Author's notes at the bottom.
"An out-of-body experience is a phenomenon in which a person perceives the world from a location outside their physical body…"
I glanced down at my arm. Short, stubby, and perhaps most concerning of all, not actually my arm.
"...Nope, still in a body. Let's keep looking…"
The tone coming out of my mouth made me sound like I was drowning in my own mucus and dropping off the wagon with the helium addiction I had when I was five years old. Hearing that noise being generated by my vocal chords made me want to cry, but unfortunately for my morning that was fairly low on my current list of concerns.
Number one on the list, reclining somewhere near the beginning of the avalanche of tabs I'd opened up in the web browser, was a picture of my face. Not my current face, oh no, that was number two on the list. Dark hair, sharp features, neatly trimmed facial hair. All of it stared defiantly back at me from the computer screen.
Right above, dated approximately 300 years ago mind you, the beginning of my obituary.
'Louis Chandler, 1997-20XX.' The date had been left blank, a detail that I'd been fairly curious about. Knowing the exact date I was going to die would have been scary, but that concern very quickly fell away as I learned more.
Louis Chandler of the 21st century was only presumed dead. The whereabouts of his remains was unknown, seeing as he'd been legally pronounced dead 30 years after escaping from a lengthy prison sentence.
Funny then, that he was sitting in this computer chair, wearing a hideous set of sleep clothes and running his hands through his spherical, sticky, and very purple hair with ever-mounting stress. He had no memory of any of these court proceedings, or his grand escape from the clutches of the law.
Oh, and the name on his notebooks was 'Minoru Mineta'.
What the fuck, you may be thinking to yourself. Yeah, well, now you know how he feels.
"Out of body experience, no. Hallucination, no. Drug fueled hallucination?" I couldn't remember taking anything questionable last night, but holy hell was I hoping I had right about now. Switching windows, I went back to the spreadsheet I'd been steadily filling out with possibilities, a technique that had been taught to me in therapy, and added another line to the 'maybe' category.
The other two in the 'maybe' category were the most elaborate prank I'd ever been hit with, or aliens. And as someone who had spent his entire life in the age of internet pornography, I had to say that aliens had never looked better than right now.
The worst part about all of this was that I already knew what was going on. This felt far too real to be anything other than reality. This body could feel pain, as it had when I'd looked at my reflection in my phone screen, screamed, and stumbled over my gremlin legs and face first into the wall.
It made no sense. And yes, thank you Captain Obvious, but even with my limited comprehension of the machinations of the cosmos I could still tell you that this shit was adding two and three to get seven. The second thing I'd done once figuring out where I was, right after contemplating if it would be worth it to throw myself in front of the moving car, was take to the internet for some clues.
Multiverse theory was completely valid, but also invalidated once I'd come to discover that I'd had a life before. Unless two worlds had collided in the most mundane way possible, that didn't feel quite right. I probably wasn't a reincarnation, unless I'd forgotten the latter majority of my life in the transition, but somehow I doubted my first life would be sent to prison on sexual offense charges when I'd lived my entire life up until that point as someone who had been asexual.
You know who would get his ass thrown in jail for that though? The piece of shit that my soul would have been roommates with if he didn't bail through time and space to fuck up my life.
So Mineta and I had swapped bodies. Alright, fine, I didn't want to believe it but until the meth wore off I'd be stuck with it. Except that also didn't make any fucking sense, because this world wasn't the one I'd fallen asleep in the previous night. Even if you ignored the Quirks, which I'd been doing a marvelous job of until a lamp post started walking down the street, it was hard to argue with history that just didn't add up.
The dawn of Quirks, I'd come to find, happened in 2016. Some lady in China had shit out a bioluminescent baby and fucked up the course of humanity forever. Some people would have called that opinion harsh, but I was feeling less than generous after waking up missing half my height and all of my will to live. Interesting how I had no memory of that, despite being able to recollect my life for a good half decade after that point. After that, I indulged a whim and looked up the manga I'd been trapped in.
Predictably, it didn't exist. Less predictable was the application letter that had been on the desk for U.A. University. That surprise had nothing on the fact that I now owned a fucking iPhone, of all things.
With a groan of pure despair, I pushed away from the desk. Mineta's shitty gaming chair caught on the rug he'd decided to put under it and almost tipped me over. I would have welcomed the pain, because that was what my existence was rapidly becoming. Pure, unfiltered, irrevocable pain.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. That had been one of my favourite quotes, once upon a time. It fit here, as well, so long as you took out 'impossible' and replaced it with 'logical'. Because I had a good idea of what had happened to put me here, and if physics was going to fail me and magic or some kind of divine intervention were even less likely an option, that left me with the most direct and coincidentally the most frustrating path available.
Fucking Quirk bullshit.
Had Mineta been hit by a quirk? Probably not, unless there was something linking him to me in this life, and for the sake of my radial artery there better not have been. But even then, it was unlikely, given that a Quirk that could so utterly bend the space-time continuum would have been noticed in the day and age where Quirks were a dime a dozen. I could hold out hope on Mineta being the dumbass who got clocked a good few centuries into the past and not the other way around, but I think it was a good indication of how bad my luck had been recently that I woke up as Minoru Mineta.
Which left option number… I don't even know at this point, but I know it was the worst option. Because that had to mean that I had been hit with a Quirk. You know, the things that didn't exist where I came from. Which meant it had to come from here, in this world. A world where I, or at least my body, had been dead for close to three hundred years. A world where whatever Quirk did this to me was also dead for three hundred years… or if I was lucky, in the possession of the personification of this world's evil.
If I was lucky, I'd be able to make a deal with Satan.
Fuck my life, fuck Quirks, fuck the world, and especially fuck Mineta.
I didn't want to leave the gaming chair. Not because it was comfortable or I was running low on energy; I just literally didn't want to leave it because getting into it had required a step-ladder. I would have to eventually, however, because some of this nervous energy I was drowning in had to be worked off. Usually my options to do that were wandering around the neighbourhood or putting on some loud music to belt my lungs out. The latter I didn't want to do because right now I sounded like a rubber duck deepthroating an actual duck. The former I didn't want to do because there were villains out there.
Like the monsters under my bed, except real, and likely to react poorly when I run my mouth at them for personal amusement.
What had Mineta even done for fun, anyway? Looking around his room didn't yield any results. Most of the wall space was taken up with posters. I'm sure you can guess what kind they were. There was a dartboard with no darts, though a ball of purple hair was sitting over the bullseye. There was a shelf full of books, but I didn't even need to move from my position to know exactly what was in those. The wastebasket overflowing with tissues sitting right next to it also provided a vital clue.
Tiny dumbbells, the kind I'd only ever seen middle aged women using, sat in one corner. Considering Mineta, may his soul burn in Hell forever, had the same body type as Bart Simpson, I couldn't have told you how much use they'd seen. Surely he had to use them, though, if he'd been training for U.A?
The letter on the desk called to me once again. Just like the first time I'd seen it, I didn't touch it. There was some level of superstitious dread to it, in a way. Like if I opened that letter and looked over the application process I'd get dragged into the story of this world and be forced to work at its pace. And there was nothing I could think of right now that I wanted to happen less.
Being a hero in this world was folly. For all that I'd rolled my eyes through the Stain arc and laughed with my friends about how much of an idiot he was, he had some good points. They were mired down with shit takes that belonged out of the armory and on twitter, but the spirit behind heroism was dead and buried and nothing was bringing it back anytime soon.
Mineta had entered the school because he was a fucking loser and wanted to get his dick wet. Predictably he hadn't succeeded, but the point was they'd taken his invitation and decided he deserved a place in the class. That meant that I'd have a good chance of getting in too, seeing as I'd gotten rid of his most crippling weakness; his existence.
On the one hand, U.A would be the focal point for a lot of shenanigans that were going to go down in the future, and chances were decent that if I ended up a part of that, I would be able to navigate my way through the minefield by virtue of having common sense… and knowledge of the future, but the common sense thing felt more indicative of my survival odds. On the other hand, if I did get into U.A, I'd need to deal with the possibility of having Bakugou in my class.
To be honest, I'd rather die in a villain attack. Being Mineta was enough cosmic punishment, I didn't want to go through school again on top of that.
So… what, then? Get a job? Work a register until someone got pissed off at the end of a sale and bombed the place? Become a shut-in streamer? Tempting, but with this voice I'd probably starve.
My eyes, wandering the ceiling and bikini posters, settled on the computer screen once more. The tab had shifted when I'd push the chair away, settling once more on my face. My beautiful, properly proportioned, real boy face. Never again would I not look like a rejected nutcracker design. A tear slipped down my cheek at the thought. I would need complete reconstructive surgery to fix the damage nature had done to m- wait a second.
Sure, I could go through the proper channels, whatever they may be. Acquire money, get stabbed in the face a lot, no longer look like the bastard child of Pinocchio and Ebernezer Scrooge, profit.
Or, I could cheat, and use a Quirk.
It would be illegal. It would be dangerous. It would require a hell of a lot of planning and some theories I'd had a long time ago actually being correct. It would require just as much if not more money than the surgery idea would. If I screwed it up then it was pretty much guaranteed I would die. And most importantly, in the event that Mineta came back, there was a very good chance it could ruin his life.
Determination was a foreign feeling as I looked once again at the picture. Mineta met my eyes, in my body, utterly unrepentant as the police of the time took his mugshot before leading him away in chains. That, more than anything, made my mind up for me.
Mineta had already ruined my life.
And a hero would never do that.
A:N: The original of this fic, named 'Vitis Vinifera', had a very different plot line. It was written on a dare from one of my friends and I had a genuinely good time writing for it. The problem came from My Hero Academia itself and how I felt its quality fell below what I could enjoy. I still can't say I enjoy it like I once did, but this fic isn't even really about that. It's a means to explore the setting and figure out for myself where it could go.
Next chapter in a week. Gonna try to keep that schedule going. Don't expect the chapters to be much longer than this, given that I'm working and studying currently.
Gotta say though, it feels good to be back.