SHIELD
Izuku woke in a cell, tied to a chair, with glowing forcefield walls surrounding him. A man stood on the other side of the barrier, his face hidden in shadow by the harsh light behind him.
"Do you know why you are here?" the man asked.
"One of life's greatest mysteries," Izuku replied. "Kant claims in his books that-"
"Not that!" the man snapped. "Why you are in this room."
Izuku searched his memories. "Postulated causes include a really powerful magnet, aliens, or Gran Torino."
"No! I mean…" the man sighed and paced outside the cell. "Your mother was brilliant. Smarter than me, even. I looked up to her, respected her raw talent and ingenuity. I thought she would make the world a paradise." The man chuckled darkly. "Heaven knows she has the tech to make it happen."
"I am not aware of any blueprints to recreate the Garden of Eden, but I could inquire-"
"She does not want to make the world a paradise," his captor said coldly. "She wants to keep mankind in the stone age, giving the world's governments a tiny drip-feed of her inventions as she gorges herself on their monetary lifeblood. She is a parasite, utterly devoted to making the maximum amount of profit off the minimum amount of effort and innovation." He scoffed and added, "Even her marriage was for money."
Izuku said nothing as he tested the restraints. The ropes didn't budge, and even the chair beneath him didn't move a millimeter as he applied steel-shattering amounts of force on it.
"But I? I've spent my whole life working for the greater good. I-Island, hero support gear, all of it, because I know what's out there. I know that if good people don't rise up and make the world a better place for everyone, the villains will take everything for themselves. But as much as I have done, years of my painstaking research and engineering fall comically short of what Inko Midoriya can put out in a single afternoon, in a cave, with a pile of scraps."
With a flick of his hand, a holographic display of emails flickered before Izuku's face. "I've asked her, begged her, to come to I-Island. To help me make the world a better place. And no matter what I offered, she refused."
David Shield stepped forward, exposing his face against the faint blue glow of the force field.
"This time, I'll make her an offer she can't refuse."
"And what offer is that?"
David sighed. "Kids these days…" More loudly, he said, "It doesn't matter. Even if she doesn't come for you, your body contains her tech. I recognize it. She'd spend minutes slapping together scraps with a welding gun and hours tweaking the boron and copper emissions until she got the color just right. Every speck of you, your skin, your hair, your eyes, could save billions of lives."
David Shield smiled. "If I can't get Inko's tech from her, I'll just get it from you."
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