VOID
There were times when the sheer rigidity, the sense of mass and energy and the ever-present march of entropy, of atoms sliding through the cosmic hourglass and seconds canvassing him like a blanket, grew too overwhelming for Shoji to handle. Those instances may coincide with a stark reminder of his otherness, that the idea of him would persist behind the curtains of reality beyond the concept of time, let alone the fleeting calcium dust of his classmates' bones, that none of the mortals he had grown fond of could comprehend even the tiniest iota of his true self without bleeding from their eyes and muttering a twisted mockery of the transdimensional whispers echoing between realities, but Shoji wasn't about to admit that to himself or anyone else.
Peel back reality in the right places, and one could find a nothingness. One might call it a white space, except the concept of light does not exist beyond the realms of physics. One might say it stretches forever, except there is no space that the void stretches out to. Time runs like a gear popped out of place on the cosmic grandfather clock, spinning aimlessly and going nowhere, with the hands stuck at imaginary numbers.
Shoji found his void in the locker room. It smelled vaguely of gym socks and Axe body spray, in more of a conceptual sense than any presence of olfactory compounds that a physical body might ascribe to such sensation. There, Shoji let down his mask, spilling his cosmic infiniteness into the void, suffusing it with tentacles and eyes and twisted mouths with sharp, gnashing teeth and grasping hands reaching up like hell-bound sinners.
Letting out a metaphorical sigh, Shoji closed his eyes and luxuriated in the liberating feeling that came with sloughing off the laws of physics like an itchy sweater.
Shoji heard footsteps, the soft scuff shoes on hardwood floors. His infinite eyes snapped open, and before him stood Izuku Midoriya.
"What an ineffable void you have," Izuku said.
"Uh… thanks? How did you get in here?"
"You left the void open."
Shoji didn't argue that metaphysical concepts had no defined location, and therefore couldn't simply be 'open'. Instead, he asked, "Are you not afraid of me?"
"No. Unit Shoji is defined as classmate, friend, and eldritch entity, only to be terminated should a minimum of ten percent of the human population begin making blood sacrifices in your name to sunder the mortal veil."
Tokoyami stumbled into the void. He looked around and said, "I imagined the abyss would be darker." Jirou came next, then Koda, and Tsuyu, and all the rest. Shrinking away from their gazes, Shoji asked, "How are you all still sane?"
"I made eye contacts," Izuku said. "Want to play a board game?"
And as 1-A played Settlers of Catan in the infinite void, with roads stretching across multi-dimensional layers and cities built atop stacks of interwoven wheat and stone tiles, Shoji felt a little less alone in the universe.
498
I wish I had an ineffable void. I'd get so much writing done in there. Or perhaps none at all.