Bokuboy A bit more at 3,450 words
“What are you wearing?” Ming asked me when Izuku and I showed up at the train station near our new school the next morning.
“Training gear.” I said and pat my arms and pointed at the backpack under my school backpack. “We have to skip our normal morning workouts and do them on the train.”
“You're soaked.” Saida said with a sour face.
“It's a hard workout.” Izuku said and looked at me. “Ten minutes is all we have to shower and change.”
“Not a problem. As soon as we cross the main gate, the limits of quirk usage are off.” I said. “We'll have ten minutes for socializing afterwards and then class will start.”
“Why are you cutting things so close?” Ming asked.
“We can't get an earlier train.” I said and Izuku nodded.
“Well... why don't you... um...”
“We can't leave our moms at home alone.” We said at the same time.
“Awww, that's so sweet!” Saida said and then blushed as she slapped a hand over her mouth, which made Ming laugh.
“Come on, then. Cleanliness awaits.” Ming said and led us over to the school gates.
As soon as we stepped onto school property, Izuku and I took off at our best speed under the weights to head to the locker rooms. A quick shower and even quicker dressing into our uniforms, we were back at the classroom door and walked in normally.
“Twelve minutes?” Ming asked with a smile.
“We forgot to lower the weights restricting us before we ran.” I said with a laugh at the stupid mistake.
“That figures.” Ming said and sat in her chair. “My mother wouldn't stop talking about you.”
“Well, we are awesome.” I said and she smacked my arm.
“You're full of yourself, too.”
“You're not entirely wrong.” I smiled crookedly and she chuckled.
“That's much better.” Izuku said and pat my shoulder before he went to sit down in his seat.
“Thanks, Casanova.” I joked and the girls rolled their eyes. “Are you ready for first class?”
“We skimmed the chapter last night. I'm not looking forward to history.” Saida said.
“If we don't know our own history, we are doomed to repeat it.” I quoted.
“Very well said, Mister Kent.” A man wearing a tiger costume said as he entered the room. “Please take a seat and we can get started.”
“Yes, sir.” I said and went to my seat beside Izuku.
“For those of you that don't know, I am Black Tiger.”
Someone raised their hand and spoke. “You're not black.”
The man chuckled. “Not like this, no.” He said and crouched down as if he was going to fight, then a kind of black mist flowed over him and he faded from view with just a glob of mist where he was. “This works much better at night or in dark places. Inside such a brightly lit classroom, not so much.”
A few people laughed and he faded back into view as the black mist disappeared.
“Now, who here has heard of the Great Reckoning?” The teacher asked.
We all raised our hands and he nodded.
“Good, I'll skip the intro and get right down to the heart of the subject.” The man said and then proceeded to teach the class as if he was a normal teacher and not a man wearing a tiger costume. It was so surreal that the class passed by before I knew it and we were headed for Math class.
“Why didn't we have home class first?” I asked.
“We always have home for the fourth period before lunch and for the last period in the day.” Ming said. “I think it's to let us wind down after cramming stuff into our heads and to rest after HPE.”
“Now I have to ask what that is.” I said with a smile.
“Hero Physical Education.” Saida said and sat down on her seat in the new classroom. “I wonder who's assigned for today?”
“My brother said he had Luxor, the Light Hero for the first week his first year.” Lino said.
“We're doing the assessment tests today, so having light powers would help with measurements.” Izuku said. “I assume he uses beams and not just illuminations?”
“Yeah, different colors, too.” Bosco said. “No idea why, though.”
“Different wavelengths of light have different properties and will act differently in different conditions.” I said and everyone in the class looked at me. “I mean, if he can also see with different light...”
“...he could have infrared vision.” Izuku said and saw the others look confused. “He can see our heat signatures and even invisible people give off heat.”
“That would be a good power if a villain is sneaking around or hiding.” Ming said.
“It would be best used for finding trapped victims in a disaster setting.” I said and a few students nodded. “Unless it's in a fire covered building, then the ambient heat would interfere with it.”
“What about using the other end of the spectrum?” Izuku asked.
“It could work theoretically.” I said and then chuckled. “The problem is that you wouldn't see any of the fire at that point and would burn your ass off before you realized it.”
Izuku laughed and so did Ming and Saida.
“That's a good observation.” A voice at the teacher's desk said.
We all turned to see a much older woman with her feet propped up on the desk.
“It's either an invisibility quirk or something that makes us all not notice her.” Izuku whispered.
The older woman smiled and stood up. “It's a combination of both, actually. I don't appear on any recorded material and I can make people ignore me whenever I want.”
“Is it selective?” Izuku asked, eagerly. “Can you choose the subjects to include and exclude?”
The older woman chuckled. “I take it you're a quirk enthusiast?”
“It's a hobby of ours.” I said. “We had a lot of free time growing up.”
She nodded and walked over to the chalkboard. “Would you care to give me some variables about what you think my quirk does?”
Izuku sat up straight and started to speculate on the usefulness of it while I added in the visible wavelengths of light and the arc of distance that the eye could perceive from within the eye socket.
Needless to say, the others in the class were impressed with us.
“Very good.” The older woman said and wrote out a complicated formula. “This is used the calculate the amount of light that the eye can see within one millisecond.”
Izuku sucked in a breath. “Your quirk changes the variable for the aperture and the constant of light! People can't see you with the aperture size changed and recordings can't capture your image because you increase the speed the light right through yourself!”
The older woman stared at Izuku with her mouth open, clearly shocked.
“I wonder if a mirror can be fooled?” I asked and Izuku whipped his head to the side to grin at me. “Does the reversed image have the same properties? Can a recording of the mirror show up or does the quirk work on all light reflected through it and not just what we perceive from the original?”
“I need to write this down!” Izuku exclaimed and pulled a black leather journal from his backpack and flipped to a clean page. He filled three pages with writing and diagrams in about twenty seconds, then he stopped and looked back at me. “Would a mass spectrometer work while behind her as she uses her quirk?”
“Good one!” I said with a laugh. “Let's take it to the next level. Use fractals!” I grinned at him. “Oh! Do photons, light particles that we can't normally see, actually pass through her like normal people or are they sped up by her quirk as well?”
Izuku almost choked. “That's brilliant!” He said and wrote another page of information in five seconds.
“Stop! Stop!” The older woman nearly shouted. “Calm down, both of you. I only meant to show the formula as an example of the calculus we will be tackling this year.”
We looked at the teacher and felt bad about letting our hobby get in the way.
“Sorry, Ma'am.” I said and bowed my head.
“I apologize.” Izuku said and bowed his head as well.
The older woman sighed and walked over to Izuku. “May I see that?”
Izuku handed the journal over without protest.
The older woman flipped back the four pages before she started to read. She read it slowly and it took her almost fifteen minutes to finish. “This... this is your hobby.” She asked, her voice low.
“Since we were kids and started school.” Izuku said.
“We needed something to occupy our brains while we waited for the rest of the class to catch up to us.” I said. “It was fun to run experiments in our heads and then guess the probable outcomes.”
The older woman walked back to her desk and sat on it, pushing her papers aside. “I've never seen a more in-depth analysis of my quirk before and I've visited the best quirk specialists in the country.”
It took me a second to get her meaning. “You're not angry at us?”
“No.” She said and looked down at the journal. “Can I copy this?”
“I can just write it out again. It's faster.” Izuku said and took out several loose pages from a binder and then filled them in under thirty seconds. “There you go. I also wrote it bigger to make it easier to read.”
The older woman gave him the journal back and took the pages in exchange. “Thank you.”
“It was fun.” Izuku said. “I'm sorry we disrupted the class.”
“I think it's fine. Just this once.” The older woman said with a smile. “I'm Ghost, the Not-There Hero.”
“Ghost.” Izuku said, as if testing the name, then he smiled and nodded before writing it in the journal.
“Now, back to the lesson.” Ghost said. “This term, we are going to delve into the depths of calculus and I am looking forward to frying your minds!”
A few people looked worried.
“Well, most of your minds.” Ghost said and pointedly looked at myself and Izuku.
I had to chuckle. “We promise to not wreck your plans too much.”
“No answering right away?” Ghost asked.
“We never do.” Izuku said. “We learned a long time ago that it draws too much attention from the bullies.”
“They hate people smarter than them and think we're rubbing their faces in it.” I said with a sigh. “They never understood that all they had to do was ignore us or leave us alone. We even offered to help them study and they just bullied us more.”
“Kids can be cruel.” Ming said, her voice sad.
“That was three years ago when we started middle school.” Izuku said and everyone looked shocked.
“So, yeah. There's no need to worry about us taking over the class or anything. Learning about your quirk was just a happy accident.” I said. “We usually leave the speculation until after class, though.”
Izuku nodded and the teacher looked like she didn't know what to say.
“You have to do my quirk during lunch.” Ming said and Saida nodded from beside her.
“Sure.” I said. “The only thing better than having one geek helping you is having two of them do it.”
My attempt to lighten the mood with a slight joke fell flat.
Ghost gave a slight sigh as she stood. “The first thing we will do is equalizing an equation.” She said and went back to the board. As she started to write, the rest of us did, too.
Just because Izuku and I knew how to do it already, that didn't mean we weren't interested to see how someone else did the same thing. Different methods to solve a problem should achieve the same results, after all. Plus, more knowledge was always a bonus for us.
*
Momo sat in study class and brooded. She was browsing her cell phone as she looked over all of the news reports, video, and print that had been released about the two young men that had saved her life the year before. She was one of the students of class 1-A and she had been there that day it happened, only she had stayed in the background and didn't draw attention to herself. She kicked herself mentally for not trying to speak up or get their attention, though. Perhaps if she had, she might have stopped them from getting kicked out.
She let out a sigh and the pink skinned girl next to her looked at her curiously. She showed her phone's screen and the other girl nodded. They all understood the mess that had happened because none of them tried to calm anyone down at the time. They also didn't go to the other staff to complain, which was actually a talking point that some of the comments on the posts pointed out.
'No wonder they left. No one wanted to help them.' One person posted on social media, and that one stung Momo personally. If she hadn't been so surprised by the sudden turn in the conversation at the time and how quickly the two boys being kicked out had come about, she would have tried to mitigate the fallout. Or so she hoped.
Momo couldn't stop her head from turning and looking at the two new students that were sitting where Connor and Izuku should have been. She wasn't a hateful person, with her calm demeanor and the high class disposition she had been raised with; but, for the first time in her life, she resented someone that she didn't know because they stopped her from getting to know the only two people that had intrigued her.
“It's not my fault.” One of them whispered. He was a boy with messy bluish colored hair and he wouldn't tell anyone what his quirk was.
Momo didn't respond and he flinched. It made her wonder why for only a second, then she dismissed him and looked back at her phone.
“You should be studying.” Aizawa said from behind her.
“I am studying.” Momo responded.
“That is not part of the curriculum.” Aizawa said in a low voice.
“Actually, it is.” Momo said and tried to not smile at the dig she was about to give the arrogant teacher. “A hero's image is an integral part of their job and should be managed and maintained to keep the public's interest. This media blitz has let everyone in the country know who these future heroes are. It's a master stroke, especially since it doesn't portray them in a negative light while also detracting those that wronged them.”
Aizawa growled under his breath and walked past her to go back to his desk.
“Nice one, girl.” Mina, the pink skinned girl, said from beside her.
Momo let the smile appear on her face briefly and nodded. It was a small and slightly hollow victory in her mind; but, it was a victory nonetheless. She would take what she could get. Her mind went to the two young men that she wanted to get to know and she searched for their email or phone contact information.
She was also tempted to use some of her mother's resources to achieve her goal, then decided against it. You don't use a hammer when a screwdriver is needed. She was sure that subtlety would get her what she needed. Eventually.
*
“That's so cooool!” Ming said loudly as she looked at the detailed pages in front of her about her quirk.
“We aim to please.” I said and Izuku nodded.
“Do mine next!” Saida exclaimed.
“We need to get some food first.” I said with a chuckle and we all went to the short line. After a few minutes, we were back at the table and Saida stared at us until we relented.
“Okay, show us what you can do.” I said and we watched as she took in a very deep breath, then she clamped her mouth shut. A few seconds later, her body shimmered and seemed to gain a reflective surface. “Whoa, is that a hardened reflective surface?”
She nodded and held her breath.
“Can we touch you?” Izuku asked.
She nodded again and we carefully poked, prodded, and caressed different parts of her hands, arms, and face. She blushed as we checked all of the exposed skin we could touch and then she let out the breath she held.
“HOOOO!” Saida exhaled and took several quick breaths to get more oxygen than a normal breath would give her. Her skin shimmered and went back to normal.
“That was interesting.” Izuku said and bent over his journal.
I moved over beside him and we started whispering and conferring about what we thought was going on. If what we suspected was happening, there were definite benefits to her altered form. We kept working for about ten minutes before Izuku nodded and wrote out what we discovered onto more loose pages to give to Saida.
“Oh, wow!” Saida nearly shouted as she started to read our analysis. “Is this right? I can keep myself in a kind of transition state with methodical breathing exercises?”
“If what we think what your biology is doing to your body is right, yes.” I said. “You can research different breathing techniques online. We did a lot of that while figuring out our own limits.”
“I'm up to nearly five minutes of holding my breath while using my quirk.” Izuku said and then realized the hole he had left for everyone else to jump through. “I'm sorry, Connor.”
“I'm sure they would have eventually asked me about it without your prompt.” I said with a sigh.
The girls and the other guys at the table gave us odd looks.
“Now we have to ask what you mean by that.” Lino asked.
“I can hold my breath for about an hour and ten minutes.” I admitted and they stared at me. “Yes, I really can.”
“But how? A person can't normally hold their breath for longer than a few minutes.” Ming asked.
“It's part of my quirk's side abilities.” I said with a shrug. “In fact, my dad could hold his breath for about a week.”
“WHAT?!?” Several of our friends gasped.
A few of the students around us also looked completely shocked.
“Yeah, he found out during that deep sea thing about eight years ago.”
“That was when those underwater villains were trying to build an illegal underwater city that was polluting the ocean off the coast.” Izuku told them and a few of them nodded.
“Wait, he fought down there without breathing gear?” Ming asked, surprised.
I chuckled. “No, he's not crazy. He had it at first. It was damaged during the second incursion the heroes tried and they didn't have a replacement. Since they needed all the ones they had...”
“He didn't know he could hold his breath that long before then?” Saida asked, her eyes wide.
“There's not really a lot of reasons to test holding your breath for long periods of time.” Izuku informed them. “Even firefighters are given backup respirators if their equipment fails.”
Everyone fell silent after that. Some had pensive looks on their faces and I tried to ignore them. I knew what they were thinking. Why could I only hold my breath for an hour when my dad could do it for days? I wasn't going to point out that I wasn't my dad and I wasn't going to replace him. If they didn't realize that, I wasn't going to enlighten them.
The bell rang and that signified the end of lunch and the start of afternoon Hero classes.
“We need to get changed into our track suits.” Izuku said and stood. “The assessment tests are today.”
“Let's go.” I said and stood as well.
The others followed us out of the cafeteria. When we were in the hallway, I felt a small and calloused hand take mine. I glanced to the side to see Ming pointedly not looking at me. Her hand squeezed mine and I felt a lick of fire flow over my hand. She flinched slightly and looked down to examine my hand, probably to assess the damage her lapse in concentration had caused, only to stare at my perfectly fine hand.
Ming looked up at me with wide eyes, clearly surprised.
I gave her a crooked smile and didn't say anything. I also didn't let her hand go until we reached the locker rooms.
Bokuboy A bit more at 3,450 words
“What are you wearing?” Ming asked me when Izuku and I showed up at the train station near our new school the next morning.
“Training gear.” I said and pat my arms and pointed at the backpack under my school backpack. “We have to skip our normal morning workouts and do them on the train.”
“You're soaked.” Saida said with a sour face.
“It's a hard workout.” Izuku said and looked at me. “Ten minutes is all we have to shower and change.”
“Not a problem. As soon as we cross the main gate, the limits of quirk usage are off.” I said. “We'll have ten minutes for socializing afterwards and then class will start.”
“Why are you cutting things so close?” Ming asked.
“We can't get an earlier train.” I said and Izuku nodded.
“Well... why don't you... um...”
“We can't leave our moms at home alone.” We said at the same time.
“Awww, that's so sweet!” Saida said and then blushed as she slapped a hand over her mouth, which made Ming laugh.
“Come on, then. Cleanliness awaits.” Ming said and led us over to the school gates.
As soon as we stepped onto school property, Izuku and I took off at our best speed under the weights to head to the locker rooms. A quick shower and even quicker dressing into our uniforms, we were back at the classroom door and walked in normally.
“Twelve minutes?” Ming asked with a smile.
“We forgot to lower the weights restricting us before we ran.” I said with a laugh at the stupid mistake.
“That figures.” Ming said and sat in her chair. “My mother wouldn't stop talking about you.”
“Well, we are awesome.” I said and she smacked my arm.
“You're full of yourself, too.”
“You're not entirely wrong.” I smiled crookedly and she chuckled.
“That's much better.” Izuku said and pat my shoulder before he went to sit down in his seat.
“Thanks, Casanova.” I joked and the girls rolled their eyes. “Are you ready for first class?”
“We skimmed the chapter last night. I'm not looking forward to history.” Saida said.
“If we don't know our own history, we are doomed to repeat it.” I quoted.
“Very well said, Mister Kent.” A man wearing a tiger costume said as he entered the room. “Please take a seat and we can get started.”
“Yes, sir.” I said and went to my seat beside Izuku.
“For those of you that don't know, I am Black Tiger.”
Someone raised their hand and spoke. “You're not black.”
The man chuckled. “Not like this, no.” He said and crouched down as if he was going to fight, then a kind of black mist flowed over him and he faded from view with just a glob of mist where he was. “This works much better at night or in dark places. Inside such a brightly lit classroom, not so much.”
A few people laughed and he faded back into view as the black mist disappeared.
“Now, who here has heard of the Great Reckoning?” The teacher asked.
We all raised our hands and he nodded.
“Good, I'll skip the intro and get right down to the heart of the subject.” The man said and then proceeded to teach the class as if he was a normal teacher and not a man wearing a tiger costume. It was so surreal that the class passed by before I knew it and we were headed for Math class.
“Why didn't we have home class first?” I asked.
“We always have home for the fourth period before lunch and for the last period in the day.” Ming said. “I think it's to let us wind down after cramming stuff into our heads and to rest after HPE.”
“Now I have to ask what that is.” I said with a smile.
“Hero Physical Education.” Saida said and sat down on her seat in the new classroom. “I wonder who's assigned for today?”
“My brother said he had Luxor, the Light Hero for the first week his first year.” Lino said.
“We're doing the assessment tests today, so having light powers would help with measurements.” Izuku said. “I assume he uses beams and not just illuminations?”
“Yeah, different colors, too.” Bosco said. “No idea why, though.”
“Different wavelengths of light have different properties and will act differently in different conditions.” I said and everyone in the class looked at me. “I mean, if he can also see with different light...”
“...he could have infrared vision.” Izuku said and saw the others look confused. “He can see our heat signatures and even invisible people give off heat.”
“That would be a good power if a villain is sneaking around or hiding.” Ming said.
“It would be best used for finding trapped victims in a disaster setting.” I said and a few students nodded. “Unless it's in a fire covered building, then the ambient heat would interfere with it.”
“What about using the other end of the spectrum?” Izuku asked.
“It could work theoretically.” I said and then chuckled. “The problem is that you wouldn't see any of the fire at that point and would burn your ass off before you realized it.”
Izuku laughed and so did Ming and Saida.
“That's a good observation.” A voice at the teacher's desk said.
We all turned to see a much older woman with her feet propped up on the desk.
“It's either an invisibility quirk or something that makes us all not notice her.” Izuku whispered.
The older woman smiled and stood up. “It's a combination of both, actually. I don't appear on any recorded material and I can make people ignore me whenever I want.”
“Is it selective?” Izuku asked, eagerly. “Can you choose the subjects to include and exclude?”
The older woman chuckled. “I take it you're a quirk enthusiast?”
“It's a hobby of ours.” I said. “We had a lot of free time growing up.”
She nodded and walked over to the chalkboard. “Would you care to give me some variables about what you think my quirk does?”
Izuku sat up straight and started to speculate on the usefulness of it while I added in the visible wavelengths of light and the arc of distance that the eye could perceive from within the eye socket.
Needless to say, the others in the class were impressed with us.
“Very good.” The older woman said and wrote out a complicated formula. “This is used the calculate the amount of light that the eye can see within one millisecond.”
Izuku sucked in a breath. “Your quirk changes the variable for the aperture and the constant of light! People can't see you with the aperture size changed and recordings can't capture your image because you increase the speed the light right through yourself!”
The older woman stared at Izuku with her mouth open, clearly shocked.
“I wonder if a mirror can be fooled?” I asked and Izuku whipped his head to the side to grin at me. “Does the reversed image have the same properties? Can a recording of the mirror show up or does the quirk work on all light reflected through it and not just what we perceive from the original?”
“I need to write this down!” Izuku exclaimed and pulled a black leather journal from his backpack and flipped to a clean page. He filled three pages with writing and diagrams in about twenty seconds, then he stopped and looked back at me. “Would a mass spectrometer work while behind her as she uses her quirk?”
“Good one!” I said with a laugh. “Let's take it to the next level. Use fractals!” I grinned at him. “Oh! Do photons, light particles that we can't normally see, actually pass through her like normal people or are they sped up by her quirk as well?”
Izuku almost choked. “That's brilliant!” He said and wrote another page of information in five seconds.
“Stop! Stop!” The older woman nearly shouted. “Calm down, both of you. I only meant to show the formula as an example of the calculus we will be tackling this year.”
We looked at the teacher and felt bad about letting our hobby get in the way.
“Sorry, Ma'am.” I said and bowed my head.
“I apologize.” Izuku said and bowed his head as well.
The older woman sighed and walked over to Izuku. “May I see that?”
Izuku handed the journal over without protest.
The older woman flipped back the four pages before she started to read. She read it slowly and it took her almost fifteen minutes to finish. “This... this is your hobby.” She asked, her voice low.
“Since we were kids and started school.” Izuku said.
“We needed something to occupy our brains while we waited for the rest of the class to catch up to us.” I said. “It was fun to run experiments in our heads and then guess the probable outcomes.”
The older woman walked back to her desk and sat on it, pushing her papers aside. “I've never seen a more in-depth analysis of my quirk before and I've visited the best quirk specialists in the country.”
It took me a second to get her meaning. “You're not angry at us?”
“No.” She said and looked down at the journal. “Can I copy this?”
“I can just write it out again. It's faster.” Izuku said and took out several loose pages from a binder and then filled them in under thirty seconds. “There you go. I also wrote it bigger to make it easier to read.”
The older woman gave him the journal back and took the pages in exchange. “Thank you.”
“It was fun.” Izuku said. “I'm sorry we disrupted the class.”
“I think it's fine. Just this once.” The older woman said with a smile. “I'm Ghost, the Not-There Hero.”
“Ghost.” Izuku said, as if testing the name, then he smiled and nodded before writing it in the journal.
“Now, back to the lesson.” Ghost said. “This term, we are going to delve into the depths of calculus and I am looking forward to frying your minds!”
A few people looked worried.
“Well, most of your minds.” Ghost said and pointedly looked at myself and Izuku.
I had to chuckle. “We promise to not wreck your plans too much.”
“No answering right away?” Ghost asked.
“We never do.” Izuku said. “We learned a long time ago that it draws too much attention from the bullies.”
“They hate people smarter than them and think we're rubbing their faces in it.” I said with a sigh. “They never understood that all they had to do was ignore us or leave us alone. We even offered to help them study and they just bullied us more.”
“Kids can be cruel.” Ming said, her voice sad.
“That was three years ago when we started middle school.” Izuku said and everyone looked shocked.
“So, yeah. There's no need to worry about us taking over the class or anything. Learning about your quirk was just a happy accident.” I said. “We usually leave the speculation until after class, though.”
Izuku nodded and the teacher looked like she didn't know what to say.
“You have to do my quirk during lunch.” Ming said and Saida nodded from beside her.
“Sure.” I said. “The only thing better than having one geek helping you is having two of them do it.”
My attempt to lighten the mood with a slight joke fell flat.
Ghost gave a slight sigh as she stood. “The first thing we will do is equalizing an equation.” She said and went back to the board. As she started to write, the rest of us did, too.
Just because Izuku and I knew how to do it already, that didn't mean we weren't interested to see how someone else did the same thing. Different methods to solve a problem should achieve the same results, after all. Plus, more knowledge was always a bonus for us.
*
Momo sat in study class and brooded. She was browsing her cell phone as she looked over all of the news reports, video, and print that had been released about the two young men that had saved her life the year before. She was one of the students of class 1-A and she had been there that day it happened, only she had stayed in the background and didn't draw attention to herself. She kicked herself mentally for not trying to speak up or get their attention, though. Perhaps if she had, she might have stopped them from getting kicked out.
She let out a sigh and the pink skinned girl next to her looked at her curiously. She showed her phone's screen and the other girl nodded. They all understood the mess that had happened because none of them tried to calm anyone down at the time. They also didn't go to the other staff to complain, which was actually a talking point that some of the comments on the posts pointed out.
'No wonder they left. No one wanted to help them.' One person posted on social media, and that one stung Momo personally. If she hadn't been so surprised by the sudden turn in the conversation at the time and how quickly the two boys being kicked out had come about, she would have tried to mitigate the fallout. Or so she hoped.
Momo couldn't stop her head from turning and looking at the two new students that were sitting where Connor and Izuku should have been. She wasn't a hateful person, with her calm demeanor and the high class disposition she had been raised with; but, for the first time in her life, she resented someone that she didn't know because they stopped her from getting to know the only two people that had intrigued her.
“It's not my fault.” One of them whispered. He was a boy with messy bluish colored hair and he wouldn't tell anyone what his quirk was.
Momo didn't respond and he flinched. It made her wonder why for only a second, then she dismissed him and looked back at her phone.
“You should be studying.” Aizawa said from behind her.
“I am studying.” Momo responded.
“That is not part of the curriculum.” Aizawa said in a low voice.
“Actually, it is.” Momo said and tried to not smile at the dig she was about to give the arrogant teacher. “A hero's image is an integral part of their job and should be managed and maintained to keep the public's interest. This media blitz has let everyone in the country know who these future heroes are. It's a master stroke, especially since it doesn't portray them in a negative light while also detracting those that wronged them.”
Aizawa growled under his breath and walked past her to go back to his desk.
“Nice one, girl.” Mina, the pink skinned girl, said from beside her.
Momo let the smile appear on her face briefly and nodded. It was a small and slightly hollow victory in her mind; but, it was a victory nonetheless. She would take what she could get. Her mind went to the two young men that she wanted to get to know and she searched for their email or phone contact information.
She was also tempted to use some of her mother's resources to achieve her goal, then decided against it. You don't use a hammer when a screwdriver is needed. She was sure that subtlety would get her what she needed. Eventually.
*
“That's so cooool!” Ming said loudly as she looked at the detailed pages in front of her about her quirk.
“We aim to please.” I said and Izuku nodded.
“Do mine next!” Saida exclaimed.
“We need to get some food first.” I said with a chuckle and we all went to the short line. After a few minutes, we were back at the table and Saida stared at us until we relented.
“Okay, show us what you can do.” I said and we watched as she took in a very deep breath, then she clamped her mouth shut. A few seconds later, her body shimmered and seemed to gain a reflective surface. “Whoa, is that a hardened reflective surface?”
She nodded and held her breath.
“Can we touch you?” Izuku asked.
She nodded again and we carefully poked, prodded, and caressed different parts of her hands, arms, and face. She blushed as we checked all of the exposed skin we could touch and then she let out the breath she held.
“HOOOO!” Saida exhaled and took several quick breaths to get more oxygen than a normal breath would give her. Her skin shimmered and went back to normal.
“That was interesting.” Izuku said and bent over his journal.
I moved over beside him and we started whispering and conferring about what we thought was going on. If what we suspected was happening, there were definite benefits to her altered form. We kept working for about ten minutes before Izuku nodded and wrote out what we discovered onto more loose pages to give to Saida.
“Oh, wow!” Saida nearly shouted as she started to read our analysis. “Is this right? I can keep myself in a kind of transition state with methodical breathing exercises?”
“If what we think what your biology is doing to your body is right, yes.” I said. “You can research different breathing techniques online. We did a lot of that while figuring out our own limits.”
“I'm up to nearly five minutes of holding my breath while using my quirk.” Izuku said and then realized the hole he had left for everyone else to jump through. “I'm sorry, Connor.”
“I'm sure they would have eventually asked me about it without your prompt.” I said with a sigh.
The girls and the other guys at the table gave us odd looks.
“Now we have to ask what you mean by that.” Lino asked.
“I can hold my breath for about an hour and ten minutes.” I admitted and they stared at me. “Yes, I really can.”
“But how? A person can't normally hold their breath for longer than a few minutes.” Ming asked.
“It's part of my quirk's side abilities.” I said with a shrug. “In fact, my dad could hold his breath for about a week.”
“WHAT?!?” Several of our friends gasped.
A few of the students around us also looked completely shocked.
“Yeah, he found out during that deep sea thing about eight years ago.”
“That was when those underwater villains were trying to build an illegal underwater city that was polluting the ocean off the coast.” Izuku told them and a few of them nodded.
“Wait, he fought down there without breathing gear?” Ming asked, surprised.
I chuckled. “No, he's not crazy. He had it at first. It was damaged during the second incursion the heroes tried and they didn't have a replacement. Since they needed all the ones they had...”
“He didn't know he could hold his breath that long before then?” Saida asked, her eyes wide.
“There's not really a lot of reasons to test holding your breath for long periods of time.” Izuku informed them. “Even firefighters are given backup respirators if their equipment fails.”
Everyone fell silent after that. Some had pensive looks on their faces and I tried to ignore them. I knew what they were thinking. Why could I only hold my breath for an hour when my dad could do it for days? I wasn't going to point out that I wasn't my dad and I wasn't going to replace him. If they didn't realize that, I wasn't going to enlighten them.
The bell rang and that signified the end of lunch and the start of afternoon Hero classes.
“We need to get changed into our track suits.” Izuku said and stood. “The assessment tests are today.”
“Let's go.” I said and stood as well.
The others followed us out of the cafeteria. When we were in the hallway, I felt a small and calloused hand take mine. I glanced to the side to see Ming pointedly not looking at me. Her hand squeezed mine and I felt a lick of fire flow over my hand. She flinched slightly and looked down to examine my hand, probably to assess the damage her lapse in concentration had caused, only to stare at my perfectly fine hand.
Ming looked up at me with wide eyes, clearly surprised.
I gave her a crooked smile and didn't say anything. I also didn't let her hand go until we reached the locker rooms.
