Chapter 22
.::The 1-A Vigilantes::.
Among the still-active Pro Heroes in Japan, the name of the Nighteye Agency brought certain expectations.
Sir Nighteye was the epitome of professional, a hero who always carried an air of stoicism and preparation. His crisp silver suit never showed wear or tear no matter how hard he fought, and his yellow-rimmed glasses and sharp golden eyes perfectly matched his even sharper intellect. He could analyze a situation at a mere glance, seldom needing to rely on his Quirk to come out on top of any opponents he engaged.
Beneath that stern, cold exterior though was a man who valued humor above nearly everything else. Though he himself rarely sported a smile, as All Might's former sidekick he knew the power and reassurance a smile could bring. As Japan fell further and further into darkness without the Symbol of Peace, Sir Nighteye espoused this value to all of his employees.
The work values of the Nighteye Agency could be summed up in two words: Professionalism, and Positivity. All employees were expected to handle their jobs with as much efficiency as possible, while also making sure they never lost the ability to smile no matter how grim reality became. After all, if even the heroes stopped smiling, then how could the public ever feel safe again?
Perhaps the best example of these values was the General Analysis Team—or as their colleagues liked to fondly call it, the "Super Happy Funtime Supernatural ESP Investigation Department."
The first half of the nickname came from the sidekick Figment, whose Quirk External Daydream allowed him to cast a large-scale illusion over any enclosed space. While he could use it in more practical ways like hiding a room's content or making there appear to be a small army of people waiting for an ambush, he preferred to use it more... creatively.
On this fine Saturday morning, anyone who entered the communal office space would find themselves in what appeared to be the inside of a lava lamp. Glowing bubbles of orange and pink plasma drifted around the space lazily, their shapes slowly morphing to form puffy 1s and 0s in a mockery of binary code. The air itself had a pinkish tint, sometimes fluctuating with other colors around particularly large bubbles of lava.
This was actually rather tame by Figment's standards, but the two and a half coworkers currently present in the office appreciated him toning it down so they could focus on their own work. Moashi Juzo, better known as Centipeder, was currently huddled in a corner reviewing a case file on a string of attacks against people with mutation Quirks. Meanwhile, the table at the center of the room was occupied by Sayonaka Saki, (slightly) better known as Lady of the Night.
Tall with narrow brown eyes and a brown bob styled to frame her face and accentuate her sharp features, Saki almost always carried an air of professionalism. Donning a black lacey mask and an outfit that Miss Joke once called "business woman meets pirate," she would dispatch villains with a brutal efficiency that could put even Sir Nighteye himself to shame. Her skill and dedication had led to her becoming one of his most trusted colleagues and subordinates by the age of twenty-seven.
Which made her office's state all that much more comical.
Like everyone else at the Nighteye Agency, Saki had her own unique brand of humor and plenty of personality quirks (pun absolutely intended). Anyone who opened the door to her personal office would find quite possibly the most disorganized space in the entire building, her desk and shelves littered with countless trinkets and random baubles. Even the walls had been plastered with everything from photos to drawings to magazine clippings, to the point people had bets about its actual color.
The cluttered mess in her office was such a sharp contrast from her apparent serious demeanor that it honestly made some people laugh, thinking it was a joke. Then when they'd watch her casually stroll inside and sit at her computer, their amusement would soon turn to dawning horror as they realized no, she actually used this space and she was in fact a Grade A hoarder.
Frankly, most people considered it a minor miracle she could find anything there. Of course, Saki knew exactly where to find whatever she might need in there at any given time, and she kept all those things for a specific reason (yes, even the burnt-out lightbulb, Genkaku).
It did, however, leave her with very little space to actually work in her office. Hence why she sat in the communal office space today, idly swirling a pen around one of the illusory lava clouds while she turned over a phone in her other hand. It had a rather feminine case, pink with white moons and stars printed on it—a perfect fit for the profile she'd been given on Uraraka Ochaco.
The request from UA's remnants to investigate the girl's phone had been quickly pushed to the top of their investigation pile. Their agency had a good working relationship with them after all, but more than that, a teenage girl's life might be on the line. Uraraka had contact with Midoriya Izuku and Shigaraki Tomura just that very week, which meant she'd likely be a target of the Alliance.
Nezu had managed to get into the phone the same day she disappeared, as Uraraka's mother happened to know the password. From there the investigation had hit the first roadblock, since she'd cleared her recent search and browsing history. It seemed she'd researched how to make it as hard to trace her as possible, another point in favor of her running away willingly. The information could be recovered of course, but it would take some time.
However, amusingly enough, she hadn't cleared everything. Random checks of various popular sites turned up a saved login for FacePage. Upon logging in, he'd found a single friend and conversation in her messenger history, which brought Nezu to the second roadblock.
While the account hadn't had its friends or chat history wiped, they had no way of actually finding out who "Alien_Queen_Pink" was. FacePage had become very privacy-oriented in face of the mounting dangers and public fear, to the point they hired people with Quirks that could encrypt the information and data on multiple levels. Each layer of additional Quirks on top of the site's built-in security measures made it that much harder to bypass it whether through Quirks or hacking.
In short, no one—villain or hero—could directly trace the anonymous accounts back to their sources. It was a revolutionary security feat that could only be accomplished with the infinite possibilities and combinations of Quirks the modern world provided.
Requesting the information directly from FacePage would take too much time. Just getting the warrant approved could take more than a month, and it would still take them at least two weeks to go through their own security. And unfortunately for them, Uraraka's friend had not given enough details to positively identify herself.
And that was where Saki came in.
Like her employer, Saki didn't have an obvious or flashy Quirk. In fact, hers might be one of the plainest ones out there, one people would never associate with a hero—and also half the inspiration for the second part of the GAT's nickname.
Psychometry, the ability to glean information about a person through physical contact with them or an object they possessed.
Even now images flowed through her mind as her fingers curled around the phone, her pen slicing through a pinkish-orange zero as she brought it back down to the sketchbook. A strange-looking girl stared up at her, with bright irises that contrasted with dark sclera and small, crooked horns protruding from her forehead. She etched in more lines around her hair, adding an air of shagginess to the already messy outline.
As she put on the finishing touch she frowned, letting the pen slip from her fingers. "Hey, Mail, mind playing soundboard for a bit?" she asked.
"Always," came the blithe response from directly above her. She tipped her head back to see the spectacled male floating above her, stretched out as if laying on his stomach with his arms pooled around his head while he peered down at her. She scooted her chair back a bit so he could get a better angle to look at the drawing, watching his torso dip down to study it while his legs continued to float above him.
Mail stood out at Nighteye Agency in a different way than most, and not just because he looked like a foreign-born teenager. Instead of a brightly colored costume or a neatly pressed business suit he wore a rumpled, dark blue polo shirt and faded slacks, his socks a dirty-looking gray-white. His natural coloring didn't stand out much more, with shaggy, dark brown hair and even his naturally tan complexion an almost dusty shade much less lively than typically associated with the sun.
His creamy-white-orange eyes probably provided the brightest spot of color he had, but few people noticed them the way Saki did. They had a curious glint as he looked at the drawing, slowly spinning to "lie" on his back as he rubbed his chin. "It's pretty detailed," he mused. "You got a pretty good look at this girl, huh?"
"Yeah, there was a lot more than just a photo. Those came from live memories. Her skin and hair is pink, by the way," she added casually. "Her irises are yellow, same with the horns. Uraraka's main impression of her is 'loud,' 'fun' and 'pink.'"
Mail hummed, his gaze flicking towards her upside-down. "You even got her impressions on another person? That's rare. So either her online buddy really reminded her of someone she knew, or they'd met?"
"I'm not actually sure," Saki said with a sigh, leaning back in her chair with a frown. "Something's really odd about this case." Psychometry didn't let her automatically know everything about an item's history. Instead, it picked up on the thoughts of the person holding the item, starting with the ones with the strongest emotions.
The first impression would always be the strongest, and after that more information would trickle into her mind slowly. The longer she maintained physical contact the clearer they would become, but even the strongest thoughts and memories tended to give her only brief glimpses of images that didn't last more than half a second. Generally she wouldn't have enough material to be able to make such a detailed sketch.
For some reason though, this girl's face had featured very prominently in Uraraka's thoughts while holding the phone. Saki had glimpsed her in a myriad of different outfits, but hadn't paid much attention to them since she'd focused on her face. "I think she sometimes wore a school uniform," she murmured thoughtfully, closing her eyes as she squeezed the phone. "It had... a blazer, I think?"
When she opened her eyes again Mail was sitting upright, looking at her almost intensely. "Are there stronger memories?" he asked.
"There are," she confirmed, setting the phone down on the table. She pushed aside the sketchbook and dragged over another open notebook, picking up the pen to begin jotting down thoughts and observations. "She was also thinking about Midoriya and Shigaraki a lot too, mostly Midoriya. She had a lot of worry and guilt associated with him. Something about... a plane crash?"
"Flight 174," Mail murmured. "His parents died in it."
"Is that what happened? Here I figured his mom died in a fire or something." Mail snorted and her own mouth twitched into a brief smile before quickly fading, becoming serious once more as she wrote '174'. "There's one other word that keeps surfacing. Quirkless."
"He was diagnosed as Quirkless," Mail mused, and his voice grew bitter, an ugly scowl twisting his face. "It's why the search efforts never really took off. No one cares about Quirkless orphans." Saki's grip tightened around her pen, her mouth pressing into a tight line. Yet another case of discrimination, huh.
"This is how you end up with dangerous trained child assassins hell-bent on taking down society," she groaned, rubbing her forehead. From the corner of her eye she noticed Moashi startle at his table and shoot her a particularly quizzical look, but she ignored him to refocus on Mail. "Okay, that part sucks, but she seemed weirdly stuck on it."
"Like, bigoted stuck?" he asked flatly, but she shook her head.
"No, like surprised. Like she expected... something else. It confused her." Mail's scowl softened to a more regular frown at that, crossing his arms and slowly spinning in the air as he mulled over it.
"The Midoriya family, or at least Inko and Izuku, never took a vacation outside of Musutafu. The closest thing would be some day trips to attend some hero conventions or meetups. Then from what Nezu said, the Uraraka family didn't get their big financial break until two years after he went missing. Before that they never had the funds for a proper family vacation. I can't think of a single opportunity for them to have met."
As Mail mused aloud to himself Saki paused, something suddenly clicking. "He wasn't a kid," she said slowly, and he stilled, his expression sharpening at her sudden switch to Russian.
"She has no memories of him as a child?" he asked, his own Russian slightly stilted but soon flowing much more naturally off his tongue than Japanese. Saki shook her head, a heavy frown forming.
"All of her thoughts of him have him as a teenager." She dropped the pen, grabbing Uraraka's cell phone and squeezing it tight. More images and thoughts flowed through her mind, pictures and feelings swirling faster and faster—Midoriya, fear, admiration, concern, villains, mall, Kamino, summer, robots, floating, falling—
She had to drop the phone at that point, hissing as she clutched at her head. Her brain felt sore and jumbled now, the speedy influx of images overloading her mind. As she pressed tighter in hopes the pressure could ease some of the aching she could hear the others get up from their desks to hurry over, Mail no doubt hovering closer as well. "Saki, give me a number," he ordered softly.
"Six," she gritted out. Six was relatively light by her standards, a very bad headache but not yet a migraine, but that didn't ease the pain in the moment. She could hear Moashi's steps approach her deliberately from the right, making sure she could hear him and avoid startling her.
"I believe you should take a break, Sayonaka," he suggested gently. "I could tell you were concentrating your psychometry more intensely even from halfway across the room. Pushing yourself won't do any good."
"Listen to the centipede man," Mail agreed sagely. "He is older and wiser than us both."
"Yeah, he's in charge of this team for a reason," Figment snorted. Saki just hummed quietly, massaging the area around her eyes as she tried to slow her thoughts. It was easier said than done though, unable to stop thinking about the dozens of brief glimpses of Uraraka's thoughts and feelings. All tiny pieces of a puzzle that still had many larger ones missing.
Something strange was going on, even more strange than anyone else could imagine.
"My babies are ready!"
Kaminari choked on the Electric Limeade soda he'd been drinking while Kyouka only barely managed to avoid knocking her laptop off her lap as Hatsume burst through the door from her workshop space. The eccentric inventor looked particularly manic at that moment, her pink dreadlocks more unkempt than usual and her eyes so wide they could barely see her irises.
"Did you get any sleep last night?" Kyouka asked while Kaminari coughed and hacked next to her.
"No time for sleep, babies needed to be finished!" Hatsume responded with missing a beat, turning to drag two mannequins behind her. At some point that week she'd procured two mannequins attached to wheeled stands to host their costumes during her tinkering. Kyouka legitimately had no idea when or where she'd gotten them, they just seemed to magically appear one day and gave her a heart attack.
Their costumes looked largely unchanged from the last time she'd seen them. They hadn't found a need for any major alterations, just some minor changes to the equipment Hatsume came up with after reading up all the theories and gossip and one minor cosmetic detail. It still surprised her Hatsume finished it so fast though.
"Should we test it before patrol?" she asked, folding her laptop and setting it on the coffee table.
"Already handled it!" Hatsume replied without missing a beat. "The changes don't actually use your Quirks so I took care of all the testing myself!"
"I-is that why—hack—y-your hair's all frizzy?" Kaminari asked breathlessly, his coughing finally starting to subside. At that point Kyouka realized that Hatsume's hair did indeed look a bit more frizzy around the edges... and just slightly burnt.
"They're perfectly functional and will not explode!" she replied, totally ignoring the question and raising completely new concerns. "Just put them on and go show my babies to the world!"
"Only if you take a nap while we're gone," Kyouka said flatly. And so half an hour later found them outside the warehouse on their third-ever patrol, now fitted with their slightly remodeled gear and probably ready to face whatever came their way.
Contrary to their first outing, vigilantism turned out to overall be fairly dull and mundane. They'd done their second patrol the previous evening, starting at eleven and returning to the warehouse around one thirty. In that time Kyouka and Kaminari got no action other than stopping a single mugger, and that hadn't even required a fight since the mugger just ran the second he saw them. They returned earlier than planned because they just didn't have much to do.
After thinking about it, Kyouka figured it wasn't actually all that surprising. While crime was more rampant in this world compared to their own, the types of crime were different. It either tended to be small fry like muggers, or big stuff like attacks in the middle of the city—way beyond what a couple of teenage vigilantes could handle. Hosu also still had a couple of publicly operating heroes like Ingenium on patrol, who typically handled bigger villains.
Honestly, it was pure luck they'd gotten to stop that convenience store robbery on their very first outing. It didn't take long for Ingenium to arrive after the police had been called, and that was the general pattern for his responses to robberies like that.
Maybe that one quiet patrol worked to their advantage though, because it gave Hatsume time to upgrade their gear before their next big debut.
"Do you really think this stuff won't explode?" Kaminari asked doubtfully as they trailed through an alleyway.
"Probably," Kyouka responded with less confidence than she liked. She raised a hand for him to be quiet before he could whine, picking up on three sets of footsteps nearby. Peering around the edge of the alley, she saw a woman striding down the street rather fast while nervously glancing over her shoulder at the pair of men walking behind her. They weren't facing her so Kyouka couldn't tell much, but something about the way they moved left a bad taste in her mouth.
She pulled back and held up two fingers to Kaminari to signal two hostiles. He nodded as he took a chance to peek at them, but tensed and then made a nonsensical hand signal before bursting into the street. Kyouka mentally cursed as she moved to follow but stopped short. In the time she hadn't been looking the men had made their move, one's arm split apart into fleshy-colored extensions that wrapped around the terrified woman's body and mouth.
She ducked back into the alley before they could notice her. No point exposing both of them at once. "HEY!" Kaminari shouted, and the trio turned to look at him in surprise. Now that Kyouka had a better view of their faces, she got an idea of their Quirks. The guy holding the woman looked average enough aside from his arm splitting up and stretching like bands of cloth, but the other had scales around his eyes and smoke furling out the corners of his mouth.
"Who the hell're you?" the smoking man scoffed, turning to face Kaminari with a scowl.
"The guy who's about to kick your ass," Kaminari replied. While he talked to the man Kyouka retreated deeper into the alley with a glance at the roof. Climbing up there would make too much noise, so she decided to circle around the building and exit from the next alleyway down for a pincer maneuver. It took her almost a full minute, but she trusted Kaminari to be able to distract them.
By the time she emerged back onto the street Kaminari was holding his own pretty well, just telling off the guys. "Seriously, can't you just pick up a girl normally like everyone else?" he ranted. "Randomly grabbing her off the street is a serious turn-off, dude."
"For the last time, we don't want to freaking date her!" the split-arm guy growled while his companion had even more smoke pouring from his face. With their attention firmly focused on Kaminari, Kyouka glanced at her remodeled amplifier jacks to plan her next move. The core functionality remained the same of course, but the rumors about Kaminari's gloves having a taser function had seriously inspired Hatsume.
In her words: What better way to hide their Quirk than to pretend they didn't have one?
The idea sounded crazy at first, but it made sense once Kyouka figured out what she actually meant by that. They could supplement their actual Quirks with gear that mimicked other Quirks, adding red herrings to the speculation. Since no one had more than one Quirk, people would naturally connect it to the gear even when they actually used their Quirks. They might even believe them to actually be Quirkless.
At least, that's what Kyouka figured Hatsume's statement meant. She hadn't actually said anything else before holing herself up in the lab, and only gave them a bare-bones rundown on how the new equipment worked before they left. Right now she could think of one feature that would be useful, and she grimaced at the thought but pushed past it.
Catching Kaminari's eye, she tapped her ear and got a subtle nod from him, and she slowly bent down to run her fingers against her boots. It didn't take long to find two buttons side-by-side near the top of the left boot, and she took a breath to brace herself. Her earphone jacks plugged into her sound-canceling headphones, the world becoming a bit more muffled around her, and she pressed down.
An ear-splitting shriek erupted from the speakers, making her wince. Noise-canceling headphones only did so much even when she plugged her earphone jacks into them, her hearing too sensitive for them to fully work, but it negated the worst of the damage. The villains shouted in alarm as they jumped, the one holding the woman hostage loosening his grip as his free hand shot up to clutch one ear.
Kaminari was less bothered, having already switched on his own headphones, and immediately launched a lightning rod at the guy with the smoking mouth. Even as he shot the first bolt of electricity at him Kyouka charged, grabbing the woman's arm and successfully yanking her free. The man spun to face her and lashed out violently, his arm splitting into more rope-like sections, but she barely dodged out of the way while shoving the woman away.
"Run and call the police!" she ordered the woman. The screeching from the boots' speakers had already ceased, but between that and yanking the woman free it had disoriented the guy long enough for Kaminari to throw a disc at his arm. Following Hatsume's idea of Quirk-mimicking gear, she'd developed a few discs for Kaminari that would shock whoever they attached to without him using his Quirk.
Sure enough, the villain screamed as electricity coursed through it, the extensions of his arm waving around wildly like the streamers on a carp kite. Smoke began to rise from it too, probably a really bad sign that made Kaminari curse in a panic. Kyouka paid it little mind though, her attention focused on the other guy whose cheeks now puffed up as he glared at the blond.
Instinct took over at the threat to her friend, slamming her hands on the ground next to his feet as her earphone jacks plugged into the amplifier jacks. She activated her Quirk and the pavement cracked under her palms, breaking apart under the man's feet and knocking him off-balance. Kyouka delivered a harsh punch to the back of his knee for good measure, and rolled out of the way side as he went down.
In the meantime the other guy had finally stopped spasming from the shock, the disc thankfully not exploding. Kaminari didn't give him a chance to recover, lunging at him and slamming his fist into his stomach. The man went skidding back with a pained wheeze, clutching his stomach as he tried to get his footing. Kyouka had coincidentally rolled in his direction, so he ended up tripping over her. Not something she planned, but she wasn't complaining as he went down with a groan.
More importantly though, the other guy was still conscious, and judging by the glare he shot Kyouka he was furious. His eyes almost seemed to glow with hatred as his cheeks puffed up, dark wisps of smoke already escaping the corners of his mouth. Oh, shit.
At that moment Kaminari basically crashed into him, diving down so his shoulder collided with the man's stomach. His breath escaped with a pained shout, fire and smoke spewing almost harmlessly into the sky as the impact rolled him onto his back. Figuring Kaminari had it handled Kyouka quickly crawled over to the other guy, pulling zip ties from her pocket to quickly tie up his arms.
Fortunately he was too dazed and sore to resist, and by the time she finished and turned around Kaminari had started restraining the other guy. She noted he'd shoved a wad of fabric in his mouth, making her arch her eyebrows. "What is that?"
"My old socks," Kaminari responded proudly, making her almost flinch. "I took them off when changing earlier and slipped them into my pocket on accident I guess, but hey, it works!"
...Kyouka didn't even like the villain, but she felt nothing but sympathy for the look of pure disgust and horror he sported at the revelation. "Find something that doesn't have your DNA on it," she grumbled, resisting the urge to smack her forehead at his stupidity. Kaminari's proud smile quickly faded as he nodded and got up to run to the alley, leaving Kyouka to watch over the would-be villains.
Their second take-down was a lot rougher than their first, but they did it. They managed to take down two thugs and save a woman. Her eyes flickered around the street, soon settling on a security camera above the door to one of the nearby buildings pointed right at them. She stared at it for several moments before deliberately turning her back on it.
Later when police would review the security footage of the encounter, they would have a clear shot of the large, white "1-A" embroidered on the back of both vigilantes' jackets.
To everyone wondering how Kaminari and Jirou would try to be found by others: here's your answer. Also, say hi to Saki and Mail! Genuinely can't say which half of the chapter excites me more. Quick note: Mail is pronounced like "Mile", not "male". I have no idea what country that name is from (I have seen people with that name though, including Matt from Death Note), so if anyone knows I'd be really grateful! It doesn't matter to the overall story but I'm just really curious.
Question for next time: what other "fake Quirks" can you imagine Hatsume creating with her inventions? (Asking because I may end up using some. I've got a couple other inventions in mind, but more ideas are always welcome!)