A/N: And so hero names are finally revealed. It's such a relief to be moving on from the Sports Festival and to actually be getting to some of the plot elements I've had planned for so long!

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Yuigahama had just barely settled on a name she liked when our fifteen minutes were up. Somehow in the mix of things, I hadn't gotten the chance to share my own hero name and have the group review it, but let's be honest - I was no Bakugo. Even if Midnight-sensei didn't like my hero name for some reason, at least it wouldn't be embarrassing. Also, it was maybe, just barely, technically possible that I might have looked up my proposed hero name at some point. In the past. You know, just in case I made it into U.A. or something. Unless things had changed drastically in the last couple of months, I was pretty sure that there weren't any heroes who had already taken the name.

So when Midnight decided that since I was the class president, I should be the first person to step in front of the class and present my name, I did so without any of the stage fright or nervousness that would usually accompany any form of public speaking. I looked out at my classmates from the front of the classroom. "Versatility Hero: Hyakuhachi-Man." I resisted the urge to proclaim embarrassingly like some of my peers undoubtedly would, instead just saying it matter-of-factly and turning the piece of paper I was holding around so that the class could see the word "108Man" on it.

Midnight looked at me and a smile spread across her masked face. "Rejected!" She announced cheerfully.

"What? Why?" I asked reflexively. "I mean, not that I'm particularly attached to it or anything, and I'm sure you have a good reason, but I mean, still, I was sure it was fine!" I did my best not to pout as I saw Bakugo silently laughing his ass off from his desk.

With a sadistic smirk, Midnight said, "No, no, you're right, there's nothing wrong with the name. It's a little bit boring, but it's fine. But trust me, I'm pretty sure you want to change it anyways."

Something about that look on her face sent the hackles up on the back of my neck. "Okay, so… why, exactly?" I asked cautiously.

"Because you, young man, already have an online fanbase," Midnight said with gleeful schadenfreude. She swiftly reached out to turn off the lights in the room, and turned on the overhead projector. It leapt to life already displaying a web search, one that was full of pictures of me.

To my horror, I realized that they all had the #casanova hashtag. As the class started laughing, I felt my face heating. "I am not taking … that! As my hero name!" I declared emphatically, pointing my finger at the offending web search.

Although she was still smirking, Midnight nodded sympathetically. "Yup, that's why I recommend you change your name," she said, which to me at least sounded like nonsense until she continued explaining. "It's not common, but not unknown either for heroes with weak or unmemorable names to be 'given' names by the general public. In your case, based on your penchant for sudden bursts of power, they'd probably get tired of the Casanova joke and shorten your name to Nova eventually." She shrugged, a movement which did interesting things to her nearly-diaphanous costume skinsuit. "As a matter of fact, if you're comfortable with the idea, I'd recommend you change your name to Nova now so you can ride the wave -"

"Hell no," I interrupted.

"Yeah, I kind of figured you wouldn't be the type," Midnight said, turning off the damning Qwirker feed and turning the overhead lights back on. "As I see it you have basically three options. Number one," she began, holding up her index finger to match, "if you're attached to the name Hyakuhachiman and want to push it, I'll approve it, but you should be aware that comes with a risk that the public will stick you with the Nova nickname whether you like it or not." She held up a second finger beside the first. "Number two, go with Nova directly, you've rejected. The last option, and my recommendation to you, is to pick a flashier name, one that can stand up to the Nova name so that people will associate you with that instead."

I swallowed hard. "I, uh. I guess I'll have to think about it," I said. From my vantage point at the front of the room, I could see some people - Kirishima, Tobe, and Denki weren't exactly shocking, but Midoriya and Iida were - looking at me with facial expressions full of varying degrees of envy and admiration. Were they crazy? It wasn't like I wanted to be stuck with this problem! Out of curiosity, I looked over at Hagakure as well; unfortunately, she had one hell of a poker face.

"In that case, sit down for now," Midnight said. "Who's up next?"

"Ooh, how about me?" Ashido shouted. "You already know mine because you came over and helped my group, but for everybody else, my hero name is… Pinky!"

"Good!" Midnight said. "Keep them coming!"

"Archery Hero: Shooting Star!" Miura called out, standing to make sure everyone heard her.

"I like the name, but 'Archery Hero' is a little generic, so tweak it! Who else?"

"Since my brother is the Turbo Hero: Ingenium, I will be known as the Engine Hero, Turbo-man!"

"Red Riot!" "Earphone Jack!" "Tentacole! The Deku who never gives up!" As my classmates' names rang out one after another, I found myself lost in thought. I had to pick a new hero name. Listening to the other names, specifically the ones that Midnight seemed to think were particularly good, I slowly got a sense for what Midnight meant by a 'flashier' name.

Not that Midnight had said it in so many words, but basically, I needed a name that was chuunibyou as hell. Part of me was tempted to ask Tokoyami his opinion on what I should do, but as soon as he announced that his own name would be "Tsukuyomi," I swiftly realized that asking him would be a one-way ticket towards a cringey name like "Binder of a Hundred Demonic Powers, Ars Goetia." Or something. Not that I'd ever thought about calling myself a name like that, specifically.

Then again… I didn't exactly need to ask Tokoyami, did I?

As soon as I had admitted to Zaimokuza that I was aiming for UA, he had predictably gone nuts with grandiose proclamations of my mightiness as a hero. Also, he had gone nuts with proclamations that I was a reincarnated general from the Muromachi era and he was a reincarnated shogun, so there was a reason that I hadn't paid much attention to his delusional ramblings at the time… but looking back on it, what had then seemed like so much chuuni bullshit I now couldn't help but see as a well meaning if chuuni attempt by someone to tell me that they believed in me.

Before I could regret it, I chose the best of the names I could remember from Zaimokuza's suggestions and wrote it down, tuning back in as the last few of my classmates finalized their hero names.

"I'm going with Baku-satsu-uo!" Bakugo shouted, only to immediately be shot down.

"Rejected!" Midnight shouted. "And from the expression on your teammates' faces, you know why!"

"Fuckin… fine," Bakugo grumbled. "I'll go with Claymore, then. Shit."

Midnight blinked a few times, apparently a bit confused by his fast turnaround, before giving the thumbs up. "Still a bit edgy, but it suits you. I'll give it a pass! Who's next?"

"Okay, I think I'm ready," Miura said confidently. "I am the Guiding Light Hero: Shooting Star!"

"I like it," Midnight said, "it's very chic! Who hasn't gone… Yuigahama-san, how about you?"

"Um…" Yuigahama said, shakily making her way to the front of the room. "Even though I have a fabric quirk, I don't want to just be all about clothes and stuff, so… I'm going to be the Battle Banner Hero: Tapestry!"

"Hmm, unexpectedly martial-sounding." Midnight said. "From that and what you said just now, you plan on being a Battle Hero?"

Yuigahama shrunk in on herself a little. "Well I mean kinda, maybe, I'm not entirely sure yet but I guess…" Squeezing her eyes shut for a second, she took a breath, then shook her head as if to clear it before opening them again. "I mean, yeah, I think so."

Midnight just smiled. "In that case, I think it's a good choice. Who else hasn't gone? Todoroki, what about you?"

Wordlessly, Todoroki walked up to the front of the room, turning a piece of paper around to just reveal his first name on the page. "Just Shoto for now," he said.

"Your teammates weren't able to help you come up with anything?" Midnight asked. Reflexively, I looked over at Shoji, Hagakure, and Tobe. I couldn't see the faces of Shoji or Hagakure since they sat in front of me - not that it would make much of a difference for either of them, honestly - but body-language wise both of them looked stiff-backed and uneasy. Tobe on the other hand I could see, and he was sitting sideways at his desk, studiously avoiding the front of the room. Something clearly wasn't quite right in their HEART group, but I wasn't quite sure what.

Perhaps because he sensed the awkwardness, Hayama stood up. "There's no shame in going with just your name if you don't have anything good in mind," he said confidently. "That's what I'm doing as well." Turning his piece of paper around, it said 'Hayato'.

"And… okay, I think that's everyone," Midnight said. "What about people whose names were rejected? Tobe?"

Tobe stood up. "I was kinda surprised when 'Talkinetic' got shot down but I mean it makes sense if it sounded too much like telekinetic, wouldn't want people to get confused, haha!" As usual, he never used two words when three would do, but eventually he got around to the point. "Anyway, luckily I already had a backup plan! Call me Bust-A-Crime!" He declared.

I was completely appalled, but shockingly Midnight nodded. "Referencing a classical musician of the Rap period, very respectable! Have you considered spelling it with a y? Bust-A-Cryme?"

"Sold!" Tobe said.

"What about you, Hikigaya?" Midnight asked.

Shaking off my bemusement, I stood and walked to the front, bringing the paper with my new prospective name as I did. Like a lot of Zaimokuza's ideas, it was a bit of an offense to the Japanese language. Zaimokuza had been the sort of amateur writer who would write a phrase in kanji one way, write a set of furigana in the margins above it indicating a bizarre interpretation of those kanji to thoroughly confuse the reader, and then finish his sentence with a phrase in English in all caps because he thought it looked cool. I couldn't remember which unlikely combination of kanji he'd used at the time and had to use the correct ones, so my version of Zaimokuza's idea was significantly more readable than the monstrosity he had come up with, but other than that I hadn't changed a word. "108 Stars Hero," I said in Japanese, emphasizing the alliteration as 'Hyakku-hachi hoshi no hero' tripped off my tongue; then switched to English for the name itself. "Myriad."

Midnight took a long, evaluating look at me and the name on my paper. "You know what?" She said, raising one eyebrow. "I think that'll do it."

I breathed a sigh of relief and started heading back to my chair. As I sat, Yaoyorozu spoke up in a low voice. "You have quite the way with words, Hikigaya-kun," she said. "You came up with that quickly. Was it a name you had previously considered?"

Silently, I shook my head. There was a raw ache in the center of my chest, and I didn't quite trust myself to speak.

Midnight made one final note on her clipboard before standing and moving back to the front of the classroom. "Now that that's settled, Eraserhead and I are going to pass out your internship offers."

Eraserhead stood as well, rousing himself from a chair in the corner where it looked like he had been napping. "Your field training will be one week long," Eraserhead said. "Since you have all received offers, all of you will be getting personalized lists. Those of you who didn't get very many offers will also see a section including a list of workplaces participating with UA's placement program, to make sure that you have access to training more in line with your specialties if that's what you really want." He paused for a second. "Again, remember that while the training you get from the placement program will be the same or better as what you'll get from an internship offer, you'll be missing a chance to make contacts, so choose wisely."

"Um… sensei?" Miura asked. "That reminds me… How did class 1-B do on their internship offers?"

Eraserhead's facial expression didn't change. "Poorly." He turned and picked up a series of packets, giving half to Midnight so that they could pass them around the room together. "Only one or two students got any offers at all - you'd have to ask them for the specifics."

"Heh. Who fuckin' cares?" Bakugo jeered. "If they don't like it they can get off their asses for next year."

"Would it kill you to show a little bit of sympathy?" Miura said, frowning at Bakugo. "Just because we did well doesn't mean we need to be happy about the fact that they did poorly."

Bakugo rolled his eyes, exaggerating the motion to be sure the whole class could see it. "Since every offer they got was one our class didn't, yeah, it kinda does. Personally, though, I'd have been fine for offers without the plan." He turned away from her, accepting the pamphlet as Eraserhead made his way down our side of the classroom. "How about you?"

Uncomfortably, I shifted in my seat. I'd used something similar to Bakugo's logic to convince the class to follow my lead initially, but now that the reality of the discrepancy in our classes' results had hit, it was hard to convince myself that our decision had been entirely morally justified. I cleared my throat awkwardly. "Maybe…" I trailed off, swallowing uncomfortably as the entire class looked at me, before taking a deep breath. "I mean, Miura kinda has a point. I'm not saying we shouldn't have done what we did." I wanted to, but admitting that I had acted like a jerk on purpose in front of a bunch of heroes was a little bit too much even for my burgeoning sense of guilt, "but I do sort of feel like we should apologize or do something to let them know we're not, like, out to get them or something?"

"Yeah. Maybe we could bake them cookies or something?" Uraraka said, poking her index fingers together as she spoke. "I've been feeling a little bit bad about things too."

"I have quite a few recipes," Yaoyorozu suggested, "and I'm sure that Lunch Rush-sensei would be willing to lend us a home economics room for something like this."

Denki perked up in excitement. "I mean, I don't know much about baking, but if you girls are going to be baking, then I'm totally down to taste-test! And, uh, I dunno, we could do like a card or something that everybody could sign?" I couldn't help but roll my eyes. What would a card apologizing for that even look like? 'Sorry we screwed you over, we don't promise not to do it again but hey, at least it wasn't personal'?

"Figure that out on your own time," Eraserhead-sensei cut in. "For now, all of you should take a look at your personalized lists. They're due in two days, so you should all take the rest of class to look them over while Midnight and I are here to answer questions."

I already knew exactly who I would be interning with, but I picked up the list out of curiosity anyway. Partly I just wanted to make sure that even despite Cyberpunch's assurances, there wouldn't be some problem and her offer would actually be there; but there was an egotistical part of myself that wondered just how many big-name heroes my act had managed to fool… Oh. Well, damn. The offers that we received had been arranged in order to the Hero Ranking of the person making the offer, probably as one of the many subtle manipulations UA was putting hero students through in order to make us as invested as possible in being the most famous heroes that we could be. That meant that the answer to my question was front and center on the very first page.

I had received an offer from the #6 Hero, Shield Hero Crust. He wasn't the only big name who I recognized either; on the front page alone I saw Kamui Woods, Fatgum, and, ugh, Campestris. Apparently, I was not the only person in the class to get offers from people surprisingly high on the totem pole, because all around me I could hear gasps, happy shouts, and muffled 'no ways' as my classmates celebrated their achievements. (Well, most of them did, anyways - frantic muttering emanated from the seat directly ahead of me as Midoriya desperately tried to weigh the pros and cons of 3,000 offers all at once.) Anyway, I skipped a couple of pages back through the booklet and quickly found Cyberpunch's offer sitting next to her Hero Rank of 258. Letting out a sigh of relief, I put the packet down and tried to figure out something else I could do with my time.

My eyes met Yuigahamas. "Do you already know who you're going to pick too, Hikki?" She asked in a low voice, trying not to disturb the people around us who were furiously thinking and plotting.

I nodded. "I had an informal offer from someone before the Festival ever happened," I said. "I'm going with Cyberpunch."

Yuigahama looked a little confused for a second, before she seemingly came to a realization. "Ah! I know who she is. She works in Chiba, right? That's nice, you'll be able to stay close to home."

"I mean, that's not really the reason I'm picking her, but yeah, it's definitely a bonus," I said. "What about you?"

Yuigahama made a complicated expression, her eyebrows drawing in with worry even as she smiled happily. "I don't really want to be a hero like him at all, but as far as my quirk goes, it's just such a big opportunity, so I don't really have a choice…" She trailed off, then said helplessly, "I got an offer from Best Jeanist!"

"Bullshit," Bakugo said suddenly. Startled, Yuigahama and I both turned to look at him. "I got an offer from Jeanist," he said. "And I'm taking it. Go somewhere else."

"What?" Yuigahama said, her eyebrows flying high up onto her forehead. "No way! I can't!"

"It is possible for a hero agency to make offers to multiple students simultaneously;" Yukinoshita interjected from the back of the room, "My sister, for example, has made three that I know of."

"I'm not fuckin' stupid," Bakugo growled. "I already know it's possible, I just don't want the Airhead sucking up the training time I should have all to myself."

I couldn't help but roll my eyes at that. "For all you know, you're going to be training with all of the sidekicks at Best Jeanist's agency," I said. "And I'm pretty sure a pro hero can train two people at the same time."

"Um, heroes look for teamwork and stuff too, right?" Yuigahama said. "Um, if we really want to impress Best Jeanist, don't you think we should probably, like, work together?" She said nervously. "At least, I think that if we were arguing the whole time, it'd probably be pretty embarrassing…"

Bakugo folded his arms with a pout. "Tch. Whatever. Just don't get in my way."

Yuigahama turned away as well to give Yukinoshita and I a thankful smile before once again returning to her recommendation list. For a while, the class was full of the sounds of rustling papers and intense focus. I pulled out my Math textbook and started trying to work my way through a set of homework problems that I was more than half convinced I had gotten wrong before I had class with Ectoplasm-sensei and had to turn it in, trying not to disturb anybody else. As more and more people in the room finished reading and made their choices, however, the room became lively with conversation as people began discussing their offers and their options. Not that I was eavesdropping, exactly… but since my choice was already made, I just didn't have anything better to do other than listening in.

"Any idea where you're going yet, Deku?" Uraraka asked him.

I pulled my head up from the algebraic equation I was trying to fix. Part of me had a sneaking suspicion that Midoriya would be interning with All Might for some quality father-son bonding time, but as I looked forward at his stressed-out posture I guessed that somehow wasn't in the cards for him. "I haven't even finished reading them all!" He said in obvious distress. "I can't believe we only have two days!"

"Well, maybe you can rule some out," Uraraka said. "Or pick from a short list, maybe. Who's your highest ranking offer from?"

Midoriya flipped through his papers, back to the very first page. "My first offer is from Mirko," he said in confusion. "But she's never taken any interns or sidekicks before as far as I know, so I don't know if she's actually good at teaching, or if maybe someone less famous would be better, or..."

"Whoa, you got an offer from Mirko?!" Denki shouted from across the room. "No way! Gah! Why wasn't I number one! I'm so jealous!"

"Heh." Bakugo smirked, turning around to leer at Midoriya. "So your best offer was from the Number Seven Hero, huh? If I remember correctly, Best Jeanist is Number Four."

Tokoyami opened his eyes and stared at Bakugo. "If that is the criteria we're to be evaluated by, Bakugo, then you should know that I received an offer from the Number Three hero, Hawks," he said smugly.

"Shut it, Birdbrain!" Bakugo barked. "Nobody asked you!"

"You got Hawks, Tokoyami?" Hayama said, envy in his voice. "Damn, I'm jealous! Out of all the offers I got, the closest to having a flight or a speed quirk was Slidin' Go!"

"Ehehe," Midoriya laughed nervously, scratching at the back of his head. "So yeah, anyways, what about you Uraraka? Have you decided yet?"

Uraraka nodded. "Yeah! I think I want to accept Gunhead's offer!"

"Battle Hero Gunhead?" Midoriya shouted in surprise.

All of a sudden, I was pulled out of my eavesdropping by a tap on my shoulder. I turned around to see Yaoyorozu. "Um, Hikigaya. If you've chosen your internship already, would you mind helping me out with my selection process?" Yaoyorozu asked quietly. "I feel like I could use a second opinion."

"Sure thing," I said, spinning in my seat to look at Yaoyorozu's desk. "What's up?"