Sorahiko waited grumbling as he scowled at the microwave.
It worked to cook his next meal, quite certain that it was stubbornly taking much longer simply because it wanted to.
He would not put it past the damn device, it might not do anything out of the ordinary, but he would swear upon all of the Taiyaki in the world that his microwave was punishing him for not cleaning it out yesterday like usual.
It was not his fault that he had been so busy as of late.
Sorahiko had been busy looking into many things as of late, so excuse him if he did not have the time to clean out the stubborn and slightly sentient microwave like he usually did.
If the device wanted to be upset with someone then it should be upset with the brat, he was the reason Sorahiko was doing so much research right now.
Shaking his head he sat down back in the living room and went through the papers he had gathered for the last couple of days.
Some of the papers were about the brat Midoriya, he was not keen to start working with someone he only heard of from others and made his own attempts to get information about the boy.
Most of which came from hacking public databases since he could not pay for it the old-fashioned way.
So, he knew where the boy lived and about his mother who used to be a nurse, turned part time garden shop worker.
Sorahiko also knew the kid had over a hundred small businesses all across the island that looked legit online.
Neither of the two seemed to have any criminal affairs hidden in the background, well the woman did not but the brat naturally had a few ties to the criminal underground.
Hacking into the cameras let him see the many times one of the Vespas spoke with him or took some notebooks from the young boy, or the times he met up with Morozov on Saturdays.
Which were a touch suspicious, but Sorahiko was satisfied that he knew enough about the brat if it came down to it.
He could definitely throw those weird connections around if the boy wanted to get uppity.
The rest of the papers covering his table were the various names the Zygote had given him a few days ago.
Yagi, having been able to contact the past users like the brat said he could, and after some convincing he was able to share their names with him.
And he had done his best to research each of the names given to him, finding any members of the past users' families like he was asked.
Some were longer than others, Shigaraki Youchi's family unsurprisingly was the shortest since his parents were single children and he would have no clue if his brother had any affairs that ended up in children.
But there was some weirdness around the mom, and he would need to look into that thread later when he had more time.
Nana's was the second easiest to piece together, having been familiar enough with the woman to track the tree down back to the first quirks in the family line.
The hardest tree to put together was the third, 'Bruce' since he hailed from the states during the dawn of quirks, and that was a very messy and a sort of dark ages times for the Americans' records.
Still, he was able to find enough that the brat would be able to take things from here and likely use it for their benefit, he was not studied in quirks, but he knew a thing or two about finding patterns after all of his years avoiding the bastard.
Youchi's family had quirk affecting quirks.
Kudo's family tree affected the laws of movement from what he could tell.
Edgar's family ended with him so the only quirk they knew of was 'Fa Jin.'
Hikage's family all seemed to be mental ones, specifically ones that ended up with headaches when used.
Banjo's family mostly had quirks that manipulated energy in a physical way.
Naruhito's family was full of smoke-based quirks, his being one of two that could produce it.
Nana's family... had levitation-based quirks.
Not the most useful but again he was not the quirk-quack that could make sense out of all the numbers in his papers.
But it at least was progress in doing something in the aid of finding a successor.
Sorahiko sighed as he reclined onto the couch looking up to the ceiling with a frown.
He unfortunately was not able to find someone that he personally would hand One For All off to, and it wasn't just because he didn't know that many people in the town by his little hide-away.
There were not any Quirkless folks around from what he could tell, and the local heroes were not the kind he would spend time together with on a good day back in his prime.
And looking up the current peanut galleries wouldn't really help much, anyone online with a ranking or a presence was too famous for being chosen, and the undergrounders were much too tight knit for them to get them to be the ninth.
This would have been so much easier to do back in his day, people were not so hawk-eyed back then, well maybe the Undergrounders were but he was not as connected to their circuit as he is nowadays.
He would not put it past them, they did always group up together during the meetings he remembered attending with them.
Undergrounders were a whole different breed of people.
The ding of the microwave broke him from his thoughts, and he stood up to retrieve his food finally.
The device was nearly as stubborn as Greenie was.
Sorahiko scoffed as he thought that.
Greenie was as dense they come.
Sure, Greenie could plan things but when it came to people, he would be better off consulting a literal brick than that man.
Once he got something in his head it was damn near impossible to sway him, his quirk certainly was not helping in that regard.
Greenie's visions always came true, which was a tough pill to swallow sometimes.
More than a few people had died in his visions and even with warnings ahead of time those people still ended up dead, normally in the way that Greenie said they would.
This of course did not help the man with his 'always right' problem.
And Greenie had a massive bee in his bonnet when it came to the brat.
The idiot was probably still convinced the kid was evil somehow, even with the brat flatly telling him that he was not connected to the big bastard.
Just a different type of evil no doubt.
Hopefully, this would be one of the times where Greenie would pull his head out of his ass and listen to reason.
Because he would not be playing mediator for the two greenettes, and for some reason he was quite certain between the two that the brat would be the one to come out on top.
Sure, Greenie trained up his body but that did not mean he was bullet-proof, and the brat would likely be more then willing to shoot him than the Zygote, and the brat was not some pushover either.
No, he has only seen that kind of fire in a person's eyes a few times, thank god, but he knew well enough that said people were the kind you do not mess with at the moment.
There was something... primal about that look, and Sorahiko could not quite place what exactly about it that unnerved him so much, but people only made those kinds of eyes when they were dead serious.
So, if the kid said he would not take One For All unless the Zygote was dying then the boy would not take the quirk under any circumstances.
Which was a shame, the brat had spunk and would have the right kind of attitude to survive the bastard's attempts to kill him or steal the quirk.
But he was not stupid enough to beat a dead horse either.
So, he had let sleeping dogs lay for now and continued to look to other people to find a successor, one that will most likely need to be a student.
The only question would be who?
Someone at U.A. would be preferable, another school would probably raise their eyes when their student's quirk changed and it would be pretty hard to brush it under the rug somewhere else.
Still, he would keep his options open.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem would be the fact he did not have the slightest clue how to find someone that could physically handle the quirk, much less deal with the mental strain of it all on top.
Would someone with an intelligence quirk be a better fit or worse? They would have a large brain with more processing power but would either of those things be a good thing when it came to One For All?
Sorahiko grumbled rubbing his forehead.
He was not one of the college brats, he had been able to get by on his street smarts so far and started as a professional straight out of high school.
The tech shit he did know was learned painfully in order to protect himself and later the Zygote.
He sighed looking over to the window.
It was not much to look at, had the same number of glass panes and there was not anything like the small herb garden sitting on the sill like the windows in the kitchen.
This particular window did have a scratch right where the lock was, a scratch he could have covered up years ago with a bit of paint.
However, the thought made him purse his lips indignantly.
He remembered the night the small gouge was made.
Many decades back, back when he was twice as tall and had just barely survived his encounter with the big bastard and his partner was not nearly so lucky, leaving him to deal with the emotionally wrecked child she chose to succeed her.
Sorahiko... admittedly was not the best person to be around then and the Zygote was probably taking it all the worse than he was and did not need him being the fucking demon of a trainer he was.
Sorahiko could have been softer on the boy.
But each night he told himself they could not afford to be soft, and he hated thinking that he was probably right about that.
Even more he remembered thinking what a waste it all was because he just could not see what his partner saw in the young fool.
She died for this damn blonde, gave up her flesh and blood for this boy and he did not seem to even know the depth of what she had given up for him.
Then one of those nights he came back and found the boy gone.
Something that was not uncommon, but that time he figured out how the boy was getting out without triggering the alarms he had set up and was damn well going to give the boy a piece of his mind.
Only to find the Zygote sitting on the edge of the roof, his glassy eyes locked up on the clear sky above them.
The boy so lost in his stargazing that he could not pull his eyes away even though his ears and nose were turning red from frostbite, or that he was shivering badly because the Zygote had been pulling this shit during the very height of the coldest winter in ten fucking years in his damn pajamas.
The memory of that night brought an odd metallic tang back to the root of his tongue, and he shivered at the taste of it.
Sorahiko was not sure what possessed him in that moment but instead of grabbing the boy by the ear and dragging him through hell before bringing him back inside, he would... just stare, watching the boy stare blankly up at the heavens.
He had never said a word about finding the Zygote that night, but he thought about it occasionally.
Wondering just what could have driven the boy to sit on the ledge and look up at the sky like it might hold the answers he was looking for.
Sorahiko shook his head of the thoughts, they would not lead him anywhere useful.
He turned back to his food and started eating, plans to look more into the little thread of the Shigaraki family later.