Chapter 24
The Endeavor Hero Agency – Present Day – Day 16
Asami sits in her office typing on her computer aimlessly as she mindlessly chews on her lip. She hears someone in the cubical next to her shout out and a crash as footsteps approach her. Asami glances over, turning in her computer chair as Emiko comes fumbling into her office space.
"We have a problem!" her wide red eyes stare down at Asami.
"What's wrong," she laughs awkwardly as the black-haired woman looks down at her with panicked eyes. "Emiko, what's wrong," Asami asks now more sternly as she sees the severity of the issue weighing in her eyes.
"Someone's attacking Endeavor's image online. It's… it's everywhere." Asami sees the look in her eyes and the tightness in her shoulders to see that this must be something serious.
Asami quickly turns around in her chair, typing furiously on her computer to find the slander story that Emiko speaks of. Her lilac eyes flash across the screen as she reads the disparaging words that stare back at her.
"Fuck," she hisses under her breath.
"What do we do? It can't be true, right? What informant are they talking about?" the young girl panics behind her. "Should we take them down and do a generic cover-up?" she asks pacing behind her as Asami begins taking down the threads that she can, while simultaneously creating new ones that state the claims as baseless and false.
Asami groans with annoyance lacing her throat as she sees just how many people this has reached and have already started sharing screencaps of the initial thread. She reads comments of people calling Endeavor a 'flaming pile of shit', and believing that they paid off the 'Look Boy' as a PR stunt.
Asami's phone begins ringing and she glances down to see that it's coming from Endeavor's office. She picks up the phone and quickly slams it back on the receiver. Emiko's eyes widen at her action, fearing how the hotheaded hero will respond to that.
"Emiko, go on your computer and start a thread stating that you're the coworker of the 'informant' and that they were fired by the Agency, and this is simply a disgruntled employee lashing out at their employer. Make sure to note they were fired for something scummy like sexual harassment or embezzlement," she states with furrowed brows at her computer.
"Yes Ma'am," she bows as she runs towards her desk.
Asami's phone rings again, and again it's from Endeavor's office. She doesn't have time to deal with him right now, and she repeats the hang up again.
Asami stands, looking at her coworkers over the cubical walls of their office. "Sato?" Asami calls out to the black-haired man who sits typing slowly at his computer.
"Yeah," the middle-aged man returns without looking back at her.
"You hear all that? Make me a fake termination letter and HR reports dating back at least 6 months to corroborate. Keep all names blacked out."
The phone rings again and again she slams the receiver, unable to work through the sound.
"Easy enough," he returns with a thumbs up as his eyes remain on his screen.
"Haru?" she turns to the bald overweight man that sits at his desk with his feet rested atop his desk.
"I'm eating," the man returns back with a mouthful of food as he shovels a clump of rice from his bento box in his mouth.
"I don't care. Get me a friend of that 'Look Boy' on the phone to make a statement about his admiration for Endeavor."
"Yeah, Alright," he grumbles as he lowers his legs from the table and brushes off the tempura flakes from his chest.
The phone rings again and again she ignores his call.
Asami sits down at her chair and looks at her computer incredulously at the detail whoever has put this together dedicated to discrediting Endeavor's performance as the Number One Hero. She's shocked at the amount of effort and precision the person has put into making sure this story would not die quietly.
This isn't something that Asami isn't used to, but she's not used to the sources coming from all different platforms. Online discussion boards, memes, falsified evidence, fabricated posts from the boy's social media accounts. These are all tactics that people use, but in smaller doses and never dropping all at once to corroborate each other. This however was targeted all in one go, all within an hour to paint the idea that this is not just one person speaking out and that this is a collective opinion.
Asami figures this is coming from one person who's well versed in disparaging people and opens a coding box, trying to search the IP address that generated these posts. To her dismay, they ping from all over the world, with only seconds between comments, so clearly the person was using a VPN.
"You know what you're fucking doing," Asami states under her breath.
"Hatsuse!" his voice bellows down the hall and her coworkers stiffen at his brash entry.
"I'm handling it," she calls out from her desk.
Within seconds, she can feel the heat emanating off of him as he approaches the small confines of her cubical. "What the hell is going on? How could this have happened?" Endeavor asks from behind her as she types wildly on her computer.
"Great question," she grunts. "Got any enemies within Public Relations?"
"I don't find your tone amusing," he informs her as he crosses his arms over his chest.
"I am working on regaining the narrative on this, Sir," she tells him as she investigates where this has to be coming from. "This was all done within thirty minutes," she releases incredulously with a scoff.
"What does that mean?" he asks her.
"It means that whoever did this isn't a stranger to this," she informs him. "This would take anyone else hours to spread this much misinformation, and we could have easily caught it in time, but completing it all at once…"
Asami provides some supplementary comments on Emiko's thread, and begins creating counter memes on the ones that were created to discredit the hero.
She shakes her head as she sees doctored photos of strings attached to the villain… as if he was never a threat to the man.
Endeavor leans into the computer past her face, watching wide eyed as he reads the clickbait article that claims he and Hawks staged the entire fight in an abandoned warehouse as crudely photoshopped images accompany the article.
"Asami, this is bad," Emiko groans as she lifts from her seat. "People are going crazy about the staged fight claims," she says as Asami lifts herself from her seat.
"Security's stating that there are people gathering outside of the building," Haru groans on the phone with the front desk.
"Hatsuse, there's a Riku on the line from the Hawks Hero Agency for you," Sato glances back at her.
"Send her over," Asami sits back down in her desk, answering the phone before it can even ring. "Riku," Asami states with a heavy sigh.
"You sound like you've had better days," she says with the same heaviness in her tone.
"Yeah, you too," Asami groans, seeing that Hawks has been dragged into this too.
"PR's shitting themselves over here. They aren't as veteran as they are at your place."
"What are you doing on your end?" Asami asks her.
"I've shut down some duplicates of that warehouse article, but they just keep popping up like crazy. I'm creating a bot to automatically scrub anything that's posted with the same or similar title."
"Yeah, I did the same with the Look Boy claims," Asami grumbles.
"Asami," Riku begins hesitantly. "This… this whole story sounds familiar," she begins and Asami feels her heart racing, knowing where the girl is going with this and thinking the same. "It's like we're writing it."
"Yeah," Asami agrees, unwilling to bring the speculation to words. "Looks like whoever is doing this is well versed in PR."
The other line is quiet for a moment and Asami's heart races, waiting for the girl to say something. To reassure her that she knows she would never write anything disparaging against Hawks or Endeavor. But she never says such words.
"Can you do me a favor?" Asami asks instead, knowing that Riku's more versed in writing code than she is, and needing to get this handled.
"Anything," she returns.
"This all came from different IP addresses within a thirty-minute timeframe. I'm thinking one person with a VPN instead of a team."
"That's a lot of work," Riku states unconvinced.
"Yeah, I know," she responds, knowing that the only people who'd even be capable of this scale of an attack is her or Riku. "Any way you can figure out what VPN they're using and gathering their original IP?"
"It'll take me a while to hack their access, but yeah."
"Do it, and get me that location," Asami says sternly. "I'll buy you dinner."
"Like old times," she states and Asami smiles at her computer.
"Yeah, thanks Riku."
Asami hangs up the phone and continues to shut down any duplications of the original post while Endeavor hangs behind her. "We will have to release a statement."
"I know," she responds. "I will work on something tonight and we can let the local media outlets know."
Endeavor places his hand on her shoulder and grips it comfortingly. "Thank you, Hatsuse," he says and she looks up at him, seeing just how much her work means to him.
"Of course, Sir."
Later that night, Asami sits on her couch writing up a statement for Endeavor to respond with. She cracks her neck as she reaches out to her local media contacts to show up for the story. She pulls on her face as she rubs her eyes and tugs down her cheeks with a groan. Her eyes are bloodshot and killing her from staring at the screen all day long.
She jumps when she hears the signature four knocks on her door. Instinctually she looks down to see that she's still in her work clothes for the day and hasn't eaten all day. She lifts herself to her feet and answers the door.
"I don't have time to—" before she can finish her sentence, she sees Hawks lift up a bag of takeout in the space between them.
"Let me guess, you haven't eaten all day?" he asks her and she turns from him as she pushes the door open. "That makes two of us," he grunts as he closes the door behind him.
"It's a fucking shit show," she mumbles as she returns to her computer while he heads to her kitchen to begin plating the food for them. Once he's opened the containers her stomach begins flipping and growling at the smell of Sakura's.
"Yeah, same at my place," he shakes his head. "What the hell happened?"
She sighs as she sends the speech to Endeavor for review, though she's not sure he'll see it since it's almost nine at night.
"Someone decided they wanted to dismantle the hero society," she offhandedly adds as she does a quick sweep of the internet to see that everyone is still talking about it.
He looks up at her, blinking at her choice of words. "You think it was one person?"
"I'm having Riku do some research for me, but yeah, it all went down within thirty minutes, the same narrative being told, across all types of forums and platforms."
"That seems like that would support a team of people doing this," he speculates as he places the bowls on her table. "Come eat something and take a break for a second."
She sighs as she lifts herself from the couch and sits down at the table next to him. She glances over at him, seeing the same bloodshot in his eyes, the dishevelment of his hair, the heaviness in his shoulders. He was the target of the slander story as well, so he's had a pretty shitty day too.
"I'm not sure," she continues as she sits at the table, her stomach painfully growling. "It's just a hunch," she begins as she stirs her food, allowing it to cool off. She stares off absentmindedly into her food. "It's just… something about the way they went about it… like…" she lingers on her words, trying to find the right thing, but she doesn't even know what she's trying to say.
He watches her carefully, seeing the words attempt to formulate in her head as she wracks her mind with what's been going on in the day. "I don't really know how to explain it," she begins as she now looks up at him. "Like when you read your favorite author's stories, or listen to your favorite musician; there is a theme to their work, like a voice or a sound that's distinctively theirs," she works through her explanation and he watches her carefully.
"And…" she scoffs shaking her head as her brows furrow at how absurd this sounds. She slumps her shoulders down, "Never mind, it's stupid."
"What is it?" he asks her eagerly, sternly.
She looks up at him, brows tangling in confliction. "It just sounded like… me," she exhales with a labored breath and Hawks stiffens at her comment. "I know it sounds strange," she shakes her head trying to make sense of it. "But every hole I went down, every avenue I researched… it… it was like I was doing it. Like I was writing those words or I would use those scenarios if I were to do something like that."
Hawks stops eating, eyes fixated on her.
Asami.
His heart races wildly as he thinks of her. This whole fiasco, it was her. She must have managed to get near a laptop and orchestrated such a blown-up story that someone was bound to have noticed her voice. It's her attempt at getting their attention and contacting him and Endeavor without being too obvious that the League would suspect her.
"I know that sounds crazy," she says, reading the shocked look in his eyes.
"No," he says quickly, shaking his head to reassure her. "Do you think there's a way for us to locate where this story originated?" he asks her maybe a bit too hopefully.
"I have Riku on it," she begins. "Sorry for taking your man power on this one, but she's probably better than any of the researchers on Endeavor's team."
"Do what you have to do to find who did this," he says.
Please find her.
"It's just a chilling feeling having what feels like your words being pulled out of your lips without ever bringing a voice to them. You know?"
"Yeah," he breathes. "But I trust that you'll figure it out. You're amazing that way."
She smiles at him, her dimples pressing out her cheeks and it breaks his heart knowing that she's not real, and that the real Asami is desperately crying out to him while he eats with her imposter.
"I need a drink," she groans as she lifts herself from the table, grabbing a bottle of Sake. "Are you staying tonight?" she asks him as she waits to pull a glass from the cabinet.
"Yeah," he tells her. "If that's alright?" he asks her.
"Yeah," she smiles at him, grabbing a second glass.