A boy stands in front of the gates leading to the exam grounds.
"I can do it," he whispers to himself, clutching his headphones in a white-tight grip. "I can do it, I can do it, I can do it." He breathes in, out. "I just need to get in there and…"
"And start!" Present Mic's voice rings out in the air, and he freezes, panic overtaking him. Already? "Real life has no countdowns go, go, go!" He runs, haphazardly putting on his headphones. He needs to get away from other contestants, he can't make a mistake there.
He takes a deep breath… and screams.
"And Start!" Hizashi yelled from his tower. As per usual, like every year, same as ever no one moves. "Real life has no countdowns go, go, go!"
He waits a few seconds to make sure no other kid stays rooted in place and switches his attention to camera feeds from the various areas.
He lazily switches the view between cameras, looking for anyone who might be in urgent need of help. There is no one, as per usual, and the mildly injured kids aren't on the list of people he can help during the exam, his quirk doesn't allow it and it's not his job either. That's the examinees job right now.
Sadly not many folks this year seem keen on helping their fellow examinees. Shame. But oh well, less work for him later, which was always nice.
He's probably being a little mean, but to be fair he's been awake for thirty hours. He deserves to be mean, as a treat. At least that's what he tells himself.
He goes through the feed, fighting the urge to close his eyes for just a moment… when he sees something that makes his eyes fly wide open. There's… someone with his quirk. Literally. The kid is running around screaming at robots and they're falling apart like they're houses of cards, cluttering to the ground uselessly. He's got some kind of headphones on. Probably protective equipment. Good. Would be a shame if he hurt himself. A niggling of worry worms into his heart however, that the kid might hurt others… but then he sees that the kid stops whenever another person comes into his view. Smart. It's better safe than sorry, and from the looks of it, he's amassing points fast enough that he might pass. Good. Hizashi can help him with his quirk then. That's good.
It's a shame he's not a homeroom teacher of first years this year, but if the kid has any problems controlling his quirk, he'll get referred to him anyway, like all people with voice- and range-related quirks do.
Although it doesn't look like the kid has any problem controlling his quirk. The screams are sharp, precise, short. Just enough to destroy and nothing else. He's not causing much damage to the buildings, from the looks of it. He's good, really good. He'll make a good hero, provided he has a knack for actually saving.
Hizashi snaps his attention away from him and quickly browses through other feeds to make sure there isn't a kid in need of help, cursing himself for his short attention span, and work negligence, but thankfully doesn't find anyone. He sags with relief, sighs, and pulls up the feed the voice-quirk kid was on last, then has to search a little on the cameras around to find him. He's still doing good. Well now, that's a relief.
Hizashi almost misses the moment the zero-pointers are released. Almost. He notices it soon enough though, since there suddenly seemed to be a vacuum of kids right where it showed up with the voice-quirk boy ending up on the very end of the simulated cityscape.
Hizashi holds his breath, waiting for what exactly he's gonna do, while pulling up the other feeds on the second screen and circulating through them rapidly, only stopping enough to register what's happening on each and every one of them.
There's a girl, trapped under rubble, in zone B, and he hovers his hand over the remote to stop the zero pointer mid-movement as it is coming closer and closer to her.
Then, two things happen simultaneously. A green-haired boy jumps at the zero-pointer in zone B and swings at it, and in zone C—the voice-quirk kid's zone—the boy tilts his head up and yells.
Two zero-pointers get destroyed in the same instant, and Hizashi's jaw drops.
This hasn't happened in a while. He doesn't know if that has happened ever, actually. Sure, there's someone attempting to go against the zero pointer every year, sometimes even successfully, but he hasn't seen something quite like that before.
He watches with batted breath as the other examinees escape.
Thankfully there's not many other injured in the paths of other zero-pointers, and they seem capable of running on their own, so he's free to focus on the two amazingly brave boys. The green-haired one is currently lying on the ground after being saved from the fall by a girl who had gotten out of the rubble, and upon closer inspection he appears to have broken his limbs. Ouch, that's gotta hurt. Such a destructive quirk… The other, purple-haired boy is helping up a limping girl get away from the unstable mass of the robot.
A small smile creeps on his lips. Yeah, there are gonna be some real good kids out there this year, he can feel it.
He calls out the end of the exam and watches the feed for a few more minutes to make sure he didn't miss any gravely injured kids, as he dispatches Recovery Girl and the stretcher robots to the most injured.
She is the closest to zone B, thankfully, and makes a quick work of healing the green-haired boy with broken limbs.
Once all the zones are cleared out, he makes his way down the tower and goes on his merry little way. Well, not that merry. He has to review footage with other teachers now, and allot rescue points to all those kids. Ugh. He wishes he could take power naps like Shouta does, but he's not really capable of those.
No matter, he knows who's gonna get the most points anyway. There's no way these boys aren't gonna get a sixty each in rescue.
He's nervous as all hell when he comes back to the facility, his hands shaking so much he has to retake the damn fingerprint scan twice. Thankfully the door finally opens after his second attempt and lets him into the 'disinfection' room.
He waits patiently as the scanner takes his vitals, and the annoying screen in front of him asks for his emotional state.
He quickly chooses 'mildly distressed' on the list, then denies a need for help when a pop-up appears. A few more seconds pass and he's finally let into the main hall of the facility.
"How did it go?" Kusunoki-san asks as soon as he steps through the door, twirling on her chair behind the reception desk to face him. She looks at him hopefully, and he shakes his head a little.
"Not horribly, but I don't know if I scored enough," he says honestly, and comes closer to give her his day pass. She takes it without even looking at it, as she chatters along:
"But you scored some points, right? That's what matters, you gave it your best shot."
"I'd have scored more if not for the zero-pointer," he mumbles, kinda angry at the misleading presentation Present Mic did before they were dispatched to their zones. "It was supposed to be a small robot. It was gigantic!" he complains, gesticulating widely as he's taking off his shoes and slipping on his favourite black cat-themed slippers.
"So the rumor was true, huh?" Kusunoki-san leans forward on her elbows, listening with barely contained excitement. "Robots?"
"Robots," he sighs. "At least they weren't that scary as I imagined…" he admits, trailing off after seeing her expression. "What?"
"Did you meet him… you know who?" she asks in a half-whisper. As if the whole facility didn't know at this point.
"Stop it. You make it sound like he's Voldemort," he chastises her with a sour expression blossoming on his face. "But yes, for your information, I did meet him… indirectly," he says confidently, despite anxiety crawling up his back like spiders.
"Details, man, details!" Honestly. Kusunoki-san was such a gossip. Nevertheless, he was kinda at fault, as he indulged her often… Too often.
"Fine, fine", he sighs in defeat. "I didn't actually meet him, he was just the one who told us about his exam, so we were in the same room. Does that count?"
"Boo… I thought something actually interesting happened with how shaken you are!" She stops, almost whining at the lack of interesting information he brought her. "Happy jitters, and all that," she tacks on lamely as he stares her down. "Okay, I did not think that through."
"He didn't know, doesn't know and won't know. Simple fact of life." He shrugs, feeling these damn complicated feelings bubble inside him again.
Questions his therapist had asked him many times over come to the surface and he does his best to push them back down. Does he want him to know? Or is he happy with how things are? The answers to that change from time to time, but the older he gets the more firmly he believes that it wouldn't change anything anyway.
Kusunoki-san watches him intently. "Okay."
He goes to his room after waving a quick goodbye in her general direction, then picks up his earphones and turns the volume up as he puts on his favourite old school song on his phone. 'Regret Roulette' filters past his eardrums and fills up his head as he closes his eyes, hoping to crumple his inner turmoil.