends up participating. She doesn't exactly enjoy eating toasts, but damn if she doesn't feel like she's about to drop from starvation. No way she is making it back to her home. Or a hero agency.
The first thing she does is to drop by a toilet. Because, yeah, she really doesn't advertise that fact but having a quirk that hinges on consuming massive amounts of tea has side-effects, especially when you've all but put yourself under a tea drip yesterday.
There is something in Mirio Toogata's stoic consumption of toasts (seen in profile) that makes him feel like a work of art, really.
Very well sculpted… sculpture. Yes. A sculpture.
She wolfs down a few toasts after putting whatever combination of things she had in her range. Saiko Intelli really needed those sweet calories right goddamn now, table manners be damned.
She is more or less satisfied (the lack of tea is sad, then again, she is totally alright with bottled water right now), when Mirio decides to speak.
"So, want to talk about yesterday?" He asks. She looks at him over the dining table.
"Are you trying to give me emergency psychological counseling…" God knows that she and most people in the country probably need it after that bullshit. "... or is it about the practical aftermath of it?"
"Both." Mirio replies, finally looking back at her.
"Aww, how caring of you." She replies, while extending her hand to grab another toast.
"There is a large chance that sooner or later the HPSC will have me deployed to a larger battle under your orders." Mirio replies calmly. "I'd prefer to NOT have to worry if you won't snap again."
Her hand freezes over the table.
"Fuck you, Togata." She replies with more venom than she expected from herself.
"You're misunderstanding." Mirio sighs loudly. "We lost most of Shikoku in twelve hours. I'd be more worried if it didn't affect you. In fact, if you showed up after it and tried to seduce me without being clearly broken by what happened, then seeing as you're one of the main authors of the Hero Society policies nowadays I'd be severely tempted to murder you and dip your body into an acid-filled bathtub that I most likely do not have in my basement."
After three seconds or thinking, her hand grabs the toast.
"If I failed to save close to three million people and tried to seduce you while acting as if it was just a normal day…" She replies. "... I'd probably deserve it." She then munches on the toast.
Yeah. Much better.
"I don't plan to snap again." She replies once she's done with chewing. "And while your concern is understandably heroic, you don't have to worry about it. I have my own therapist to visit when things trouble me. As for the practical aftermath?" She sighs. "Things don't add up. But maybe they will once I go back to my agency and look through the new intel we gathered."
"Elaborate?" He asks.
"I'd make some sort of 'what, is NVA asking you for this' joke…" Intelli replies. "... but we both know that if you worked for it, I would've woken up bound and gagged."
"Now, that's kinky." Mirio comments. Saiko manages NOT to laugh at that. Yeah, way to feed her with her own words.
"Necromancer's little rampage had no point to it." Saiko decides to elaborate. "It was just a random mass slaughter. I fail to realize the point of it. Which worries me, since it suggests that there are some factors that I'm unaware of."
"Wiping out Shikoku had no point to it?" Mirio asks, clearly surprised by it.
"I'm trying to approach it rationally." She replies while spreading butter on another toast. "Necromancer was certainly a puppet of someone, he was clearly something akin to what Singularity became. Some cutting edge noumu with their looks more or less intact, but rationally certainly altered."
"So, a living weapon?" He asks. She nods.
"The thing is, weapons have to be aimed by someone and have their triggers pulled to work." She replies. "Romero Fujimi was a total, pardon my french, dickwad in life and a genuine case of 'bad powers, bad people'. I will never understand why the hell did Isamu Academy actually let him in. What's even the usage of that quirk in heroics?"
"Don't ask me." Mirio shrugs. "I figured out that they wanted to make sure that he doesn't go to the other side. Maybe it's that his zombies are more physically resistant than normal people? Keep him uninfected and you can make trapped civilians less squishy in exchange for making them rampage a little?"
"That's incredibly dumb, but probably better than any rationale I can think off." She replies. "The thing is, he was a dickwad, but if being a dickwad made you a mass murderer material, HPSC would have self-annihilated years ago."
"Are you sure that my house isn't wiretapped by anyone?" Mirio decides to ask. It's quite touching of him.
"I assure you that if it was wiretapped by the government, I'd know about it." She replies. "So, Romero was clearly a tool. But whose?"
"The Paranormal Liberation Front?" Mirio asks. "I really don't have high estimates on those guys' moral decency level after Shiketsu High." The fact that he seems much less moved by UA being destroyed says wonders about his opinion on Thunderbolt and the people that replaced the faculty that he knew from the past.
"Yeah, I think the term is 'big mood'." She replies. "But Midoriya is clearly Re-Destro's student, and Re-Destro had more moral boundaries that Midnight had kinks. Thus far Midoriya's modus operandi is within reach of what Re-Destro had coming, with a natural switch from regular warfare to guerilla attacks. What happened to Shikoku simply didn't fit."
"It didn't fit?" Now Mirio is clearly surprised. "Isn't his goal terrorizing the country?"
"Wrong type of terror." She replies, before wolfing down another toast. Yeah, she's practically full. Stuffed to the brim. Yeah. Those were either some very good toasts or she was just THAT hungry. "Midoriya attempted to rouse the population into anarchist rampage during the Revival Celebration."
"And?" He asks when she stays quiet for a moment.
"What happened to Shikoku would rouse support for the government." She replies. "It's one thing to show the government's weakness by launching unstoppable raids… and we're probably bound for another one soon. It's another thing entirely to wipe out an entire island. People are going to flock to the government for protection."
"So, Midoriya was probably as surprised with that mess as we were, that's what you're saying?" He asks and she nods. "Unless his grasp on the PLF is weaker than we assume and it was someone on the inside, who is left? NVA wouldn't do that."
"I could totally picture Kamiji unleashing it." Intelli replies. Judging from the look on Mirio's face, he disagrees although reluctantly. "That woman's insane, and it's putting it lightly. But the rest would stop her, especially Crawler and Nakahara. Lethally, if needed. So, yeah, it's almost certainly not NVA. We'd know that it was them if some poor sod finds Firestorm's body floating down the river towards the sea or something like that."
A metaphor, of course. Nakahara is too good at that game. She would probably have Kamiji's quarters gassed with sleeping gas, and then have Crawler or Tornado float drop her from the sky somewhere where no one would find her body until the end of the war.
Or, like, just straight up shot her in the face with a gun.
Or something similar.
"So, what?" Mirio looks vaguely confused at that. "We barely have any terrorist organizations left in the country, everyone is either working for Nakahara or Midoriya."
"Don't fucking remind me." She growls lightly. Liberator was already back at it, that nutjob just killed several district councilors in Shibuya with a fucking trap car. They knew it was him but that shithead let himself get recorded by a CCTV camera.
He literally made a victory sign at it while the car exploded in the background.
She was going to enjoy dismantling his organization the moment she had spare time to do that.
"Liberator?" He asks dryly.
"What, now you can read minds too?" She replies in a similar tone. "It might be an unspecified third, no, fourth party. Alternatively, Romero went on a rampage himself due to some malfunction. Years passed since the war, and we know that the noumus that the PLF used during the second USJ attack were clearly underperforming."
"They are missing on maintenance?" His brow raised. "That's odd."
Huh?
"How so?" She asks.
"Midoriya sounds like someone who cares about his assets, especially when he doesn't have an awful lot of those." Mirio replies. "Why wouldn't he give his noumus proper maintenance?"
That's…
Mirio might be onto something there.
"That would indicate that either he gave up and then something made him snap back into supervillainy and start a war…" She replies. "... or that all the noumus have a limited lifespan, and no amount of maintenance can change that."
"Yes." Mirio raises his finger. "But Uraraka is clearly performing up to specs, right? Unless her specs were downright ridiculous and that's her malfunctioning self. But if it's just the lower grade noumus that are dying out, this probably wouldn't include Fujimi."
"We don't know the original specs of Singularity." Intelli replies. "There might have been 'downright ridiculous'. Then again, she is a walking bundle of mysteries, so there is that. And besides, the lifespan might depend on the combination of quirks involved."
She stares in space for a few long seconds.
She really needs to think it over again while on some proper tea and with her quirk on.
"Fujimi malfunctioning would have made sense." She eventually states. "Especially as his operation plan was idiotic. He clearly had access to a warp gate quirk which he used to assault the Naval blockade. Why didn't he warp a few of his copies into central Tokyo while at it?"
"Range limit?" Mirio asks.
"I calculated it." Saiko sighs. "If it reached the naval blockade, it SHOULD reach the mainland too. Not Tokyo, but certainly some nearby cities. It's as if someone told him to only wipe out Shikoku, so he didn't step a foot outside of it. Except for the attacks on the ships."
"So, a random act of terrorism." Mirio summarizes. "That actually strengthened the government temporarily."
It's not said openly, but she can read behind the lines.
"It wasn't the prime minister." She replies with a certainty in her voice. "Look, I get it that you expect the worst from her. But she, and I assure you of that, genuinely considers herself to be acting in Japan's best interest in mind. Consider her delusional if you will, I don't really care. But she wouldn't do it."
"Deika?" She should have expected that argument.
"The one and only reason why Deika was destroyed…" Mindscape replies. "... is because its entire adult population was composed of active villains in the process of rebelling against the state. And because Re-Destro was too genre-savvy for his own good and had Kurogiri move captive soldiers and heroes elsewhere to avoid some hero infiltrating Deika and freeing them to cause chaos behind his lines."
"Guess the few hundred children that returned to the city through warpgates after Re-Destro crushed Best Jeanist and Edgehost and broke the siege to reunite with their 'villainous' parents were an outlier not worth mention." Mirio states dryly. When she opens her mouth to protest, he raises his hand. "I concede your point with that argument, just don't expect me to say that nuking a town on Japanese soil was a good idea."
"Even with All for One being there?" She asks, while ignoring the startling question of 'how the fuck is Apocrypha carrying his skull around if it got vaporized by a blast'.
"All for One was a cripple, Intelli." Mirio replies, while making eye contact with her for the first time in a while. "A cripple that everyone was terrified of regardless of All Might dying while putting him in that state. The prime minister and the HPSC should go and beg Star and Stripe to come change 'cripple' into 'corpse' rather than have a kneejerk reaction after Re-Destro changed Best Jeanist and Edgeshot into blood smears and murder something close to fifty thousand people. Now we all have to face the remnants of the army you've nuked, and it's a no holds barred fight thanks to Deika. Ask Shiketsu High students and their families how they feel about the results."
She averts her gaze first.
"If it makes you feel any better…" She replies. "I'd have voted against it if they asked me about it back then."
"Great." He replies while grabbing his - naturally All Might-themed - cup. "You passed a basic human decency test." Then he chugs some fizzy drink from it. "So, you suspect that it was someone else?"
Back to the subject. Yeah. It feels like a better option than continuing this particular line of talking.
"Honestly, yeah." Saiko replies. "Unless Romero malfunctioned and executed some imprinted war plan that we've managed to counter in a way that I haven't fully figured out, we might have someone else out there. And this worries me greatly."
"Wait, you haven't fully figured out?" Now she got his attention again.
"I can only assume that we've managed to kill the original Romero with one of the nukes." She replies. "And that his copied couldn't create copies of themselves, resulting in the whole disaster stopping suddenly after we've wiped out most of the command units with the last salvo from the Sword of Damocles. That's not how Twice's quirk works, though. Besides, he is still running around with Kodai and the Levelers, so it's not like he lost his quirk."
"I thought that Garaki and, maybe, Overhaul could copy quirks somewhat?" Mirio asks. "The copies were inferior to originals, we only run into multi-quirked noumus, and they seem to be able to copy only a limited number of quirks, like Hyper-Regeneration, but…"
Yeah, it would suggest that Romero's self-copy was an inferior version of copied Twice's quirk. However…
"After analyzing what I got from Sir Nighteye's archives…" She replies. "I think that Garaki and Overhaul both approached the subject from different angles."
"Elaborate, please?" Mirio asks. What, what an improvement, it was just 'Elaborate' earlier.
"Garaki's method of quirk-copying was based on biology." She replies. "Think about it. The High-Ends we've run into all had their original quirks… plus some 'standard ones. Super-strength and hyper-regeneration, mostly. Those are both amplifications of naturally existing biological capabilities."
"Mutant quirks, in other words." He replies and she nods.
"Overhaul, in the meantime, seemed to be attempting to find a way to copy emitter quirks or their effects through surgery or pharmacology." She replies. She's only basing it on conjectures, theories that Sir Nighteye made about the mysterious 'Eri' girl that Overhaul was apparently experimenting on before Shie Hassaikai was destroyed by the hero raid and he managed to flee with just said girl and Chronostasis. "That's way harder, and it's not a big surprise that he seems to have mostly failed. But if so, then it makes no sense for Garaki to have managed to copy Twice's quirk since it was an emitter one. So, it was probably another quirk entirely, just similar, and probably given to Romero by All for One before Garaki did his standard mad science on him."
"So, we can't be 100% sure that we've actually eliminated him, and that the mysterious person behind it isn't amassing more copies for another outbreak." Mirio replies. "On Hokkaido or even on Honshu."
"I…" She looks down on the table. ".. don't want to even think about it. Because frankly, if it's like that, then it's game over for us."
After a few long seconds of silence, Mirio speaks.
"I think I get why you broke so hard now." He then sighs.
Yeah, it wasn't just 'what happened' but also 'what could possibly happen and we would be unable to stop it."
She leaves his house thirty minutes later, feeling oddly refreshed. Having to sneak out of the area without someone seeing Saiko Intelli where she really shouldn't be was slightly harder, if not for the fact that he drove her to the back alley beside her agency.
Days until the Second Battle of the Marukane Ward:
21
(***)
Yes. We are all of similar mind here. "Just F_k Already" in full swing. They are really having something, just being very weird about it. Sigh, it's like the opposite of Eri approach to the subject, ngl.