Physically, Japan was a beautiful country.
Much like every other populated place in the world, it had its issues. In another couple of years those issues would be very front and centre, but aesthetically the Japanese countryside was some of the most gorgeous landscapes I'd ever seen.
Coming from me, that probably didn't mean much. Before this unwanted excursion I'd spent my entire life in small Australian towns. My childhood memories were a smudged mixture of orange and brown hues, where if every surface wasn't smudged with dirt and burning in the unforgiving sun, it was drowned in one of the few thunderstorms we'd get every year.
Australia could be a pretty place too, but that was only in the places where we'd show other people. The glory of the bays and opera houses did an amazing job of obscuring the fact that most of the kids born in the 90's over there had learned to drive on a farm in a car that was missing too many parts to be safe.
By comparison, Japan was downright charming. The blend of modern architecture and natural gentle slopes was a literal world of difference to the arid plains and yellowed shrubbery I'd grown up around.
Of course, right now wasn't the best time to be making the comparison. Not when the bullet train I was riding in was averaging a quarter of the speed of sound and morphing most things I could see outside into an amorphous blob of colour.
But damn, what a pretty blob.
Too bad it was difficult to enjoy the kaleidoscope outside my window when I'd been seated next to a crazy person.
Japanese public transport had its reputation for a good reason. It was quick, it was efficient, and it was crowded as fuck. Even a bullet train that would take me to the coastline in a couple of hours had found a way to sell out most of its tickets. I'd been lucky to show up at the station this morning, half eaten breakfast sandwich in hand, and still manage to get a seat half an hour before boarding.
My ticket number had taken me to what was almost exactly the middle of the train, the centre in the third of five carriages, and placed me in the window seat next to a short tanned woman with flowing white hair. Between the wide straw sun hat and the sunglasses she was wearing I hadn't been able to get a good look at her face, and contrary to the polite behaviour I'd been expecting, when I'm shimmied around her to get to my seat and accidentally bumped into the open book she had on her lap, she'd growled at me.
Putting my award winning social skills to good use, I'd growled right back, and proceeded to flop down into my seat and stare out the window. Being stuck with some feral weirdo for the journey wasn't an outcome I'd been expecting or desiring, but at least she was quiet.
For all of five minutes before the muttering and clicking started.
Why is this country full of psychopaths, I wondered idly to myself, as I surreptitiously shifted in my seat to glance at her from the corner of my eye. My own face was hidden behind a pair of sunglasses that were so comically oversized it was obvious at the first glance I was hiding my appearance, but if there was one thing I knew about the world of Quirks, it's that the weirder shit appears at face value, the less questions people were going to ask.
The first thing I noticed was the calculator and pen balanced on top of a sheet that was filled out with numbers. Probably the source of the clicking noise. The second thing I noticed was the woman's head tilted in my direction, her sun hat shifting idly and her eyes staring into and through my soul, despite the two pairs of reflective sunglasses in the way.
"The fuck you lookin' at?" Her voice was low, more gravelly than I was expecting. A quick shiver went down my spine; the sneer pulling back her lips gave me a front row seat to the sharp canine teeth on display.
That shiver wasn't from fear, but that wasn't really important right now.
Shaking off the feeling that I really should know who this woman was, I let my eyes fall back down to her lap. Even with an open book and separate piece of paper on her thighs, there was still a lot of jeans-covered leg to see, but I liked my gift of sight and thus I turned it towards something less likely to get me unceremoniously killed.
"...You're missing an 8 at the end there."
"Eh?" And just like that, the spell was broken. The feeling of death looming over me vanished into thin air as the woman's head snapped back down to her page, the pen in her hands tracing over the numbers she'd been writing down. I took the opportunity to snoop a little further, my eyes flitting across the page as she furiously made the correction I'd pointed out.
A bill of damages to the Shibuya Ward? I tilted my head to the side, leaning a bit further away as the woman started hammering numbers into the calculator again. Not a specific office or address, the whole ward?
Maybe she was being blamed for a villain attack on the place. I'd come across enough pop-up ads on my browser to know that was a real thing in this world. That would also explain the disguise, and why she was taking a train out of the place. If that was the case then it was little wonder why she was so pissed off.
That was our routine for the next half an hour, as the landscape outside the window shifted entirely away from sprawling structures and settling more firmly into hills and trees. I would stare out the window at the passing flora until the clicking and scribbling beside me stopped. Then it would be all eye rolls and silent judgement as I looked through the book on the woman's lap (which seemed to have been written specifically for her, odd), making adjustments to her mathematics and ignoring her grumbling about how she "could do it herself," and, "didn't need anyone's damn help, especially not the weirdo purple dipshit on the train."
Pretty rich coming from the woman doing her accounting on said train, but that didn't feel like a fight I was going to win. A strange sensation to get from a woman who hovered around the five foot tall mark and couldn't seem to win an argument to save her life, but a sensation nonetheless.
It was when we were passing the midway point of our journey that the inevitable happened.
"It clearly says here that you need to account for the houses and residents that were affected by the main gas lines being compromised."
"I did! That's what this entire part is about!"
"That's the damage to the three properties that were caught in the crossfire, you're missing the entire city block in the variables!"
"There's a whole damn section for the gas line damage further in, you already read it!"
"We're talking about personal damage, dumbass! Not the economic impact!"
"Your mama had an economic impact!"
Something would have to give, and that something ended up being the calculator, a model so basic that it lacked the sine, cosine, and tangent feature. With all the fury of a woman scorned by the whims of the law, the woman jabbed the delete button, the muscles in her arm bulging to such a degree that I could clearly see them through her shirt's sleeves.
The screen of the calculator was overcome by static. When she raised her finger, a very obvious indent was left behind. We both stared down at the calculator as it struggled for a moment, before finally the static disappeared and the screen went blank. With nobody holding onto it, the vibrations of the train overtook the small device, and it rattled along the woman's thigh and finally, mercifully fell to the carpeted floor.
Bemused, I reached down, grabbing the calculator from where it had bounced under my feet. It would take a moment to figure out the inner workings of it, but it would be easy enough to Overhaul back into working order.
"Give me a second, I can fi…" It wasn't the reminder that public quirk usage was technically illegal, that would come later. No, instead I trailed off as I looked back towards the woman, seeing her hunched in her seat. I had to lean down a fair bit to see her face, my frown going from concerned to exasperated once I saw the bulging veins in her neck and the way she was grinding her teeth.
Thankfully for what I'd been dreading, she hadn't been reduced to tears. No, rather, she was fucking furious.
I winced when the grinding gave way to a chilling CRACK, her teeth pausing for just a moment before they continued back and forth in their apoplectic march. She didn't even seem to notice the pain, even as a trickle of blood began pouring from the corner of her mouth.
Okay then.
Muttering an apology that she probably couldn't even hear, I reached over, gently pulling her cargo over to my lap. My elbow brushed against the skin of her knuckles in the process, and I willed Overhaul to life, coaxing it to relax her muscles and sew her mouth back together as subtly as possible. It probably wasn't as inconspicuous as I would have liked, as her head shot up as soon as it had happened, but I didn't give her time to question me as I got to work. A clump of hair shifted away from the braid I'd made it pull itself into for the journey, catching the glob of spittle and blood that her movement had sent right at the book.
Not willing to get up and find a bin, I swaddled it tightly in more hair, moving it securely into my pocket. My mind was elsewhere, the calculator forgotten on the seat beside me as I scribbled along the page.
Math always had been one of my strongest points in school. I had fond memories of my scientific calculator, because it had been on loan from the school and I'd stolen it at the end of the year when I ditched mathematics to pick up literature. That little fucker had served me loyally for years afterwards, and it was nice to have a reminder of where I'd come from.
Still, for addition and multiplication? I hardly needed a calculator for that, and even if I did, I had my phone ready and willing to go in my pocket. Part of me wondered why that hadn't been the woman's response, but I wasn't going to question her right after she'd not reacted to crumbling her own teeth out of rage.
Thankfully, once she'd realised that I'd taken her things, it hadn't resulted in any sort of meltdown. Her hat was still trembling much more than the train should have been making it, and I could see the corner of her eye flitting from the page to my mostly obscured face. Crimson, how fitting.
With the book held up and being flipped through by my hair, that left my hands free to write, the paper supported by another shelf of hair. There would probably be some weird indents on the back of it when I was done, but thankfully it wouldn't take all too long. Someone, probably her, had already written out everything that needed to be looked at at the top of the page. That would just leave me with adding it all up.
Throughout it all, those eyes were on me. After the first few minutes of initial discomfort, I sank into the work, letting my mind sink into the familiar comfort of adding and subtracting. It was a bit of a novelty at this point to be using actual numbers instead of ambiguous extraneous factors or names; even with the staggering amount of money this was turning out to be in damage, it was fairly relaxing.
Eventually, as the train was pulling into the station, I flipped the page over to tally up the final amount. With all the numbers, scribbles, and a few graphs I'd had to draw up in order to figure things out, there was no room left on the other side, not even in the margins. With that done, I handed the woman her belongings back, including the calculator I'd surreptitiously put back together, and let my hair wind itself back into a braid down my back.
And then, before another word could be said, I grabbed the seat in front of me and used it for leverage to push up and into the aisle, right over her head. Her head followed my movement, her mouth opened to say something, but she didn't get out more than a brief "hey!" before I had slipped through the crowd of people collecting their luggage and out the opening carriage door.
As much as I would have loved to stick around and chat with her, I had an appointment with a murderer and his extremely powerful Quirk.
Taking the escalator steps two at a time, I scanned my ticket, hopping over the turnstile before it could fully admit me and waving off the guard who'd been watching the entire thing. He rolled his eyes, muttered something about 'youngin's', and let me go unmolested to tear through the train station and out into Aomori.
Immediately, the scent of saltwater hit my nose. I took a deep breath, an easy smile spreading across my face before I pulled a mask out of my pocket to cover it. The fanged smile I'd let Twice paint across it drew some looks, but between that and the sunglasses, any attention I did draw was diverted very quickly.
For however long that would last. Fixed and transient smiles both in place, I set off.
It was time to hunt some monsters.
