Bloating

Recently caught the plague and was inspired by being personally touched by Nurgle's love to write some more in return. This story is not dead, my muse is just a sleepy bitch.

Eiji Todoroki panted, unkempt nails carving shallow red trenches into his pale skin as he desperately sought to relieve -or perhaps simply distract himself from- the unending itch raging all over his body. He felt like he was burning, like every inch of his skin was on fire in a way his own flames had never -could never- cause him. His eyes watered and twitched as his control over his quirk slipped, red fire crawling across his skin in erratic, directionless trails.

He couldn't make it go away, he had gone to a dozen (well vetted and discrete) doctors, each of which had given him a different diagnosis and different treatments; not a damn one had had any effect. It had only been getting worse, more distracting and painful with every passing hour. He hadn't been able to work in over a month, not after he had broken down clawing at his face mid-fight and lost his grip on his flames. Unnecessarily killing a small-time villain didn't look great on his resume, but it wasn't something he'd never had to cover up before.

Burning down a suburban home and killing a family of five was a lot more difficult to wave away.

He had been none too politely "asked" to take some time off while the government smoothed things over. He'd vaguely heard something about blaming the villain for the deaths and the fire that swept through the neighborhood (and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of property damage, though fortunately there hadn't been any additional fatalities), but he had been too busy trying to resist the urge to take a cheese grater to his skin to care.

He could feel his mind unraveling, even as his nails caught on something and peeled a thin strip of skin from his face he couldn't keep his fractured, bleeding thoughts from swirling back to the unending prickling fire under his skin like broken glass in a drain. His breaths became shorter and more rapid as his fingers tore away at his face, seeking that damnable itch yet doing nothing to dull it. The feeling was deeper, so far down that even when his nails ground against his bones he knew he just wasn't reaching deep enough to drive out the infernal burning that gnawed at his every thought.

He could barely even feel his actions, barely even noticed the hot blood pouring over his fingers or the flames bursting from his ragged wounds and torn eyes. Not until a shrill scream caught what was left of his ears, and drew his empty, ruined attention back to reality. His vision was in barely less tatters than his mind, but even with what little remained of his eyes he could see what he had done.

He had tried to burn himself, burn away his crawling flesh. Instead, he had burned his home… and everyone in it.

The strips of slightly charred flesh one might generously call ears hanging loosely off his head picked up the sounds of sirens in the distance, though most of the fragments of his tattered attention not absorbed by his writhing nerves were taken up by the agonized screams of his daughter.

Izuku stared up at the building before her, the wide smile on her face visible even through her heavy biohazard suit. She watched numerous other excited teens buzzing about, chatting amongst each other and slowly heading into the building before her. Once, the mere suggestion that she would be standing here, before the gates to UA, would have earned her scorn and mockery; now, however, she couldn't imagine failing to get in.

She took a deep breath and released it with a happy smile, "Okay, this'll be easy as dying."

"That's an odd thing to say, sounds kinda pessimistic to me," the unexpected voice nearly made her jump straight out of her suit. She whirled around, probably faster than the speaker expected a being of her size could given the surprised squeak they let out at the sight.

Compared to her now rather tremendous frame the girl before her seemed down right tiny, though she was probably closer to average than short. A look of surprise faded into a smile that stretched the brunette's perpetually blushing cheeks, "Wow, you're pretty quick for such a big guy! Hey, I thought we weren't supposed to get our costumes until after we got in?"

Izuku blinked, her singular eye sweeping over the other girl. She was, on second glance, indeed rather average height for a human girl of her age. Her brown eyes held not a hint of the fear or disgust Izuku had only barely gotten used to since she ascended, though she attributed that more to ignorance than any sort of better nature.

Realizing she had immersed herself in analysis to cover her surprise and anxiety at being addressed (let alone by a pretty girl, she didn't have many good experiences with such people approaching her in the past), she scratched the back of her helmet sheepishly. "Er, it's not a costume. I'm required by court order to wear a biohazard suit at all times in public, due to the nature of my… uh, quirk." She stifled a grimace behind her grimy faceplate, expecting the girl to flee as most who learned some of her nature tended to.

Instead, the brunette merely quirked an eyebrow, though her smile did dim slightly. "Wow, that's gotta suck. Though, you must have quite the quirk for something like that to happen!" The girl blinked suddenly, "Oh gosh, I totally forgot to introduce myself! I'm Ochako Uraraka."

Izuku smiled only slightly nervously, "I'm Izuku, I-Izuku Midoriya. And uh, yeah, my uh quirk is… certainly something. It's kinda hard to explain all of it, suffice to say I'm really strong and really durable but I'm always sick." She decided that explaining the full extent of what her Daemonhood granted her was probably not a good idea, not the least because she didn't know how to describe half of it to a mortal without driving them insane. She had several notebooks detailing what abilities she had thus far discovered, but given the last person she'd shown one to had gouged out their eyes and had later been discovered eating disease ridden hookers, she felt it probably wasn't a great idea to get too in depth with anyone else.

Her master still chuckled when he remembered that incident, though her pouting seemed to cool his amusement somewhat.

Ochako waited for a moment before seeming to realize that Izuku didn't seem inclined to elaborate further. "Wow, that's pretty cool. Well, I'll see you inside." So saying, the brunette waved at the towering greenette and faded into the shifting crowd of UA hopefuls heading for the entrance. Izuku watched the girl go for a moment, her single eye easily able to track her despite the people in between them.

A heavy sigh flowed through the vents on the enormous Daemon's suit, pushing virulent bacteria and mold that had grown in the system into the air around her. She only spent a moment longer staring at the building and watching students enter before the realization that she was getting close to being late overrode her awe at the prestigious school, sending her sprinting inside.

I grinned, using the haft of my scythe to stir a viscous greenish fluid that bubbled maliciously, releasing foul smelling yellowish bubbles into the air. I was standing on the rim of a large, rusty iron cauldron my new converts had managed to dredge up from somewhere, performing extremely basic plague alchemy while my minions did minion things. I wasn't exactly knowledgeable about the exact mechanics of running a gang, so I simply had the existing lieutenants continue doing their jobs as they had been before but with a bit of a Nurgle twist.

I'm aware we're somewhere along the creation and distribution chain for various narcotics, but I cared little for the detailed logistics of day to day drug dealing drudgery; only how it can be used to increase my power. Spreading Nurgle's love, even in small ways before I had the skill and power to fulfill more elaborate schemes, was simply Chaos Champion 101; do the things your God likes, increase the source of your deity's power, and you will reap the benefits! Thankfully for me, disease is relatively easy to spread, and the other gods I'm trying to create aren't that much harder to appease.

Fujun's prostitutes were easy to infect with some of the less visible (and longer incubating) diseases I had cooked up. People all but expected to get sick when they went to see prostitutes, though that certainly didn't mean being known for pestilent whores was a good rep to have. Thankfully, most people are looking for STDs and the like after a nice night with a profit oriented girl; give them something that isn't obviously sexually transmitted and that incubates for a few weeks, and very few of them will think to blame the seemingly healthy hooker for it.

This also had the side benefit of giving some scraps to Slaanesh, and occasionally Khorne when one of the guests got a little too rough and Fujun took their head off with a machete. When he told me that was standard practice, I laughed; I had expected him to say he just let them kill the girls and film it for blackmail, but apparently highly skilled prostitutes were (usually) worth more than what most clients are worth in blackmail. The times we do blackmail people also kicks some crumbs to Tzeentch, which is… good, I suppose.

Drugs, on the other hand, were a bit trickier. Slipping pathogens into crack or meth or even weed would require very carefully crafted diseases to survive the distribution method (fire and life don't tend to get along well, after all). However, anything snorted, drunk, injected, or otherwise consumed with minimal cooking could very easily be tainted; cocaine, heroin, pcp, and just about every flavour of edible that my men sold, pushed, or otherwise distributed was tainted in some way. While this would undoubtedly net us quite a lot of souls and suffering on its own, as soon as I could figure out fire-proof diseases (or reliably create the sort of microscopic-daemon-plagues that really make Nurgle scary) I'd be slipping them into everything.

Unsurprisingly for the God of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, Slaaneshi energies were also created by feeding and causing additions. Tzeentchian energy seemed to be generated by forcibly addicting people; apparently the bird lover liked it when people's fates were suddenly shifted. And, of course, Khorne doesn't much care if the person tearing heads off and battering their fists bloody on shattered bones was in their right mind or not, so tainted pcp driven rampages were right up his alley.

Unfortunately, I wasn't skilled or powerful enough to make tailored afflictions for certain emotions and responses just yet. Most of the shit I was making currently was just practice; the majority of the things I'd cooked up would simply be dumped in various far away lakes, rivers, sewers, and anywhere it could sink into the groundwater without being found. The more lethal or amusing of them wound up either slathered on weapons, poured into the pool around my altar, or drunk by my daemons (and occasionally the more devout amongst my followers, though few of them had reached that level of faith). I made very sure to explicitly tell my servants to dump most (but not all) of the vats far away from here, preferably in entirely different cities and smaller towns (farms being a particularly nice choice) to obfuscate where I was located; I allowed some of the barrels to be dumped relatively nearby to ensure anyone searching for patterns wouldn't see a suspicious lack of victims around here and start asking questions.

Plans for selling and using traditional bioweapons rolled around the back of my mind, but at this moment I was attempting a proof of concept; I wanted to make a disease that would induce happiness, preferably with a deep sense of contentment and joy. And, of course, I sought a way to bring despair, misery, and intense sorrow as well; Nurgle's love is often quite the heavy millstone to those unworthy of it. If I could manage that, I could provide a new "narcotic" with the greatest anti-depressant effect ever seen, like Ecstasy multiplied manifold. I would create bliss in a bottle, joy in a pill, happiness in an aerosol…

And all it would cost is absolutely everything.

Of course, that was mostly for the future, when I got a far better grasp on controlling and manipulating disease. In the shorter term, I actually had a reason beyond spreading misery and destruction for releasing my less world threatening concoctions into the world; to spread desperation, and allow me a foothold into the pharmaceutical field.

The diseases being released mostly had a low infectivity rate but would generally cause a great deal of pain, culminating in either death or a life of misery. This would result in scared and desperate people flooding hospitals and finding their doctors utterly incapable of helping them, as each and every disease was completely new and had nothing even approaching a cure. Their horrible suffering would drive many to suicide to escape the agony, but more importantly it would create a sudden influx of desperate people searching for anything to relieve their own or their loved ones' pain.

Unfortunately for them, no one could help them… no one but me, of course.

The hopeless would give their souls to Nurgle when they couldn't handle their despair, and those that still clung to hope would find me (or my servants once I managed to train some half-decent plague sorcerers) waiting with an offer. While long term I intended to actually slip into the legitimate pharmaceutical industry and start selling tainted cures, in the short term acting as a faith healer offering to relieve incurable illnesses would net me a noteworthy amount of souls.

I still wasn't entirely sure how my powers worked, but I'd already noted I was stronger than when I first woke up. It didn't seem to be time alone that had caused the increase in power, I could clearly correlate a small but noticeable growth whenever I claimed a soul. Killing was faster and seemed more short term effective, but those who had sworn their souls to me seemed to provide a slow trickle of power overtime; I always liked to think of myself as a long term planner and thus, I wanted to convert as many people as possible to my brand new ancient religion.

Whether or not I was any good at long term planning remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I had pushed my men to look into the arms trade, despite how heavily illegal it was in Japan. I cared nothing about the law of this land's opinions, and I really wanted guns! Ninety percent of Quirks are less combat effective than a pistol and only the top one percent or less can compete with even a twentieth century rifle; a few Nurgle blessed thugs with AKs would be worth most of the League of Villains with some training.

Of course, actually acquiring said weapons and ammo and then actually training my men to use them effectively would take time. Even dinky pistols are hard to get in this quirky nightmare country, and the era of cheap soviet weapons is a few centuries gone now. Luckily, the world will never want for warlords, maniacs, and the arms dealers to enable them despite what authoritarian governments may desire; my lust for lead will only be difficult to satisfy, not impossible.

As of right now, a quick sip of my bubbling brew told me it probably wasn't what I was looking for; the skin around my jaw briefly bubbled over in a yellow rash before settling back into my usual extreme pale. It did have a lovely lemony taste though, so that was something at least. I passed a ladle full to one of the Plaguebearers I kept as bodyguards who, after mulling over the taste for a bit, concurred; the disease would be plenty virulent and debilitating, but it didn't affect the emotions at all. Another one for the dump heap, though I made a note of the recipe for the next time that I decided to make something lemon flavoured.

At least the rashes would be hideous and uncomfortable enough to make people desperate for my aid; not lethal enough to be a proper weapon though, even if the scars might cause complications for the particularly unlucky. I almost instructed my acolytes to dump most of it in a river before changing my mind and ordering them to break into a confectionery factory and mix it into a yellow frosting vat; it was funny, and it would further throw off anyone looking for patterns. "Oh well, onto the rest of the day's itinerary." As much as I might want to, I couldn't spend all my time tinkering with plague magic.

I left the various pots of festering filth to my more devoted acolytes, or at the very least those corrupted enough to survive breathing the disease encrusted air. My bodyguard daemons followed behind me, grabbing thick rubber robes and biker helmets (thankfully, quirked society had plenty of clothes for "unusual" body and head types, accommodating horns had been easy enough) to hide their nature as we headed to the more central part of the warehouse. I took a moment to observe the progress made in the last few weeks, watching my bloated, dribbling servants buzz about our filth and religious symbol coated lair like happy little wasps at work.

Japanese summer break isn't very long, around forty days. In that span of not even two full months, our headquarters had transformed from a run down warehouse to an incredibly overgrown and rusty warehouse; fungus and slime grew everywhere and symbols of my tastefully edited pantheon faintly radiating dark power from the innumerable places they had been scrawled, burned, sprayed, and grown. For the average cult, this amount of corruption in such a short time was truly worthy of praise! Most don't even start getting the kind of blessings my underling cultists have received for many years, especially with the decidedly limited amount of human sacrifice we've been engaging in.

While the place was beginning to properly radiate chaotic energy, the actual gangsters inhabiting my growing garden by and large just looked like people afflicted with various stages and severities of sickness. A few standouts had some minor mutations aside from Nurgle's blessed infections (ranging from a few with greenish skin tones to one particularly successful thug who had survived a disemboweling by growing a jagged maw in his stomach), but most just had the standard Nurgle package of pain immunity and the blessing of perpetually remaining just this side of dying from their blessed afflictions.

I snapped my fingers and one of my daemonic guards handed me a grimy and rotten clipboard with my schedule printed on prematurely yellowed paper; the physical gesture was wholly unnecessary, the true signal being a mental command in the Warp, but I liked the added flair. I barely glanced at the stained paper, only using it to reaffirm where I was headed before handing the wooden slate back over to the incarnation of misery and decay. Just as I thought, next on the agenda was getting myself some snazzy new clothes to give my new "faith healer" persona the proper gravitas.

Expert tailors were a dime a dozen in a city with enough wealth to attract luxury, but tailors capable of discretion were slightly less common. Still numerous enough that it had taken me a little while to narrow the list down to one who had notably never been caught selling any secrets. I wasn't truly that concerned about anything being leaked; even if my presence wasn't hazardous to one's health and sanity, I wasn't about to casually discuss my evil plans like a dumbass.

Besides, she was recommended by Izuku after all.

Yes, it seems in this world the green haired hero fanatic's mother had a slightly different quirk and with it a very different career; she, with what had been described to me as murky legality, used her telekinetic control over small objects to become a very successful seamstress. Officially she catered to the rich and heroes of good standing, unofficially villains tended to pay much better and most knew better than to go spreading any rumors. While she wasn't considered the highest end tailor around (mostly because her services were of questionable legality), the idea of Mamadoriya making my priestly garb was too amusing to pass up.

That, and I'm feeling rather partial to some oyakodon in the future; Izuku's mom may not be the hottest milf in the setting, but I always liked collecting sets.

Waiting outside the increasingly dilapidated warehouse that made up our main base was an extremely dark green car with heavily gold tinted windows. I didn't care enough about vehicles to recognize the model, but the large and vaguely sedan shaped hunk of metal appeared decently expensive. It was doubtlessly stolen, but someone in this gang turned cult knew how to replace the plates and had changed the paint, so that shouldn't be too much of a problem. The inside had been reupholstered in the same near-black green and gold, a modified colour scheme I had decided to unrepentantly steal from Abaddon; the man may have been a shit leader, but he had good taste in colour pairings.

Technically it wasn't the same style as the Black Legion, but from a distance most wouldn't notice it was actually very dark green instead of black.

I didn't trust a daemon to do a good job driving -they had a nasty tendency to forget about the petty shit, like physics- so it was rather fortunate that Nobutan had volunteered to escort me, claiming it was his job as chief security officer (a title I half suspected he had entirely fabricated) to ensure my safety. I doubt he had intended to volunteer to serve as my driver, but watching him desperately try to keep his face even when I informed him of such had been hilarious.

Nobutan merely gave me a nod through the mirror as I sat down, leaving me and my infernal attendants to sit in silence. Plaguebearers don't really make good conversation partners (too pedantic for small talk, though they were very enthusiastic about discussing their work) and my lead enforcer took his job far too seriously to allow such distractions. I wasn't about to carry tracking equipment around on me despite how sinful a song cellphones sang to me until I could set up daemon powered security, so I was left with my thoughts and the gentle wheezing of my guards.

I barely withheld a sigh, deciding to simply check in on Izuku's progress with her entrance exam as the car slowly crept through traffic.

Izuku was glad she had turned off her suit's external speakers, lest her possibly future classmates hear her quietly fangirling over the hero that was administering their exam. Even then she got more than a few glances from the people about her; though, she couldn't really tell if that was about how she was vibrating in place or how her nearly twenty foot frame had managed to fit inside a desk made for tiny mortals. She was quite thankful she had practiced (very, very extensively) keeping her entropic aura and her more visible infections from spreading out in her excitement or she was sure her desk and her neighbors would have been a pile of burbling slime by now.

As it was, despite some mildly irritated or amused mutterings from the mortals around her, the teacher didn't seem bothered by her enthusiasm. Seriously, how were all these humans so blasé about being lectured to by a hero! Sure, Present Mic wasn't exactly an A-lister, but she couldn't be the only one that listened to his radio show! At least her Lord found her rambling about the actual professional hero in the room interesting.

Apparently her thoughts on how his lack of nostrils might affect sinus infections amused him the most of her sprawling thoughts.

The written portion of the exam had flown by, though she was fairly sure she had done well enough on it. Her Lord told her he had no doubts she would succeed, and while she didn't usually share his confidence, she had thought the test was a little too easy. Who wouldn't know the optimal team setup amongst a given group of heroes to deal with a given situation? That kinda stuff was simple compared to the more esoteric math questions.

Being a daemon made math a little harder to grasp; two plus two doesn't always equal four in the Warp, after all.

A loud voice drew her from her mutterings, drawing her gaze from distant waves of the Warp back to this infantesimal material moment. "Two Things! One," a sharply angular teen snapped his arm to point at the paper handed out at the start of the lecture, his voice just slightly below outright shouting. "You Stated There Are Three Types Of Villains, Yet The Paper Displays A Fourth! Mistakes Like This Are Most Unbecoming Of A Prestigious Institute Like UA!" She could feel her Master's contempt at the boy's words and tone, his irritation swirling right alongside her own. Who did this punk think he is, talking to a hero and teacher about their own lesson plan like that?

Her Lord's irritation turned to outright anger at his next words though. "And Two," the stiff-backed bluenette whirled to point at her, "Cease Your Bouncing And Remove That Costume! You Are Distracting The Other Students, And Wearing Costumes Outside Official Hero Activity And Holidays Is Strictly Frowned Upo-" His ranting was cut off by a sudden and violent coughing fit, Izuku's embarrassed irritation reaching across the sways of the warp to twist a harmless infection the boy never would have felt into something far more virulent and aggressive in an instant.

The blue haired asshole collapsed to his knees, face turning red and eyes going wide behind his square glasses as he tried and failed to get his coughing under control. Izuku barely kept from visibly panicking, she hadn't meant to do that! Well, she had but she hadn't actually intended to enact it! Her thoughts tended to have more influence in the Warp than they ever had as a mortal; a moment of not actively restraining her power had her desire for him to be silent mixed with her disease nurturing nature to bolster a bacteria in his lungs that normally never would have been able to truly bother him into something dangerous.

Only her Lord's voice managed to keep her from visibly reacting, "Stay calm. Act surprised and concerned like the peons around you, and put that new sickness into remission before it kills him; it would be far too suspicious if he dies of a previously undetected illness right after being belligerent towards you."

She tried her best to display concerned body language in her suit as she focused on the disease currently eating the rude hero aspirant's lungs, lulling it to sleep and dulling the boy's immune response until his coughing petered out. It took a bit of effort to get the newly born sickness under control, she wasn't as skilled at putting diseases into dormancy as her Master; the bluenette would suffer from a chronic cough for the rest of his life, but Nurgle's mercy would let him keep that life.

The rude boy lay on the ground curled up in something halfway to the fetal position, desperately gasping for breath as tears ran down his faintly purple face. Present Mic patted his back comfortingly before standing up with a sigh, "You alright kid? Do you have an inhaler on ya?" The blonde hero watched the stiff aspirant shake his head with an even expression, "That looked like one hell of an asthma attack, are you sure you're cut out for this whole heroing deal? I don't wanna stamp on your dreams but if you keel over like that in front of a villain, you may well die." He spoke with a gentle concern, voice pitched just right to not sound condescending even while telling the kid his dreams were out of his reach; Izuku mentally took note of that tone, filing it away for if she ever needed to comfort a hurt civilian in the future.

A look of mixed horror and anger bubbled up from under the oxygen starved purple of the bluenette's face, "I-I-I've never had an asthma attack before, I'm fairly sure I've just-" He cut off, a deep and scratchy cough tearing its way up his throat before he could finish. Present Mic pursed his lips in the way only a man trying hard not to grimace can, before plastering a smile on his face that would have seemed sincere if Izuku couldn't taste his sad exasperation in the Warp.

"Hey kid, let me walk you to the infirmary and, if Recovery Girl gives you the all clear, we'll let you take one of the later practical exams, okay?" Seeing the still coughing teen attempt to respond before giving up and tearfully nodding, the Teacher stood up straight and addressed the rest of the class, "Alright kiddos, looks like I'm gonna be a bit busy for a little while, but fortunately yours truly thought ahead and the path to where your practical exam will be taking place is well marked! You all follow the signs, and we'll get this test going right on schedule!"

Most of the students simply shrugged their shoulders and began filing out of the test room, only a few electing to stay back a little while and watch the blonde hero help the bluenette to his feet and out of the room before leaving as well. Izuku was one of the few who watched the duo leave before following the crowd, though her delay was more due to her master's commentary than anything else.

Said master also had to remind her not to get lost in her speculation, and actually head to the practical testing zone.