Chapter 17
Despite Izuku's insistence that he was fine, the hospital kept him for three days. Due to the intense vertigo and the full body induced paralysis he received from his fight with Psyren, the doctors wanted to be absolutely sure that he was stable before having him upright and moving. The vertigo he experienced was so bad that he required multiple treatments and medication that were spread out, since his body appeared to be rejecting the normal methods, not to mention that they didn't want to touch him at all until they were sure his spinal injury had been healed and wasn't at risk for something more severe.
Originally, they were going to request Recovery Girl to come and heal him, but once Izuku heard that the effects on his body would be temporary and not something that could really be healed, he told them it wasn't necessary. Recovery Girl wasn't exactly on call for every time he needed to be healed. She was still the UA school nurse, and she was much older now. He didn't want to bother her with something so trivial that would only heal from a couple days of bed rest. However, now that he was on his third day and the medication they had him on appeared to be working, he was anxious to get back to work. At least he could at least be upright without feeling like he was going to vomit. He had regained feeling through out most of his body, though some parts felt itchy or numb like his limbs were still asleep. What feeling he did have however, he tried utilizing to make up for lost time.
Going over the Hero News Network on his phone, Izuku was unable to find information on any villains under the pseudonym Psyren, even among the individual discussion threads spread across several hero agencies, including the private server reserved for licensed pros. He then began pouring over available files listing people registered sound Quirks, in and out of prison, but that would take hours to go through and that didn't even extend to Quirks registered outside of Japan. He didn't think they were an international villain, since they spoke fluent Japanese, but it wasn't safe to make assumptions when he didn't have all of the pieces yet. Which was why he had requested his team members to go over files and search for anything they could in their spare time. Next time they got together, he had to ask Kaminari to bring Jirou with him to the next office meeting. He wanted to pick her brain about her experience in dealing with sound Quirks as well ask for suggestions for equipment involving noise cancellation. If he could aid the police in capturing the villain, maybe he would have some peace of mind over the whole ordeal.
"Good afternoon, Deku-san." Izuku turned to see Kotone Momozono standing in the doorway. Her hair was done up in a more elaborate bun that had an open loop and a free strand of hair falling from the right side of her face that curled past her chin. "How are you feeling today?"
"Oh hey, Momozono-san. I'm fine. The doctors say that if I do well with the next treatment, I can go home today." He failed to mention the other little detail they had told him when he had been admitted. According to his charts, the sound-wave that had hit him in the back had nearly paralyzed him due to the intense vibrations and the placement of the strike towards the nervous system. If the decibel level had been just a bit higher, regardless of the location, it would have been fatal.
"That's a relief." So far, almost everyone from the office had visited him, but Momozono had been the most consistent, insistent on bringing him lunch boxes filled with freshly made food, for which he was very grateful for. The hospital food was way too saturated for him to stomach and he was tired of tasting it a second time every time he threw up. "Here. I made this for you," she handed him a bento box wrapped in a cute Sakura blossom pattern similar to her hairpins. "I was making my kids' lunch boxes and figured you would like something more wholesome than Jell-o."
"Oh wow, thank you. You really don't have to do this for me."
"Nonsense. I'm happy to do it." He unwrapped the bento box and found an assortment of goodies, including mixed tempura and hot dogs cut like octopi. There was even a thermos filled with hot miso soup, something that his mother would often make for him when he was sick. He hadn't had lunches this cute since middle school, at least until he had to ask her to stop making them for him. In all honesty, he liked cute things like this, but he had to stop because of how the other kids would make fun of him for it. It had gotten so bad that there were days where he didn't have a lunch to eat at all, having had his bento mysteriously disappear from inside his desk or be thrown away in the trash, so he had politely asked his mother to stop making his lunch altogether, stating that he was old enough to make his own meals. He failed miserably, of course, cooking and home economics being one of his worst subjects in school, so he compromised with her and said no more 'cute' bento boxes. He hadn't realized how much he had missed them until this moment.
"How are your kids anyways?" he asked, breaking the chopsticks and saying his thankful prayers for the meal before digging into the first clump of white rice.
"Ah, they're good. Kotomi is just as quiet as ever while Kotoko can't stop talking all our ears off."
"Good, good," he nodded before swallowing, taking a sip of his tea. "Did you bring the files I asked for?"
"Yes, but I couldn't find much," she said, pulling a manila folder out of her little black briefcase she held at her side. Izuku appraised the manila folder, only containing a few slips of paper, before setting it down on the hospital tray by his bedside."Who's Psyren, by the way?"
"They're the villain that I fought last Sunday that stole artifacts from the hero museum, including All Might's support gear."
"Oh no. I know you were looking forward to seeing his gear. I know how much you admire All Might."
That had been the final nail in the coffin. Not only had he failed to protect himself and others, but he had failed to keep one of the most prized artifacts from his idol, his mentor, from being stolen. He had at least saved a few people, but that didn't stop the villain from getting away or for him to end up becoming a victim of their assault. It had been a grave miscalculation on his part, one he hoped he would never make again.
"Why the sudden interest? Isn't this more of something the police would handle than a hero agency? Plus, I heard no one was really hurt from the incident."
"That doesn't change the fact that they put dozens of people's lives at risk. What if someone had panicked during the evacuation and caused someone to become trampled or I hadn't found the guards in time? No one would have known about the vertigo or the concussion until it was too late because no one would be let back into the building," Izuku frowned, growing angrier by the second. "A person who holds so little regard for human-life like that needs to be stopped and brought to justice."
A ping on his phone interrupted his current train of thought, alerting him to several text messages. He tried to ignore it, but the first one was followed by seven more obnoxious pings that continued in rapid-fire succession.
"I'm going to see if I can get you some more tea," Momozono said before politely taking his cup and stepping out of the room. Izuku sighed before picking up his phone, only for his irritation pass once he looked over the message.
Here are the photos you wanted. Sorry if they were delayed.
He smiled at the pictures, reminded that there had been some good that had come out of his trip to the museum. In all of the chaos, it had totally slipped his mind that he was supposed to text Alyssa about how the rest of his day went. How was he supposed to go about it now though? She was a civilian and he didn't want to worry her by telling her he was in the hospital, but he also couldn't lie and tell her that the rest of his day had been fine when it hadn't. Furthermore, he was concerned on whether or not she had been caught up in the whole mess. Since he had been unable to move the majority of his body for days, he couldn't have texted her back even if he wanted to. Had she thought he had forgotten her or that he was ignoring her?
Maybe I'm just overthinking things... Izuku sighed, concern for his friend winning out in the end. Rather than send a text back, his thumb instead hit the dial button on his phone. A few seconds went by, a low dial-tone ringing in his ear before he heard a slight click on the other end.
"Hello..?" asked a low, feminine voice.
"Hey, Alyssa, it's Izuku. Izuku Midoriya?" He wanted smack himself in the face. Of course she knew who he was. He didn't need to introduce himself like an idiot. "I was just wondering uhh... how are you?"
"Umm... fine, I guess. Why'd you call me?"
"Oh uh, I just wanted to see how you were doing. I'm sorry. Are you busy right now? I don't mean to bother you."
"No, please. I need something to do while I search for these damned kanji books. I left my iPod at home, so I have absolutely nothing interesting to listen to while I work. So what's up?"
"I was just wondering if you got home okay on Sunday," Izuku said before realizing exactly how stupid that sounded, "although, in retrospect, asking you that now three days later seems a bit unnecessary."
"I got home fine. Are you okay? Did something happen?"
"I'm fine just... There was some issues that happened at the museum after you left, and I wanted to make sure you were okay."
"Oh... thanks, I guess, but uhh.. what kind of issues did you think I ran into?"
"Villain related issues. Someone tried to steal a bunch of hero artifacts on display while we were there."
"Oh no, that sucks. Well... it must not have been that much for you to only be calling me now."
"More like I'm only able to call you now," Izuku bit his lip, hesitant in going into full detail. Did he really want to tell her the full extent of his condition? He was a terrible liar. "I've... kinda been in the hospital for the last couple of days."
"Oh my god, are you okay?!"
"I'm fine," he reassured her, "just a little dizzy and numb from their Quirk."
"You didn't break yourself again, did you?"
"...What makes you think I 'broke myself'?" he asked, concerned yet intrigued by the exact wording she went with: 'breaking himself.' Sounded about right in any other context. There was a slight pause at the other end of the phone before Alyssa continued.
"I umm... may have looked you up on the internet out of curiosity and saw a few UA Sports Festival clip-shows."
"Yeah that sounds about right..." Izuku smiled wanly and ran his hand absentmindedly through his hair, the same hand that had been covered with surgical scars from the same incident. Well that certainly explained it. It had been many years since he had purposefully injured himself like that, but he hadn't forgotten. It was embarrassing how much of amateur he used to be, wielding his power so self-destructively like that. "So you really are okay then?"
"Yeah, I'm fine. The cab took me home before I missed all of the fun, though it sounds like you got more than your fair share. So what happened?"
"Some villain with a sound Quirk faked a fire alarm to get everyone out of the building and then knocked out all of the guards that stayed behind while they tried to steal rare support gear."
"Eww that doesn't sound too good. Did you at least catch 'em?"
"No, unfortunately, they got away," Izuku frowned, unable to keep back the stab of failure and regret from hitting him. He tried not to let setbacks like this get him down, but they still hurt. "They hit me with a sound-wave that gave me vertigo and caused my whole body to go numb."
Rather than be disappointed in him and his shoddy job performance, Alyssa responded with a light-hearted, "Well, I'm sure you'll get 'em next time."
"Yeah..."
"The whole hospital thing sucks though, but at least you weren't horribly mangled... You're not, right?"
"No, I'm not horribly mangled," he chuckled, parroting her unique choice of words. "Just a bad case of vertigo and a bit of numbness." She certainly had an interesting way with words, like she had swallowed a thesaurus and was trying to be as verbose with her phrasing as possible. He wondered if it was just in her nature to be formal with her vocabulary or if it was something lost in translation that came out as stiff and formal like most beginner Japanese speakers.
"Oh good. Well, not about the vertigo or anything, but that you're overall okay. The vibration thing makes sense though. Sound can do more than mess up your hearing. Did you know that the clicks a sperm whale can make can reach around two hundred and thirty decibels underwater? That's louder than standing a hundred feet away from a jet plane taking off, and loud enough that both of your eardrums would be blown out and the vibrations alone could kill a human being."
"I did not." Izuku paled. They really hadn't been kidding when they had told him the blow could have been fatal.
"But sound can do more than just hurt. Cat purring is actually proven to stimulate cell growth because of the low vibration frequencies they emit, so maybe you are also being healed?"
"Maybe-" There was a cluttered noise on the other end of the phone and some violent cursing on the other end. Izuku's English was spotty at best- it had been a few years since he had practiced -but he recognized the more common swears. "Alyssa? Hey, Alyssa? Are you okay? Talk to me," Izuku exclaimed, growing more concerned by the second. There was a groan and a bit of stirring at the other end before he heard the phone being picked up on the other end.
"I'm okay just- oww! -stubbed my toe on the corner of a box when I wasn't watching where I was walking and rammed my knee into a stack of boxes when I fell."
"Oh okay," he sighed in relief. Thank god it hadn't been anything serious. "Are you sure you're alright?"
"Yeah. I've dealt with worse. This is nothing compared to fight camp."
"Fight camp?"
"It's this retreat my lightsaber class- well, my American class, anyways. I don't know if the Ludosport people here do it. Anyways, it's this intense weekend training camp they do every year where we push ourselves to the limit and do all of these intense fight-training exercises until you break yourself, like five mile sprints, team sparring matches, and endurance training where you get punished for breaking form. We also do other outdoor activities like Capture the Flag and King of the Hill, where you try to be the last person standing against our headmaster, but for the most part it's the weekend from hell."
"That sounds really intense..." Izuku said with mild interest. He really did need to check out her martial arts class at some point. He didn't think such extreme programs existed outside of hero training and professional sports.
"Yeah. I think I threw up the first morning out of sheer exhaustion and by making the mistake of exercising on a full stomach. I definitely ended up regretting eating that second helping of waffles for breakfast," she said with a rueful chuckle, "But you know, I don't regret doing it. It was so much fun during the parts that I didn't feel like my body was trying to kill me. It's like you hate it but you love it at the same time."
"I know the feeling," Izuku hummed to himself, thoughts suddenly far away. If he hadn't gone through such similar training when he had been working with All Might and the other UA teachers, he probably would have balked at anything resembling such high intense workouts. "I think my high school did something similar for summer training camp."
"Really?"
"Yeah. One year we trained with a team of rescue heroes called the Wild Wild Pussycats and did a lot of specialized intense training at their mountain retreat in order to train up our Quirks, from strength exercises that lasted for hours to making our own meals. If you didn't like the food that was served, you had to go and find your own food, though I think pretty much everyone didn't care how bad the curry we all made was since everyone was so exhausted by the end of the day."
"Good god. Our training camps really are similar... although I don't think we made curry at mine."
"Yes, I was going to ask- what are waffles?"
There was an audible gasp at the end of the line before Alyssa asked, "You've never had waffles before?"
"No..? What are they?"
"They're kind of like pancakes, only you cook them in a waffle maker, which is like a bumpy looking iron skillet that you fold over the batter to fry it into a specific shape. They're like a circle broken into fourths that you can eat like pancakes, only the holes keep the syrup from spilling over everything like it would on a pancake."
"That sounds really good."
"If you think that's good, you should taste my Grandma Berg waffles. Those things are so soft and sweet, you can eat them without syrup like a cookie."
"Deku-san, I don't mean to interrupt, but there are some officers here to receive your statement," spoke a doctor, Momozono not too far behind him.
"...Breakfast is my specialty. My pancakes are my best work, 'cause I can make funny shapes with them, but my Grandma Berg waffles are top-notch. It's basically this super secret recipe that's been handed down in my family for generations-" Izuku heard Alyssa explaining into his ear, oblivious to Momozono's warning and the people following behind her.
"Hey, Alyssa, I'm sorry, but I need to go. Some people are here to see me."
"Oh! O-Okay. Do you umm... want me to visit you or something? 'Cause I can, if you want me to."
"No, you don't have to do that. I think I'm going to be discharged by the end of the day anyways."
"Oh... well thank goodness for that. Well, best of luck to you. I hope you get a clean bill of health."
"Thanks." He smiled and said their goodbyes before hanging up his phone.
"Pardon us for the late introduction, Mr. Midoriya, but you're last on our list to visit and we wanted to make sure you were in a lucid state before questioning you about your accounts of the incident last Sunday."
"Yes, of course. Please ask away." He then went onto explain the various details about his encounter with the villain, how he had originally intended on locating any people needing to be evacuated or locating the fire so that he could contain it until the firemen were there and ended up find several security guards on the floor.
"I've been meaning to ask, are the other victims okay?" Izuku asked the detective in the beige overcoat as he passively took notes with his pen and clipboard.
"Thankfully, no one was badly hurt. One of the victims had a severe concussion but no other major trauma as a result."
"Sato-san," Izuku nodded, remembering his name from the female security guard. "And what about Yamada-san? Is she okay?"
"Yamada?" the detective quirked an eyebrow, looking over the report in his hands. "I have no one under that name on my list."
"What? Are you sure? No one named Hina Yamada?" Was she not listed because she wasn't that badly injured or had she not checked in with the officials yet?
"We have no one under that name on the victim list or under the employee registry. We checked that after identifying the other guards. There were no female security guards on staff during that morning's shift during the robbery." Izuku felt his blood run cold.
"But she was there with the other guards! She was the one who told me about everyone else being hurt in the attack." Both of the cops shared a look with each other before glancing back at him.
"This will require some further investigation."
"You think it could have been an inside job?" Izuku asked, his mind jumping a mile a minute.
"I don't know. It certainly appears that way. We have a missing victim and a security guard with no name in the employee registry, all on the most crowded day at a well-renowned museum displaying rare artifacts that get stolen in the same day."
"We'll pull up the security tapes and see if we can find anyone under the name Hina Yamada. Can you tell us what you remember the woman looked like? My friend here is quite the sketch artist."
"Certainly," Izuku nodded, admiring as he described her in detail as best he could, though it was hard as he had only met her once. "She had short dark hair, like a pixie cut, only she had a strand of long hair on the left side of her face and she was a bit shorter than I was, and I think she had dark eyes."
"Thank you. This should be enough of a description to get," his partner held up a rough sketch of the woman. It both looked like her yet disturbingly not like her, like it was an abstract piece of art. He had done it really fast with very little visual descriptions. Was that part of his Quirk? "We'll contact you if we have any further questions."
"Is there anything else I can do?"
"Actually, we would prefer you stay out of the matter unless we require your assistance. These matters do not concern heroes as of yet. In the meantime, we'll contact you should we require any more information from you, Mr. Midoriya."
"Alright. Please let me know if anything changes," Izuku relented as the two gentlemen stepped out of his room. It was hard to sit on the sidelines waiting for the rusty wheels of bureaucracy to turn. However, he was good at biding his time, and it wasn't as if they had told him to stop researching. If there was something that he could do to prevent more people from getting hurt, he would do it without hesitation. "Miss Momozono?"
"Yes?" Kotone asked, having been quietly sitting in the background while the officers and him had talked.
"Sit down with me. We're going to go back over what we know about Psyren."
"Oh but- didn't those two gentleman say it wasn't necessary to get involved?"
"All Might told me once that the essence of being a hero is meddling when you don't need to. Even if what we do ends up being a wild goose chase, I'd like to say that I tried than regret it later. Better to be prepared either way." Rather than reply, she sat right across from him and placed the full cup of green tea in front of him before opening the manila folder and pulling a pen out of her bun. "Alright. Let's go over the reports again."
