A/N: And so November begins. This fic began its life as a NaNoWriMo project, and is - uncharacteristically for literally all of my previous projects - still stumbling along, two years later. To celebrate - and because the current chapter is already close to 15,000 words with quite a ways yet to go - I've decided to break the chapter up into smaller chunks and post them every few days. The first bit will be released today, the next will be on 11/5 which is the actual anniversary of the fic, and I'm thinking the next portions will come out on the 10th, 15th, and so on.

With that said, I'm not anticipating being able to do NaNoWriMo this year - I might be able to manage 30,000 words, but between my day job & school I don't have time for 50,000. Nevertheless, the spirit of writing is strong with me this month, and I hope you all enjoy the reading!

EDIT: Since it seems like Fanfiction dot net is having some issues with displaying updates, I thought it'd be a good time to remind everyone that this fic is also available on the Spacebattles Forums (where there are a lot of fun omakes and fanart) as well as on SufficientVelocity and ArchiveOfOurOwn. So if you can't access it here, you can find it elsewhere!

108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108*108

The night before the Sports Festival, I'd slept poorly due to my attempts to avoid the use of Efficient Sleep. Maybe I just hadn't been exhausted enough, because the night after the Sports Festival I slept like the dead. After weeks and weeks of using quirks to compress a night's rest into a few hours, sleeping for a full twelve hours in a row felt positively decadent.

Not that I had been given much of a choice.

Hundreds of hours of stored quirks. Gone. Efficient Sleep, which I would normally use to help restore them: currently off-limits due to the fact that I'd apparently trained to the brink of starvation. Muscle Building, which I'd used to try to compensate for my other weaknesses: even more off-limits. Like it or not, I wasn't going to be doing much this weekend besides resting. When I was younger, long weekends away from school were always opportunities to be celebrated, grand occasions when I could sit around on the couch all day watching television, playing video games, and eating junk food. Somehow, despite the fact that I now had a doctor's note to do almost exactly that, it no longer held quite the same appeal.

Even though Cyberpunch had been kind enough to message me ahead of time to let me know that I had the internship if I wanted it, my empty 'inventory' of stored quirks still left me feeling anxious and antsy. So while in theory I had carte blanche to relax and enjoy a weekend for once… I was sitting on the couch watching the Second Year Sports Festival, notebook in my hand.

"Onii-chan!" Komachi growled, stomping over to the couch from her room down the hall. "You're supposed to be resting!"

"There's nothing about paperwork that prevents people from gaining weight, Komachi," I said absent-mindedly as I started jotting down notes. "Just ask Dad. Heck, for maximum efficiency, I should probably be sitting at a desk."

"I have a desk job too, you know," My mom called out from the kitchen, a hint of warning in her voice. She held out the kitchen knife that she was holding. It glinted ominously in the overhead lights. "Watch it." I hadn't gotten up particularly early in the morning, but seeing Mom up and about before noon on the weekend was just a little bit odd - that's my excuse for making such a rookie mistake, anyways. It wasn't like Mom had anything to worry about; she and Komachi shared the same naturally slim constitution, though in terms of facial features Mom's were angular like mine rather than rounded like Komachi's and Dad's.

"Watch what? I didn't say anything!" Needless to say, I immediately denied the whole affair.

Komachi sighed. "You should be taking the day off, onii-chan," she said, but there was a hint of a smile playing around her lips as she said it. After a second, she dropped down next to me aggressively, close enough that our shoulders bumped each other. "You're going to be sharing, right?"

I blinked. "Sharing what?"

"Sharing these," Mom said as she placed a plate down on the coffee table in front of the two of us. "Scootch over," she said, and found a spot to sit on the other side of Komachi.

Taking my attention away from the television for a second, I looked down at the plate. It was full of celery sticks, carrots, cucumbers, and bell peppers, with a big tub of miso dip in the center. "I literally just ate breakfast," I grumbled.

Komachi picked a celery stick up and bit into it aggressively, her teeth shearing through the celery as effortlessly as the jaws of a hydraulic press. "Don't eat any if you aren't hungry for them, then; that just means there's more for me!"

I put a stick in my own mouth after using it to scoop some dip, then bit down gently, just firmly enough to hold it between my teeth while my hands returned to taking notes. "Fair enough," I mumbled around my mouthful of food.

"So?" Mom asked, rolling her eyes at my poor table manners. "What are you working on? Did UA give you homework where you had to watch the festivals from the other years?"

I shook my head. "Nuh-uh." I finished writing my sentence, then reached up a hand to grab my snack and bit down firmly. The celery crunched satisfyingly against my teeth, and I gave Mom a smile of appreciation. "I'm… well, I'm scouting quirks to copy once I get back to school, I guess."

"You don't have enough quirks already?" Mom asked curiously. "I would have thought you'd be full up by now."

"He does!" Komachi chirped. "I even helped him get Endeavor's!"

"Endeavor's? Really!" Mom said, her eyebrows lifting in surprise. "Oh my! Well, don't use it in the house," she warned.

I rolled my eyes. "There's no such thing as enough quirks," I said self-righteously. "And believe it or not, there aren't a lot of chances to just copy people from other grades. We only really run into the other classes at lunchtime, and it's not like hero course students wear different uniforms or anything that would help me pick good targets out."

"Hmm, I can see how that would make it more difficult," Mom said.

With a look of confusion on her face, Komachi raised an eyebrow at me. "Why didn't you just ask a teacher if you could go visit the classrooms from the upper years and see who you could copy?"

I looked at Komachi blankly for a second. "Because… I… didn't think they would let me?"

Mom looked at me knowingly. "You should definitely ask, Hachiman. The worst thing that they can say -"

"Is no," I finished her sentence, having heard that particular piece of advice more than once in the past. "I know, I know. It's a good idea. Thanks, Komachi."

"You're welcome!" Komachi said. "So, do you really have to keep watching this?" She asked. "Because if you wanted, you could thank me by changing the channel to Fuji TV, and we could watch something that isn't even more Sports Festival stuff."

Absent-mindedly, I grabbed a slice of bell pepper. "I mean... looking for quirks isn't the only reason to watch the festival, I'm also getting a good idea of how people use their quirks. That gives me ideas for how to train - when I'm allowed to train again," I added swiftly as I saw Komachi and Mom both giving me the evil eye, "ways that I could maybe combine quirks with the quirks I have already, stuff like that."

"Well as long as you're being a creep and stalking your senpais for a good cause, I guess?" Komachi said sarcastically.

"Komachi," Mom warned gently. "Your brother's working hard, so don't tease him. Besides, even if you got to see the festival yesterday, I didn't, so I want to watch."

"Fiiine," Komachi whined.

Mom looked over at me curiously. "So, are they doing anything different for the second year students versus what you had to do?"

"Yeah, it's totally different," I said, gesturing at the screen. "For example, our first event was an obstacle course race, but the second-years moved that to the second event and made it a relay race, and instead for the first event they had a big 'Battle Royale'."

"That sounds dangerous," Mom said. "Is that safe?"

"I mean…" I trailed off slightly. "They have Recovery Girl on standby, so I guess it's fine? Anyway it wasn't a big fight like you're thinking, mostly people were trying to stay inside of a perimeter generated by robots and trying to avoid getting pushed out of it or getting hit by the glue gun turret at the center of the arena, that sort of thing."

"Oh, you mean like Sennite," Komachi said. "My friends tried to get me to play that one time. Do you have one, Onii-chan?" Komachi asked. "We could show Mom how it works."

"Not really," I said, shaking my head. "All my games are single-player."

Komachi groaned. "I know," she said irritably, then raised her hands to her eyes in a show of crocodile tears. "Onii-chan, why don't you ever want to play video games with me? Is it because you hate me?"

Mom looked at her with a deadpan expression. "I think it has something to do with the fact that you kept getting excited and squeezing the controllers so hard that they shattered whenever he let you play."

"I was nine!" Komachi said with an exaggerated pout. "I can control myself way better now."

"Uh huh." I said dubiously. "How long ago was it again that you got so worked up during a test at school that you wound up getting ink all over your hand because you squeezed your pen too hard?"

Komachi flushed and elbowed me in the ribs. I immediately sucked in a breath of pain. "Whoops, sorry," she said insincerely. "Guess I don't know my own strength."

"Komachi," Mom warned.

I sighed. "It's fine," I said, rubbing the injured area surreptitiously. As the television cut away from commercial and Present Mic-sensei announced the next pair of contestants, I pointed at the television. "Oh, there's one of the people whose quirk I want to copy," I said, pointing at the pink-haired girl on the television screen.

"It's a battle between small and smaller!" Present Mic shouted. "We have Aisaka Taiga, the Palmtop Tiger Heroine, versus Kushieda Minori, also known as Major Minor! Two girls who both pack incredible power into their tiny frames! Who will be victorious in this shoot-off between pint-size titans? And will either of them be able to reach the hoop for a dunk?" Amusingly, I saw the other second-year take a second to turn around and glare evilly at the announcer's box before she turned to face the girl I wanted to copy.

"Shrinking?" Mom asked curiously as the one-on-one basketball match began and the pink-haired girl diminished in size until she barely came up to the tiny tiger heteromorph's ankle. "That doesn't seem all that useful."

"Just watch," I said. "See how fast she's moving around? As far as I could tell from the second event, the relay obstacle course race, either she gets stronger the more she shrinks, or her weight drops while her strength doesn't. That makes her super maneuverable." Not just that, but while I had played around with the notion of using shapechanging to add to my own maneuverability, Kushieda was apparently a master of it, doing things like shrinking mid-air to accelerate out of the way of blows and growing mid-punch to add momentum to her attacks. Unfortunately for her, Aisaka appeared to have the reflexes of... well... a cat, and was pouncing around the arena after the diminutive Kushieda like she was chasing a mouse, practically ignoring the basketball that the two of them were supposed to be competing over. "I figure that if her quirk actually lets her reduce her weight, I can shrink at the same time as I activate a flight quirk and get a lot more mileage out of it - or if it's the super strength thing, I could maybe try shrinking at the same time as I tried growing using Mt. Lady's quirk, and either way size changing quirks tend to be pretty useful even at 1/108th power for whatever reason, so-"

Suddenly, my pocket vibrated, then interrupted me with an obnoxious soundbyte. "You've got mail!"

I frowned and pulled my phone out. Who the heck was sending me text messages? Was it a spammer? As I did, I noticed that Komachi was looking at me with pitying eyes. "Onii-chan, if you're going to start making friends who actually text you, you should change your text message sound to something less lame," she advised.

I felt my cheeks heat up. "It's ironic," I defended myself weakly. "It's meant to be corny."

"If you want something corny get an All Might ringtone or something," Komachi said, still looking at me with disdain, "yours is just lame. Oh! But if you wanted to set it to a special ringtone just for me or something, even if it's super lame I'd pretend it didn't bother me just for you! Ah! I totally earned a lot of points with that one!"

"My ass you did," I grumbled, as I managed to fumble my way to my infrequently-used message app. As I saw the message in question, I felt my cheeks heating yet again, this time for a completely different reason.

"Hope you're feeling better," it read, "you looked pretty tired yesterday. LMK when you want to get together & talk costumes - I know hero classes have internships over the break but I'm pretty free all that week whenever you find time." It was a completely platonic, perfunctory message, realistically sent only because Kawasaki Saki wanted to use me to build up her resume or her costume design portfolio… but it was sent by an attractive girl, so I couldn't help but feel a little flutter in the pit of my stomach.

Suddenly, I became uncomfortably aware that Mom was leaning over my shoulder, shamelessly spying on my texts. "Oh?" She asked, "Who's this Kawasaki Saki person? Someone who I should know about?"

I flushed deeper at the arch tone in her voice. "What? No, she's just…" I flailed around for a second, looking for a suitable description, "she's just the big sister of the boy who Komachi went to the Sports Festival with," I finished, throwing Komachi right under the bus. Better her than me, if Mom was in a teasing mood!

Mom nodded sagely. "I see," she said, and for a brief moment of hope I thought she was going to take the bait. And then I knew true despair. "Is she the one you kissed yesterday?"

"That's someone different," Komachi said gleefully. I was doomed. They were collaborating! "That's Tohru-chan, I met her yesterday while Onii-chan was getting changed to go home." Silently, I sent up a prayer for salvation, searching for a distraction, an interruption, anything at all! "She seemed nice," Komachi said thoughtfully. "And she was super pretty."

Mom sighed exaggeratedly. "Barely into high school and my son is already a playboy," she mock-lamented. "Where did I go wrong as a parent?"

As I spluttered and stammered trying to come up with a defense, I was saved from a need to respond by the front door slamming shut. "I'm home!" Dad called from the entryway.

I stood up from the couch. "I'll help with the groceries!" I shouted over Mom and Komachi's giggles.

As I approached Dad, I could clearly see his face shifting from the youthful, pretty-boy-esque appearance he normally took on when he was carrying heavy objects to his natural appearance, a middle-aged man going grey on top and soft around the middle. "You don't have to," Dad said, "There's a lot, but I can make a couple trips. Sit and relax."

I cast a fearful glance over my shoulder towards Mom and Komachi before shaking my head. "I don't mind," I said significantly. "Besides, if I let you do it by yourself you'll go out looking like a Visual Kei star again."

Dad took a deep breath and his skin rippled, once again looking significantly younger, but this time looking far more masculine and natural - and significantly more like me. "You know, you're right," Dad said with a grin. "If I'm going to do an Impression of anybody to help me haul in groceries, it should be the hero in the house!"

I groaned and planted my face in my palm. Dad's quirk, Impression, was useless to me, mostly because he was a 'weak copier' like me. He could 'record' the appearances of people he wanted to imitate later, and then later do 'Impressions' that let him shift roughly halfway between his normal appearance and that of the person he was copying, picking up a lesser version of their physical capabilities like strength and speed when he did. He liked to take a '50% Komachi' form whenever heavy lifting was required; otherwise, he mostly used it for joking around. Obviously, this was an example of the latter. "Okay whatever, let's just go," I grumbled as I made my way past him out to the driveway.

"Don't forget to text Saki-san back!" Komachi shouted from the living room as I exited the door. As I walked out to Dad's car - which was too well taken care of to be called a clunker, but was probably as old as Komachi - I saw that even after Dad had taken a load of shopping bags in, the trunk was still mostly full.

Chips, cookies, crackers, coconut milk for curry, some nice-looking cuts of beef and pork, a whole pallet of MAX coffee, an expensive-looking melon; it looked like Dad had practically gone out and brought back the more expensive half of the grocery store. I whistled, impressed. "What's the occasion?"

Dad looked at me like I was stupid. "You made it to the final round of UA's sports festival. The top eight, even. What do you think the occasion is?"

I felt a surge of anxiety in my gut, a frisson of nausea at the look of proud satisfaction in my father's eyes. Making it as far as I did had been half lucky accident, half manipulative scheming; my only advantage over the other competitors had been the fact that I could pour literal weeks worth of preparation and effort into an event that they had to handle with the resources that they had on hand. "Yeah, well, don't get too used to it," I mumbled as I grabbed the handles of a couple of heavier shopping bags. "I'm pretty sure it was just a fluke."

"You know what they say about luck," Dad said, grunting slightly as he picked up the bags next to mine. "You don't get lucky sitting on your ass on the couch watching television. When my boss retired a few years ago and a spot opened up for me to get promoted, that was luck too, but if I hadn't been working hard and making myself known as a reliable person they would have promoted somebody else instead."

"Uh huh," I said as I moved the groceries inside and put them on the floor next to the fridge. "So... anyway, I was in the middle of studying the second-years at UA and looking for quirks to copy, so I'm gonna go sit my ass on the couch and watch television."

Dad laughed. "Smart-ass. Go ahead, go ahead. Komachi," he called, pitching his voice to carry to the living room, "come help me put this stuff away, will you?"

As I sat back down on the couch, I noticed that the tournament had moved on to the next match. Helpfully, the broadcast staff had overlaid a score counter over the match, showing that 'Kitamura' was up by ten points over 'Takasu', whoever they were. As soon as he scored, I figured out that Kitamura was the speedster, while Takasu was the one shooting razor-sharp beams of force out of his eyes. Talk about a cutting glare.

"You should copy the fast guy," Mom said, "the announcer said his quirk was powered by caffeine."

I made a considering expression. "On the one hand, an excuse to drink more coffee; on the other hand, it sounds like using it would put me in danger of using up all the caffeine in my bloodstream." I paused, and shuddered in horror. "I'm not sure it's worth it," I said. I was lying. It totally, totally was. Even if only for the fact that I could legitimately say I was powered by MAX Coffee, I was definitely going to be copying that quirk!

Mom laughed anyway though, conceding the point, and got up to head to the kitchen, probably to put on a fresh pot of coffee. Now that I finally had a moment of privacy, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. "Yeah feeling better thanks," I texted. "Not sure what my schedule looks like yet but I'll let you know." It was a simple message, just as business-like as the one that Kawasaki sent me… but it still took me over a minute once it was typed to finally hit the button that would send it.

Within a few moments, my phone was buzzing again, the obnoxious 'You've got mail!' sound seeming loud enough to make me want to cringe. For now, I settled for turning down the ringer to vibrate. "Yea I figured," Kawasaki texted back. "How's your weekend going? R U watching the Festival?"

I took another glance at the broadcast, which at some point during the deliberations had moved past the end of the last match and was preparing for the next, a match between Kawashima Ami and Fuwa Mawata. "More or less," I texted. "Probably going to have to go back and re-watch pieces once they get posted online." I looked over at the kitchen, where Dad and Komachi were play-fighting over a box of cookies, Dad trying to put it away while Komachi 'tried' to take it for herself so that she could bring it back to her room. Mom was watching the show in tolerant amusement, leaning back against the kitchen counter and sipping at her coffee. "Surprisingly, my weekend is going pretty okay," I texted. "How about you?"