Izuku was a step away from the doors out of Aldera, a step away from a weekend of freedom and not having to look over his shoulder to make sure Kacchan wasn't about to pounce on him for obsessing over heroes or planning to be one himself, when he felt fingers close around the collar of his shirt. Not even bothering to fight it, Izuku let himself get dragged away from the doors and towards the janitor's closet. Kacchan hurled him inside, making the mops and brooms carefully hung up fall all over him.
"See you Monday, Deku!" Kacchan grinned and closed the door.
"Kacchan!" he wailed. "Let me out!" Izuku pounded on the door, even as he heard Kacchan and his friends cackling and walking away. "Someone… anyone!"
He kept banging for another fifteen minutes before the throbbing in his hands made him stop. Sinking to the floor, Izuku buried his face in his kneecaps and let out a long, exhausted sigh. He took out his phone, dreading the disappointment in his mother's voice when he made her leave work again, only to find he didn't get any service this deep in the school.
Izuku made himself relax with a few deep breaths. He probably wouldn't be stuck the whole weekend. His mom would realize he got stuck at school and come to get him. And in the meantime, he still had his backpack, which meant he had a bottle of water and a bunch of snacks he kept for situations like these. He even had a mop bucket if he couldn't hold it anymore.
He opened his backpack. No snacks, no water, and a suspiciously broken zipper. His stomach chose that exact moment to grumble noisily and remind Izuku that Kacchan had tossed his lunch in the garbage.
At least he still had the bucket.
Izuku eyed the door. Licking his lips and finding them dry as a bone, Izuku braced himself and swung it open. On the other side was yet another broom closet, with labels in a foreign language. Izuku closed the door and tried again. This time, it opened out onto a tiny island in the middle of a lake. Izuku poked his head through and looked around. The shack above him was a stiff breeze away from falling over, and the only boat to shore was half-submerged, missing a board at the bottom, and had a snapping turtle lounging atop the only oar.
Izuku closed the door, imagining the shack falling apart as he left. Then he opened it again. Freezing gusts drove icy daggers through his skin, and snowflakes like shuriken slashed at his face. Izuku slammed the door shut, shivered, and huddled for warmth in a dusty pile of mops.
Once he could feel his face again, Izuku anxiously tried the door. It opened out onto a busy street packed with stone buildings and foreign people. The moment he got a hostile glance sent his way, Izuku yelped and slammed the door.
Again and again, Izuku tried the door, and each time, he found a place more hostile or remote than the last. He found a sunken ship, with naught but rusted metal and a single pane of glass between him and a curious, massive octopus. He found a quaint, remote cottage that his phone could only say was somewhere in Ireland. He stumbled into a church in Detroit, plastered with graffiti and littered with empty beer cans, cigarette butts, and discarded needles. He found a Taco Bell bathroom and promptly decided he preferred the bucket. One door opened directly out to a cliff, with sharp rocks and splashing waves a long drop below him, and another led out of an RV stranded in the middle of a desert.
At some point, Izuku had given up on ever getting out of the closet and was simply mindlessly opening and closing the door, numbly taking in a variety of breathtaking sceneries, bustling cities, and mundane closets and restrooms. In the midst of channel-surfing the entire globe, he nearly closed the door again when some primal part of him sequestered deep within the lizard brain buried beneath human consciousness and rationality, conditioned by generations of science fiction classics and pop culture, recognized the sleek, sterile, narrow corridor of a spacecraft.
Izuku swung the door wide and propped it open with a bucket. He reverently stepped inside, marveling at the way the steel floor rang as he stepped across it, running his fingers over the walls and gawking at the broken digital screen next to the door. It looked as though the sliding door had broken, and someone had bolted hinges and a metal plate in its place.
The room had a window. Izuku pressed his face right up against the glass. An inky black void, speckled with countless bright stars swirled around him.
"No way," Izuku breathed as he watched the cosmos dance before him. "Is this the ISS? No one's been up there since the dawn of Quirks! How is it still up here? And where is Earth?" He swung his head around, but he couldn't see any sign of his planet.
Izuku ran towards the other door in the room, only to realize in mid-stride that he was running. In space. Where there wasn't supposed to be any gravity. He probably wouldn't have noticed, except it felt slightly off, just light enough to give his hasty sprint an awkward springiness that nearly made him trip. Yet, it wasn't nearly so little that he could explain it away as a quirk of space.
Whatever spacefaring craft Izuku had stumbled upon, it had artificial gravity. To his knowledge, the only artificial gravity mankind ever made came from Quirk, and the space program perished alongside the rest of scientific advances in the Quirk Upheaval. Which meant, either he had stumbled upon a government conspiracy, or an alien spacecraft.
The other door opened. Izuku froze as he stared at two flat, scaly faces, with long spines jutting backwards from their scalps, weird mandibles at the sides of their mouths, and far more pointy teeth than Izuku felt comfortable looking at. Flexible body armor covered the rest of their bodies, and their three-fingered hands held rifles.
One alien reacted first, raising a rifle and barking orders in a language Izuku didn't understand. Izuku flinched, slowly raised his hands in the air, and got down on his knees in case raising hands was considered a threat in alien culture.
The second alien walked around him, giving Izuku a wide berth, and examined the door. They hesitantly reached through and pulled out a mop. The alien turned it over and disgustedly threw it back in the closet.
When the alien grabbed the door, Izuku panicked. "No, wait!" His sudden outburst got the gun shoved into his cheek, pinning him to the floor. Izuku froze up, not daring to breathe, blinking tears out of his eyes as he waited for the alien to pull the trigger.
The second alien snapped at the first. They argued back and forth, with Izuku struggling to understand what they were saying. After a few tense seconds, the gun withdrew. Izuku stayed on the floor, not daring to move, breathing as quietly as he could for fear that even the slightest provocation would get him shot.
An alien knelt before him. Izuku flinched as its face drew too close for comfort, and it quickly backed away. More cautiously, the alien extended a single, three-fingered hand. Izuku glanced between the two aliens. He couldn't get a read on either of their emotions, but he could see a finger twitching on the gun the first alien held.
Ever so carefully, Izuku reached towards the hand. The alien's hand felt stiff and rough underneath his grasp. The moment their fingers entwined, the alien gripped him, hard enough to make Izuku wince, and started pulling. Izuku scrambled to his feet and kept as much distance from the alien as his grabbed hand allowed.
The alien said something, in a rough, gravelly voice, and pointed to itself. After a moment of confusion, Izuku realized the alien was introducing itself. Izuku made his best attempt to emulate it, while pointing at the alien. Then he pointed to himself and said his own name. The alien's said something close to Isshuku Midorira, pointing at him, and Izuku eagerly nodded.
The two aliens exchanged a look. The first swiped at their forearm, bringing up a holographic display full of obscure symbols Izuku couldn't make out. They spoke into it, then directed Izuku towards the other door. Izuku worriedly looked back at his only way home, just a stiff kick away from potentially stranding him in space forever. He took off both of his shoes, jammed them underneath the door, and ran back in his socks to rejoin the aliens.
Izuku had no clue what to expect from an alien spacecraft, but aside from the signs featuring unrecognizable symbols, the bluish tinge to the lighting, and the vague sense of floatiness to the artificial gravity, Izuku could have mistaken it for a rather spartan ship back home. The steel walls lacked decoration, and the short, narrow hallways connecting rooms gave the ship an uncomfortable, claustrophobic feel.
A door slid open to a roomy area that could only be the bridge, with a holographic image of an unfamiliar galaxy hovering over a massive round table. More aliens sat in swiveling chairs, backs ramrod straight, clawing at digital interfaces with their three-digit hands, each tiny swipe sending lines of code and command prompts across the screens.
Standing before the table was their captain, marked by gold accents along the shoulders where other aliens had none, and by the salutes the two aliens escorting Izuku gave when they stepped up to them. Izuku nervously examined the saluting aliens, wondering if he should copy them or if it would be rude to pretend to be a part of their military.
Before he could decide, the captain spoke, and the two escorts relaxed. One dove into a lengthy explanation, while Izuku withered under the hawk-like gaze of the captain dug into his soul. Once the explanation ended, the captain stepped around the table, each step clanging against the floor in the otherwise silent bridge. With the way the captain stood perfectly straight and as hunched as Izuku was, the captain towered over Izuku, casting a shadow over the smaller boy.
The captain held out a hand, and they rasped out their name. Izuku took it and said his own name. Izuku tried to move his arm for a handshake, only to find the captain's arm locked into place. They both exchanged an awkward glance. The captain hesitantly moved their arm, Izuku clumsily moved theirs, and thus, the most important, yet most embarrassing handshake in human history was completed.
The captain promptly wiped off his hand. Izuku felt that he should be insulted, except the idea that he might contract some alien illness suddenly took root in his mind. As if sensing the sudden anxiety, an alien escort offered him a wipe. It smelled close enough to isopropyl alcohol that Izuku decided to slather his arms with the stuff.
Izuku felt the atmosphere in the room harden into a razor's edge. The aliens all sat up straighter, somehow, and ominous blinking messages appeared across every screen in the room. One alien spoke into an intercom that boomed across the whole ship, then Izuku felt the vessel tilt. The gravity still pointed down and he didn't get flung aside, but there was a subtle sense of inertia that told him the ship swung sideways.
The captain snapped out orders. Looking back at Izuku, the alien pointed at him, then pointed at the two aliens that brought him to the bridge. When one of his escorts jogged to the exit and waved him closer, Izuku got the hint. They hurried down a hall, past rooms with aliens checking weapons, gearing up, and smearing paint onto their faces.
An impact rocked the ship. Up ahead, a door slammed shut, muffling the sounds of violent decompression. The aliens hustled faster, and Izuku panted to keep up with them, struggling with the too dry and slightly too thin air.
Just as they came upon a room filled with alien-sized, tubular compartments, which Izuku numbly realized must be escape pods, the entire far side of the wall exploded. The second alien yanked the first back just as the door slammed shut.
The aliens froze. One shouted into the device on their wrist, while the other nervously drummed their fingers on their gun. For his part, Izuku felt his stomach twist, imagining himself blowing up in space, far from home, with no one knowing what had ever happened to him. At that moment, he wanted nothing more to go home.
And that's when inspiration struck him. He tugged on the alien's hand, getting its attention. Then he pantomimed opening the door. The alien frowned at him, clearly not understanding, but the one shouting into their radio widened their eyes, then said something into their comm.
They rushed Izuku over to the room he had come from, and the surviving ship's crew all followed them. Izuku ran up to the door, and hesitated. The broom closet could fit himself and maybe four others if they tossed everything into it back into the ship. There was no way he could save them all through there. But, if he closed and opened the door, he had no idea where it might take them.
Another explosion rocked the ship, and the lights flickered. Taking a deep breath, Izuku yanked his shoes out from under the door, not even bothering to put them back on, and slammed the door shut. The aliens reached out, trying to stop him, but Izuku opened the door again, praying it wasn't a Taco Bell bathroom. They paused, taking in the empty office. Izuku waved them all in, and they rushed through. Most of the aliens were inside when the walls of the ship were ripped away in twisted lumps of steel. Three of the aliens vanished with a panicked cry, and a fourth barely caught hold of the doorframe. The aliens rushed forward and grabbed him, fighting against the wind rushing out the door into the vacuum of space, and with a final grunt, pulled them inside.
Izuku slammed the door shut, then slid down its side and let out a long sigh.
Some of the aliens gazed out the windows. Others checked the devices on their wrists, flicking through the hovering screens. Most, however, had their guns out and drawn at the lone desk in the office. Following their aim, Izuku realized, to his horror, that they weren't alone in the room.
Nezu smiled at the aliens, paws folded in front of him, acting as though he weren't facing down a firing squad. "Well, isn't this exciting?" he asked. "Not every day one makes first contact with an unknown sapient species." He slowly, deliberately raised a tiny mug to his mouth and took a loud sip. "You might be wondering if I am a dog, or a bear, or a mouse, but know that I am the principal, and this is Yuuei Academy. Welcome to Earth! Would you care for a cup of tea?"