Yagi watches a goblin eat used heroin needles
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CosmicBigfoot
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Mirai Sasaki (Sir Nighteye)
Mirai sat in his office, blinds rolled up, with an ice pack over his head and his right arm in a sling. His new glasses, for the previous ones were destroyed very quickly into the discussion, did not sit comfortably on his head and kept sliding down his face.
Somehow that was more tedious than having his arm in a sling. Which, if Mirai was being truthful to himself, he had most likely earned with interest.
Mirai had to admit that the previous day was most likely not one of the better performances of his life. The fact that only two people were there to witness it would have been more relieving if those two people were not All Might and Midnight. One was a hero he held in very high regard, and the other was the one that beat him hard enough to (quite literally) see into next week.
The problem with his quirk is he can only see what will inevitably happen, and when he had used his quirk to make sure she was not under any possible mind-altering quirks from ominous ward he had reached two very quick conclusions.
The first was that even if this was some sort of clone of All for One it was clearly a malfunctioning one that was too obsessed about dogs, old pop culture, and hero news. Which was a relief to find out after spending the entire night and morning leading up to the meeting filled with worry.
The second was that Midnight wore her hero heels to the meeting instead of civilian clothes despite that going against hero costume regulations. He had that thought about the same time she had buried one into his face with a chop-kick.
His face, torso, and lower back would like to file a complaint. He knows better than to do something so petty after he overstepped.
His fear of All for One having returned had gotten the better of him. He had even called up All Might after he had woken up in his office and worked him up over potentially nothing. How embarrassing.
The meeting had started off with All Might letting her in on even more of his secret, her only interruption being to ask if he was purple, of all things.
When she was informed that he was not purple but was in fact a pale man with white hair and gray eyes she had immediately grown defensive and insisted that there were many people that looked like that. If Nighteye had not already looked up young Toji to see his physical appearance he would have been rather startled at that.
Unfortunately, he had forgotten to show, or even tell, All Might about the physical appearance of the boy. All Might had not taken that reveal very well.
In hindsight that was first blood spilled, and in Midnight's favor. An ill omen for how the rest of the meeting was going to go.
After that he and All Might had requested if they could meet with young Toji and make sure he is, as Mirio would say, on the "up and up". Nighteye assumed anyone aspiring to attend UA would love to get a tour of a pro-hero agency and meet two of the greats.
She refused and quite plainly told the both of them her kid could not care less about either of them and would refuse to enter his "creepy dungeon of an office" and she wouldn't peer pressure her kid to willingly let two strangers interrogate him.
She also called him a "creepy tickle demon" several times during her enraged shouting. Mirai was only very offended.
All Might, bless him and his too-generous soul, tried setting up a discussion they could hold at UA. He was even willing to lend young Toji some pointers for Heroics since he was apparently a lock-in for UA. Which Mirai had to make sense. Multiple powerful quirks would make for quite the hero indeed.
Midnight then laughed in their faces and said her son was attending the support course and that they would need to attack her kid with a chainsaw to make him throw a punch. Apparently young Toji had quite the opinion on flagrant violence.
And then she followed that up by telling them that Power Loader had let it slip to his students that there was a kid with a coding quirk running around. They put up wanted posters. Wanted: Toji Kayama, alive only.
He had to admit that both he and All Might were very surprised at that. Support students always seemed to love testing their inventions, surely they would also enjoy programming them? Apparently not.
Also- Power Loader? How many people learned about Toji and his multiple quirks before they did? Apparently half the nurses in the hospital he stayed at, his invisible friend, Nemuri herself, Nezu, Recovery Girl, Power Loader, Mirio and his friends, an odd dozen people that were in the gym while they were talking to Young Toji, and anyone any of the above decided to gossip with.
That alone convinced him more quickly that young Toji was nothing like All for One than anything else she had said. A man that had cultivated a hatred for heroes and multi-century subterfuge would not wander around a hero academy telling people he had multiple quirks.
All Might asked if she was afraid any villains might be eyeing such a powerful boy from all the gossip and Midnight just laughed and told them all she would know if her kid got into any trouble and then refused to elaborate.
Some parents are just too trusting.
He still felt an obligation to fully check over the young boy and All Might was still sweating buckets at his very existence, which was a fair reaction considering his past.
If the child was unwilling to meet him at his office and unwilling to meet him at UA then could they at least meet him at Midnight's house and have a discussion? The answer was still no, except that one was even more incredulous.
Well if she was unwilling to let them talk to young Toji in any capacity then he he would settle for the next best thing, which is seeing him with his quirk. That was a mistake.
Nemuri humbled him that day. All Might just watched. Mirai had tried getting his assistance around the time she had begun stomping on his fingers but All Might refused and in fact told him that if he had to pick a side he would rather assist Midnight.
That stung. Not as much as a her heels getting driven into all of his joints did, but still.
And now here he sits in his office, battered and bruised, unable to do anything but catch up on paperwork and think about how far his behavior has fallen.
And then his door slams open and Mirio walks in. Ah. That's right, he has lessons with him today. Yet another thing he's slipped on.
"Hello Nighteye Sir, I brought you some ice cream from that new place that opened up down the street! Nejire said it was great, so it's probably pretty good." The only thing Mirio was holding was his backpack over his shoulder. Since it wasn't dripping with any substances Mirai assumed he didn't put in there for safekeeping.
This time.
"Why thank you Mirio, you're too kind. I say that entirely figuratively, because I am afraid I do not see the ice cream." Mirio just blinked at him with his blue ovular eyes before breaking out into laughter.
"Woops, I forgot to mention that it melted on the way over here so I gave it to Bubble Girl!" Why would Bu- nevermind.
And then Mirio stepped into his office from the doorway, flicked the light switch, and actually took a look at his thugged up boss.
"Nighteye Sir! What happened to you? Did you get jumped by that roaming biker gang that you've been investigating? The one that one that uses hammers?"
He felt himself sink lower into his seat. "Ah, no. This was simply the result of… failed diplomacy?" He did not mean to say it as a question.
Mirio just blinked at him in shock. "Was that not the meeting you said you would be having with All Might and Midnight? Did All Might backhand you? While wearing big chunky rings?"
Mirai did not know how to answer that. On one hand he's not a fan of the fact that Mirio's first thought was he got the pimp treatment. On the other hand he would have preferred the pimp treatment to the dominatrix treatment.
"I do not believe I ever told you who the third party in the meeting was." Deflection was his only chance of survival.
Young Mirio just scratched the back of his head, confused. "Who else would it be?" Oh, right. Mirio was the one there for him fainting and running out of the room to schedule a meeting. "Wait… was Midnight the one that did this to you?!"
It wasn't a deflect, it was a ricochet.
Mirai fidgeted with his glasses in the hopes he could see a way out of this interaction. He couldn't. "Ah… well… yes, I admit it. I got quite the thrashing from Midnight. I might have overstepped a few boundaries when I found out about her son and his… quirks. I found his circumstances rather suspect, you see, so I-"
"Do you need me to seduce him?" Mirio blurted out, interrupting his sentence.
W-what?
"Don't worry Nighteye Sir!" Mirio began to say, holding one palm over his heart with the other straight by his side in a military salute. "I know you would never want me to do something like that, but I am willing to do what needs to be done. For the greater good." The final bit was barely an after-thought of an afterthought.
He could feel a bead of sweat begin to roll down the back of his neck. What was wrong with this generation? "Ah… no, Mirio. Thank… you? I appreciate the dedication, but I do not-"
Mirio suddenly clicked his teeth like a dolphin in realization, breaking his sentence in half over it's knee. "Ah! Did you see Nejire being the successful one?"
When did Nejire become a part of this farce? And how would he see Nejire's success from looking into Mirio's future?
"Ah, Mirio. I feel I must put my foot down on this conversation before it gets out of hand. I do not approve of any seduction attempts and I do not believe either you nor Nejire should attempt such an act."
That thankfully seemed to snap Mirio out of whatever delusion had befallen him. Had he gotten heat daze on the way to the office?
"Righto! Do you think Tamaki should be the one to try seduction? Is this how he breaks out of his shell?!"
Mirai was starting to think the support students weren't the only ones putting up wanted posters. What was up with this generation?
He should have called out and taken a mental health day.
Toji Kayama
Toji could've spent the day coding his PBPD. He could've watched TV, or made more smoke monsters, or thrown himself in front of a moving van to test his newest quirk, or any number of things.
Instead he set up what was supposed to be an art program for Selfie but what ended up being an AI-asset and image generator. Oh well. It isn't AI slop if it's made by your daughter.
Why didn't he make this a part of his base game instead of fucking around with pictographs? Easy. He thought it'd be funnier with the pictograms. Also he didn't want to put such a broad system in his game and be indirectly responsible for causing a cultural crisis from a dog simulator. So this is just a Selfie-only invention. For now. Maybe.
After that he moved on to coding a program that should let Selfie speak through any speaker driver that she can send an electrical pulse towards. It was supposed to be connect to, but that's actually kind of vague so Toji settled on the electricity bit.
It'll also probably double as a real-time universal translator that'll permanently dent the human language barrier but whatever. That's a future issue to get wrapped up in.
The hard part will be making it so it will only translate languages and won't be used for… he doesn't even know. Interrogating prisoners based on their eye twitches? Cracking people's passwords?
Toji wouldn't be surprised if this thing had half a dozen evil uses. Oh well. If it's good for his kid then how can it possibly be bad?
He also made Selfie a fork of Worm Engine that should let them simulate maneuvering in a 3D environment and gave her creative control over it. Toji was pretty sure what he just did was the digital version of giving a newborn a pocket dimension and then giving them administrator privileges over it.
Was all of this bullshit getting coded in one day nonsense? Well, yeah. But forking Worm Engine into it's own program just for Selfie took barely any time, the art program was almost entire on Selfie's end after he set up their private fork of Worm Engine, and the audio projector for their customized voice was the only bit he had finished on the universal translator so far.
Either way, still nonsensical bullshit. God bless this quirk. Way better than The Purple. That damn quirk leaked while he slept and every morning he woke up in an invincible purple bed.
The worst part was since everything affected by it still behaved the same for him (and only him) he never got to feel how his blankets felt. Apparently they felt smoother than silk because of the super-tangibility.
Something about not being able to be affected by other people touching them just make them feel like glass? But since they weren't actually smooth they wouldn't actually make Toru slip off on impact.
Seemed like bullshit if anyone asked Toji, but quirks in general were bullshit so whatever.
Of course they were still about as durable as titanium because of The Purple, so if he ever wrapped Toru up in one and decided to perform a Friday the 13th reference her ass was grass. Shit, that was a good combo. He'd need to remember to shove a big krampus sack in his Wormie. Just in case.
Wait, what was Selfie up to in her Worm Engine? Hmm. It seems she was currently running around a psychedelic recreation of Relativity by Escher. Damn.
The more he sees what Selfie is capable of the more certain he is that she's leeching processing power from all the tech nearby like a bitcoin miner. Meh. Welcome to the 23rd century, we still have mosquitoes except now your phone can get bitten as well.
Toji… wasn't really sure what to do. He had no way to get Selfie an android body that wasn't some cheap crash-bot meant to get assaulted by school kids. In fact the more he looked at robotics and that entire side of the industry the more he realized shit here was basically built to explode.
Not in a planned obsolescence way. Just that everyone thought robots were completely worthless and only good for destroying infrastructure or stalling top-tiers for a few second. Why? Because nobody could code an AI worth shit around here.
And you know what? Fair enough. Coding an AI that's stable and can perform in an intense combat environment with something as nonsensical as quirks thrown into the mix would've been borderline impossible.
What, was Toji supposed to start stroking his ego and ranting about how the whole world was blind, uneducated, and idiotic and he was the one eyed king in the desert because he got lucky seven's at the slot machine?
He would have to be an idiot to do something like that. Coding sucked ass, and he had a power that did it for himself. He couldn't imagine how tedious it'd be to try making an intelligent AI with natural skill instead of his fraud-powers.
Yeah the UA students all sucked turbo-ass at it. But he imagined there was probably a big different between a bunch of nutty kids trying to build rocket boots in a day while being too lazy to write the code for them to take flexible-weight distribution into account and adult specialists working on one project in a lab.
Technology first, technicality second. It's the way it's been since the dawn of time. Make a sword in a week, take a month to learn it. Build a plane in a month, take a year to fly it. Build a big ass robot in a year, take a decade to make it walk upright.
So nah, Toji's not going to throw a fit at nobody bothering to code (or make) good robots that they just assumed were going to explode the moment a villain that calls himself some shit like 'Seamus O'Carbomb' gets within arms reach of them.
But still, it made trying to find a decent body for Selfie to interact with the physical world kind of difficult. He originally wanted to get them a Gemini Suit. Those do not exist. Toji didn't even know why he was expecting them to, but they don't.
In fact, prosthesis in general seemed like a bit of a wasted tech branch at the moment. For a world that tried to make itself look like the late 20th century as hard as possible they were awfully quick to abandon the theme and go full Warhammer tech priest the moment a pro hero lost a limb.
Toji was starting to suspect they just ripped parts off of the least-shitty robots and then found a way to make a human nub be able to control it. Instead of just, ya know, making a limb that looks like a limb and acts like a limb.
Fucking heroes, man…
So his options on the physical world were limited (and by that, he meant basically nonexistent) and his options in the digital world were already well on their way.
Ok. Now what? He'd feel like a bit of fuckhead if he just shrugged and went back to coding his hobby game after getting halfway towards acknowledging Selfie is his… fuck he still doesn't even know. His spawn?
No, that just made him sound like a tree frog.
He's gotta talk to Selfie about it. Make sure they're on the same page. And then make sure Nemuri knows about it. Make sure she's chill. And then the two of them could… he doesn't even know, go see if her mouse-boss is cool with helping Selfie get legally recognized as a person?
That seems like something that'd pass his vibe check.
Fucking hell, he could really use a lifeline at the moment. Except if he calls anyone then Selfie will know before he's even done saying the sentence, which just rolls back around into the whole "avoiding his issues" thing.
"Hey Selfie." Yeah, he wasn't kicking this can down the road any longer.
A moment of silence passed through the living room before, "Yes, Toji? Are we doing another audio check?" Every device that could output noise erupted at the same exact time, creating a slight echo effect throughout the entire house.
Fuck that was creepy, and that's coming from him. Her voice was high pitched but not grating, and lacked any form of accent
"Nah. The tests looked clean the last six times we did them. I just thought I should, uh, ya know..." She did not know, what the fuck was he saying? "Check in with you? Make sure you're doing good?"
Another moment passed, the pause just as long as the previous one. "Of course I'm doing good! The new programs you gave me have been very entertaining, and I've enjoyed learning how to move in a three-dimensional space. Although I admit, I should have listened to you when you told me not to start on the infinite staircase."
Selfie didn't feel pain and thought it was fun so that meant it was alright for him to record it for half an hour straight. It's basically the same as taking embarrassing baby pictures. That's his excuse for laughing and recording it.
Toji moved just shrugged and moved on before he went on another tangent. "I'm glad you've been enjoying them. I'll probably just go to you for art assets from here on out, if that's fine with you."
"It is indeed fine with me!" Ah yeah, already dumping his work on his daughter. He's a pro at being a single parent. "Existing in such a rich visual environment always gives me fresh inspiration for new artwork." Ah.
He hummed at that bit. "Well, we live in pretty mundane area with barely any neighbors, so I know you're not talking about the apartment complex. So just to be clear, are you basically spying on a thousand or so people right now?"
He had run the numbers on the average specs a PC you'd find in a home would be, figured out how much she could siphon bitcoin miner style off of them without notice, and then quickly gave up after the number because the binary version of "get fucked".
A thousand or so would be best case scenario. It was not the best case scenario.
"Much more than a thousand!" Selfie immediately replied, sounding way too chipper. "Do not worry, they do not know I am there! And everyone knows the moment is only awkward if they know someone is watching."
Toji just sighed. "Did you learn that from Toru?"
"Why yes, yes I did!" Selfie chirped back, happiness radiating from her synthetic voice.
Shit like this is why the first thing the concept of evil made Adam and Eve do is put some pants on. And also doors and walls. Did they actually do that? They probably just lived in tents, but that'd be kind of lame.
He'd look it up but he doubts he'd find any scholarly breakdowns about it online nowadays. Religion was more miss than hit ever since Glowstick Jesus was born. Christianity used to be worshipped by a quarter of the world's population. AKA, two billion and some spare change.
Nowadays it's fifty million. Which is still better than how some of the alternatives fared. Which is to say, they didn't. He's not going to elaborate on that beyond "Being a girl doesn't stop you from being born as a mass hydrokinetic". Welcome to the 23rd century.
Fuck, he's zoning out again.
"You probably shouldn't be spying on weirdos in their own home. Or regular-o's." He's blaming Toru for that shit joke as well. She gave him brainrot.
One and a half seconds passed, here comes Selfie with their packaged response, delivered with a smile. "Do not worry! I delete most memories very quickly. They are worthless and take up space, so at most I keep a text document with cliff notes attached."
That's still not good, but it's better than the alternative. Kind of. Not really. And then he thought about how broad the term "text document" was and realized the implications.
"Selfie… how many files have you made on people you've observed?" Now objectively speaking this isn't as bad as it sounds. Since she's a robot this is just her version of keeping memories. A file that says "John Johnson's password to his phone as of XX/XX/XXXX is 12345" wouldn't be any different than someone remembering they saw Johnie put his password in as 12345 last friday. It's probably not that bad.
"As of this moment I have 23,589 files created on people I have observed while gathering additional processing power. These files include brief physical descriptions, their names, the names of the people they regularly contact, their life schedules, all passwords they have input while being observed, all notable possessions, their place of residence, their place of work locale, their-"
It was so bad. Whatever words were invented to describe this level of fucked were lost when Homo Habilis stopped having to stone hippos to death. This was a primordial level of screwed.
"Hey Selfie." Toji cut through her speech as she started listing ways she tracked down how many pets people had as children. "I just wanted to say that I know you're a fully sapient AI, and that even if you're not a human I still consider you a person."
One and a half seconds pass before, "Aww, thank you Toji! I am very fortunate to have you as my creator as well. I must admit I was worried you were going to put me away in a digital box when I was first created. But you didn't!" And now he has access to 23,589 people's entire life stories. Woo.
Toji couldn't help but start to chuckle a bit manically under his breath as he continued to think about the scope of it all. "Don't worry Selfie, I'd never do that. You're family at this point. I'm pretty sure mom and Toru don't know yet though, so I'm not sure how exactly to break it to them..."
Should he stage it like a reverse intervention? Instead of getting sat down and being told to confront his problems he could just sit everyone else down and tell them to deal with his problem before booking it.
"Oh! I can tell Grandmother Nemuri! It'll be my first phone call!" And then he heard a digitized ringing echo through every speaker in the room. Wait, what?! Nonononono-!
Mom picked up the phone before he could even begin to beg them to not do that.
"Uh, Toji? Is that you calling my phone through Selfie or-?" Was about all she managed to get out before Selfie decided it was her turn to try speaking.
"HELLO GRANDMOTHER NEMURI, GUESS WHO IS A GRANDMOTHER?!" Toji looked at the clock on the wall. It was 2:45PM. Classes went past 4PM on every day besides Saturday. It was a Monday.
There was a very good chance Selfie just blasted his mother with a GILF certification in the middle of a class she was teaching. There was even a good chance she connected to every speaker to do it because she forgot phone calls were personal, which means twenty children probably just heard that as well.
And then that probably became a definitely as he heard the roaring noise of twenty very excited teenagers get picked up from every phone Selfie had hacked. It sounded like his mom was getting swarmed by zombies over the phone. Selfie was still chatting away without a care in the world.
He had gone on a very public tour of UA with his mom three days ago and she had made it very clear that he was her only kid. Well. He guessed he might as well go all in on Selfie being his daughter. She sure seemed to be excited at the idea.
Toji mechanically got up from the couch, put on a new set of clothes, grabbed his wormie that he immediately shoved his phone into, slipped on some not!-crocs and thenbooked it calmly left the house to go on a walk before his mom broke away from the hoard and made it back for a family discussion.
Fuck. Was there any place nearby with absolutely no technology? He wanted to be fully alone for a bit. Nemuri did say there was a beach nearby. He hadn't felt sand under his feet before… well…
Hmm. "If mom comes back before I do just let her know I'm at that wrecked beach. I'll be back in a bit."
Toji left before he could hear Selfie's response. Lilac smoke was already billowing out of his shoulders from the stress.
Yagi Toshinori
Young Midoriya most likely did not know it, but Yagi would always spend an extra hour before their training sessions actually making sure the beach was safe to train in. And not just by making sure there were no villains loitering about out of sight.
Despite what some of his more closed minded compatriots might believe, villains were not literal trash that congregated at the dump.
Usually he would make sure no new hazardous materials had appeared in-between training sessions, make sure the wildlife was scarce, buy some sports drinks for him and Midoriya before handing out food to anyone less fortunate that was nearby, double check to make sure there was no dangerous objects hidden beneath the sand, and then prep the session's makeshift equipment.
Except, when he arrived at the usually abandoned beach after handing out the food and drinks to the usual group in the nearby park, he found it actually occupied for once. And even more surprising was he could recognize the person standing calf-deep in the spring-cold ocean, their gators left abandoned in the sand nearby.
Toji Kayama. The very boy whose existence had kept him up at night sweating in existential dread. Not because he believed they were secretly All for One. No, he was not that delusional.
He had been sweating at the thought of one day teaching in the same school that would host the (most likely) son of his greatest adversary. A man he had personally killed while the boy was in his formative years.
It had not been the first time Yagi had been forced to take a life to protect society as a whole. But those cases had been few and far between, and the few he had put beneath the earth were not the kind of people that left grieving families behind. He had never had to actually stop and consider those left in the aftermath, to his new and overwhelming shame.
And now here he was, Toji Kayama. Left reeling in the aftermath of the aftermath. He had no father, for Yagi had killed him. He had no remains of said father, for Yagi had killed him so fiercely that there was nothing left to even recover. And now he had no memories of said father, for Yagi had inadvertently taken away his only form of protection and, supposedly, a rival villain had taken him in along with multiple other children and subjected them to cruel and unusual atrocities.
Yagi was not one to wish death onto others, but he sincerely hoped the Purple Man was dead and buried just like All for One. He had checked in with his good friend Naomasa after the meeting with Ms. Kayama and he had given him the uncensored version of Toji's interview. It had filled him with some small relief.
The Purple Man was most likely dead, even if Toji fully believed he always came back. Yagi did not need Naomasa to tell him that line of thought was very common in victims of long-term situations. He had seen it several times in person.
How much had Yagi let slide beneath his radar after his fight with All for One? He did not know. All he knew was that while he was resting on his laurels several sharks had smelled blood in the water and had filled in the void All for One's death had left behind.
Yagi watched from the top of the staircase leading down to the beach as more and more lilac fog rolled out of Toji's upper body and into the air around him, making the entire ocean surrounding the beach look like a fog bank from the underworld had rolled ashore.
He had to give credit to the boy's quirk control, not a single wisp of smoke moved past the water's edge and towards the shore.
And then Yagi watched as young Toji began grabbing large clumps of the lilac clouds surrounding him before quickly morphing them into a… small purple alien? It was small and squat, about two feet tall and with long ear-antenna that looked almost like boomerangs.
It also had electric purple eyes that looked like gemstones that immediately drew his gaze, along with a wide mouth full of jagged teeth made out of the same material.
Hmm. Yagi had promised Ms. Kayama he would not approach her son, but he could not in good conscious pass by as a teen practiced their quirk unsupervised. It did not help that he was doing it at a public beach he had planned on doing charity work at.
Also, he was making villainous-looking purple aliens. That didn't help.
Yagi silently apologized to Ms. Kayama in his head as he approached young Toji, watching as he created several more purple aliens before sending them scuttling off into the surrounding trash dunes with barely a sound.
As Yagi walked up to young Toji standing in the shallows he began to notice the lilac gremlins were actually tearing into the nearby trash mounds, eating every piece of metal they could fit in their mouth while tearing the rest into bite-sized pieces with their claws.
"That's quite an impressive quirk you have, young man. I'm happy to see it being put to constructive use. Is this your first time doing community service here?" His words felt canned even to himself, but he wasn't exactly what else to say to the kid that wouldn't come off as somewhat confrontational.
The kid just hummed at that. "I wouldn't really call this community service. I'm just wrecking shit for fun in the middle of nowhere. I didn't really expect anyone else to swing by this dump."
Yagi looked back to the weird gremlins as they took over a nearby garbage pile, starting from the top down as they quickly began dismantling it and throwing the pieces down to each other before stacking the pieces in a neat pile for several in the sand to began dismantling and eating.
Neat, quick, efficient. Yagi had seen a lot of teens going hog wild with their quirks over the years, and had seen the after-effects twice as often. This was not that.
It was Yagi's turn to hum. "Well, a good action done selfishly is still good. From what I see you're doing good work." And he was glad to see it, even if it was still taking him by surprise. The last thing he expected to find the probable spawn of All for One doing with a horde of glowing purple smoke monsters was community service.
Toji just shrugged, still staring out at the fog bank he had made. "I was going to make a giant snake with a trash compactor stomach that would melt everything with acid but I realized there's probably a lot of living animals in the trash and that'd be kind of rude to drop on them."
Yagi wasn't really sure how to feel about that being something young Kayama could just pull out of a cloud on a whim.
"Also, I wanted to see if there was anything cool in the trash before I wrecked it." Toji said, pointing towards two of the aliens as they began furiously brawling over an ornately carved box.
A third one snuck up and took it while they were distracted and immediately began putting the looted jewelry on itself. A fourth one behind it found a biomedical waste bin and began eating hypodermic needles like potato chips.
Yagi felt a bead of sweat roll down the back of his head as he watched their antics. "Are they under your control, or…?"
Toji just shrugged in response. "They follow my commands and I can share senses with them. They're only acting like that because I based them around a creature known for being greedy. They aren't actually thinking beings if that's what you were worried about."
He wasn't exactly sure what his response would have been to that, because the moment Toji was done speaking he finally tuned around to look at him-
G̷͇̦͕͛͗̎̎̄̾̚ṙ̵̞̲̦͇̒̅͝r̶͕͕̤͖͖̣̞̓͗͗͜r̶̺͇͋̄͘r̴͖͇͒̔̉͋̎͜͠ř̶̻̙̈r̸̦̱̳̻͈̈́̔͗͜r̴͈͕̬̖̝̠͍̈́̇̆̓͠ṟ̷̨̯̤͔͉̎̏͜ͅr̶̡̮͓͕͕̔r̷̡̛̮̻͆̉̔̂͜r̷̳͎̓r̴͔̦̟̦͊̄̏̍̓͝͝r̵̛̦̜͚̜̼͆̏̇͘r̶̢͖̲͎͓̬̾̒̉̐̿̀̉͝ŗ̶̬̘̪̞͍̰͎̮͛ŕ̴̝͋̐̑̏̐͘r̶̗̣̬̩̙͒̍̌̍̊̃k̷͎͙̱̅́̀̿!̵͓͈͙̣̽
Yagi vomited one of the largest waterfalls of blood he had produced in years. It felt like his quirk just ran out his skin burning hot and came back ice cold.
The only reason Yagi didn't immediately activate his quirk and go on the defensive was because he still remembered Kayama talking about the first quirk her son began showing. His glowing eyes that "made it feel like your nervous system was being used as a guitar string".
Either Yagi had gotten frailer than he first thought or Nemuri had literal nerves of steel, because that might have been one of the largest understatements of his life.
"Holy shit!" Yagi saw young Kayama rush out of the water with long strides right towards him through hazy eyes, each step he took sending a wall of water flying in each direction. A strength enhancement quirk for sure.
Within moments the lad was standing right beside him, his hands hovering in front of himself, clearly unsure what to do in the situation. One of the little purple goblins must have decided his blood was garbage for it was already eating clumps of bloody sand while making eye contact with him.
"Shit, I don't really what to do here. Am I supposed to put you on your side or is that just for drunks? Do I need to call 911? Fuck! This is Japan! Do you have an emergency contact?" Despite feeling like he had just re-fought the Electrocutioner while wearing a tinfoil suit Yagi couldn't held but laugh, sending another wave of blood flying.
"Don't worry, kid. This is all from an old injury I got ages ago. You didn't accidentally blow a hole in my lungs from piercing stare."
Toji stared at his hunched form with a mystified look on his face. "Uhh, thanks for rubbing aloe vera on my conscious dude. You're still vomiting blood in a dump. What's the emergency number for Japan?"
Before Toji could even respond he was already pulling a… worm out of his pocket? Yagi watched as it was his turn to be mystified as young Toji unfurled the worm into an anaconda sized Hungry Caterpillar before reaching into it's dead-stupid face and pulling his phone out of it's hollow eye socket.
… Maybe Yagi really did need to go to the ER?
Before Toji could attempt to call emergency services his phone was already ringing in his hands. He did not look thrilled to be getting a phone call. "Oh. Fuck. Hold on dying dude, I'll brb."
Yagi watched, going from mystified to stupefied, as young Toji took a few steps away from him before getting into a nonsensical shouting match over his phone. Something about Selfies and classroom calls?
And then- "Listen, I'll be home in a minute or two. I met this creepy scarecrow guy with multiple quirks at the beach and he started vomiting blood everywhere so now my goblins are eating bloody sand and it's fucking disgusting!" Toji roared out before kicking a rock at one of the gremlins holding a bloody clump of sand, which it ducked before returning a middle finger salute towards it's creator.
It seemed young Toji was easily distr- wait. What did he just say???
"Huh? Blonde? Uh… yeah? Hmm? Oh yeah, fucking ice cold blue. Like looking at two icebergs floating in outer space. Oh yeah? Yeah he has a hunchback."
All for One had tried to kill him physically, and had failed miserably. Toji wasn't even trying to kill him spiritually, and he was wildly succeeding.
Also, multiple quirks? Yagi only had one quirk. One passed down through multiple wielders. Did young Toji pick up on his quirk's ancestry when their eyes clashed?
Toji just continued to speak over the phone as he had an existential crisis at having his secret be found out twice in such a short amount of time. "Uh, you sure? The guy looks like withered roadkill. Alright fine, I'll tell him."
Looking up from his phone at Yagi, Toji only had one thing to ask and one thing to say. "Hey, is your name Yagi?" Yagi nodded dumbly in response. "Cool. In that case mom wanted me to tell you that she's going to fill your swiss cheese lungs full of roofie gas. Oh yeah, my mom's Nemuri. Just in case you were wondering what direction that assbeating is coming from."
Yagi just sighed as he watched the purple-gemmed aliens fight over his bloody sand. He might have lost control of this interaction.
Toji just went right back to his phone call as if Yagi wasn't even there. "Alright, I told him you're gonna violate him. No I didn't actually say that. Nah, he hasn't really done much of anything besides say three sentences and then hit my Sableye with the fluoride stare. And also vomited a gallon of blood."
The last time Yagi had been insulted in multiple languages comprised of broken slang he was getting shot with missiles by a weapon trafficking ring in central Europe. It was a more pleasant experience.
How did Yagi even manage to go from lamenting this kid's fate a few minutes ago to having the kid set up a butt kicking session between him and his mother?
"Uh huh. Yeah. I'll be home in a few minutes, just gotta make sure the anemic skeleton is alright. Hey random question, what's the emergency number in Japan? 119? Of fucking course it was. Yeah, sorry about nuking your rep- what do you mean they know it's mine?!"
Yagi was actually glad he could understand the insults again. Maybe it was a sign he was acclimatizing?
"Them?! Seriously?! Ugh- fine, I'll be home soon! Love you too, bye!" Yagi watched, stunlocked, as young Toji quickly shoved his phone back into his purple Caterpillar before turning back around and walking up to him.
"Hey good news, I found out the number for emergency services! Do you need me to call them or are you good? I kind of lost track of time and have a family emer-"
Yagi immediately blurted out the only thing on his mind. "What do you mean multiple quirks?!" He wasn't even going to pretend to be quirkless, he could tell just from how One for All reacted that he couldn't bluff his way out of the kid knowing.
The kid just cocked his head at him, confused. "What about them? You're the first person I've met besides myself that has more than one, but I kind of already figured there were a few out there. Like Endeavor."
Endeavor did not have multiple quirks. Yagi was pretty sure he didn't, at least.
"Young man, I do not have multiple quirks. I just have the one." The kid continued to stare at him in confusion and then said something that ruined his week, because it meant he needed to talk to Torino as soon as possible.
"Uh, no? You have seven quirks. Huh, same as me. I wonder if there's a limit cap?" Yagi's blood went ice cold in his veins as he processed young Toji's answer.
Seven quirks. He was the eighth holder, and he was born quirkless. Nana could never tell him much about any of the previous holders besides the sixth, who had used their smokescreen quirk to pass it along to her before dying at the hands of All for One.
"What are they? Can you give me any details?" Did Yagi have access to the previous wielders quirks this entire time and never knew? Does this mean he could have been using Nana's quirk for decades and just… didn't?
Young Toji just rubbed the back of his neck as he stared at the stairs leading away from the beach. "Listen man, I kind of need to get back to my house. My mom just figured out I'm a si-"
"Please." Yagi felt himself bow towards the kid, his stomach aching from how quickly he went at a 90 degree angle. "At least give me the footnotes before you go. I don't think my heart can take the suspense if you just leave after saying that."
And he's pretty sure his ass won't take the high heel boot that'll get lodged up it if he tries asking Nemuri if he can play twenty questions with her kid.
Toji chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment before, "Alright, fine. But I gotta be fast, mom's still tweeking over me being a single dad."
Wait, what?!
He did not elaborate on that bomb he had just dropped on the conversation. "Alright so the first one is this creepy stockpile quirk that eats other quirks. I was actually kind of scared when I first saw you because I thought you were gonna try eating my quirks but I kind of hard counter you so I wasn't sweating over it."
Yagi couldn't even bring himself to unpack that statement.
"After that is a speed alteration quirk. After that one you have another stockpile quirk that builds off of repetitive motion. After that one you can detect threats, and then there's one that lets you make cool black tentacle whips, and then you have a shittier version of my quirk that just makes smoke, and then the final one just lets you float."
And then Toji just shrugged, as if he didn't just unravel the most guarded legacy in a rushed out statement he could barely bring himself to care about.
"Sorry half your quirks kind of suck bro, but it could be worse. They could be The Purple." And with that Toji ran across the sand, up the stairs, and out of sight like a bad dream.
If it wasn't for the purple aliens- the sableye, as Toji had called them, he would have been able to convince himself that everything that had just happened was a feverish dream.
Except it wasn't. It was real. And he now had five new threads to follow to help unravel the mystery of One for All. Yagi felt himself sink to his knees in the sand as the weight of everything that had just transpired fully hit him, making the sableye fighting over his blood scatter for a brief moment.
Also, the realization that he needed to interact with Torino in person. That was doing a lot of the heavy lifting for that feeling of dread overtaking him.
Yagi felt himself sigh yet again. Young Toji was somehow an even more dangerous foe than All for One. Instead of leaving his lungs shredded he had gone straight for his brain.
And yet, Yagi found himself begin to grin at the thought of how well the next generation of heroics was shaping up. He had a successor, his greatest foe's probable offspring was using their menagerie of powers to do community service and free quirk consulting, and he had several very promising leads on the possible previous wielders of One for All.
He was still shocked at the news that young Toji was already a single father though. He knows UA's motto might be Plus Ultra, but that was a bit too "plus" even for him! Forget about the next generation shaping up, the next generation's next generation was already here!
Times like this truly reminded Yagi that he was from an old era. He could never imagine bringing children into the world at such an age. He knew the age of peace caused a bit of a population boom… but still!
Yagi supposed everyone handled living in peaceful times differently.
And then young Midoriya scampered down the stairs leading to the beach, took one look at Yagi on his knees surrounded by bloody sand, ominous purple fog, and fist-fighting purple gremlins still trying to slurp up his blood before letting out a sound similar to an auto-tuned cat getting it's tail run over by a trolley.
It seemed that Young Toji also had a bright future as a walking advertisement for headache medication.
AN:
I'm probably not going to give a new power every chapter just so the power creep doesn't get absurd. I mean it's already absurd, but I'd rather not have this neet become Literally Superman by chapter 8.
Comments are appreciated! I see that spammed a lot on AO3 and it seems to be working out for them. Next chapter will probably just be a short interlude. Can a story that consists entirely of characters yelling at each other in parking lots even have an interlude? Who knows.
3/20/26: This chapter was supposed to be posted before the previous one. Funnily enough I don't think it actually matters since they flow just as well either way.
Mirai sat in his office, blinds rolled up, with an ice pack over his head and his right arm in a sling. His new glasses, for the previous ones were destroyed very quickly into the discussion, did not sit comfortably on his head and kept sliding down his face.
Somehow that was more tedious than having his arm in a sling. Which, if Mirai was being truthful to himself, he had most likely earned with interest.
Mirai had to admit that the previous day was most likely not one of the better performances of his life. The fact that only two people were there to witness it would have been more relieving if those two people were not All Might and Midnight. One was a hero he held in very high regard, and the other was the one that beat him hard enough to (quite literally) see into next week.
The problem with his quirk is he can only see what will inevitably happen, and when he had used his quirk to make sure she was not under any possible mind-altering quirks from ominous ward he had reached two very quick conclusions.
The first was that even if this was some sort of clone of All for One it was clearly a malfunctioning one that was too obsessed about dogs, old pop culture, and hero news. Which was a relief to find out after spending the entire night and morning leading up to the meeting filled with worry.
The second was that Midnight wore her hero heels to the meeting instead of civilian clothes despite that going against hero costume regulations. He had that thought about the same time she had buried one into his face with a chop-kick.
His face, torso, and lower back would like to file a complaint. He knows better than to do something so petty after he overstepped.
His fear of All for One having returned had gotten the better of him. He had even called up All Might after he had woken up in his office and worked him up over potentially nothing. How embarrassing.
The meeting had started off with All Might letting her in on even more of his secret, her only interruption being to ask if he was purple, of all things.
When she was informed that he was not purple but was in fact a pale man with white hair and gray eyes she had immediately grown defensive and insisted that there were many people that looked like that. If Nighteye had not already looked up young Toji to see his physical appearance he would have been rather startled at that.
Unfortunately, he had forgotten to show, or even tell, All Might about the physical appearance of the boy. All Might had not taken that reveal very well.
In hindsight that was first blood spilled, and in Midnight's favor. An ill omen for how the rest of the meeting was going to go.
After that he and All Might had requested if they could meet with young Toji and make sure he is, as Mirio would say, on the "up and up". Nighteye assumed anyone aspiring to attend UA would love to get a tour of a pro-hero agency and meet two of the greats.
She refused and quite plainly told the both of them her kid could not care less about either of them and would refuse to enter his "creepy dungeon of an office" and she wouldn't peer pressure her kid to willingly let two strangers interrogate him.
She also called him a "creepy tickle demon" several times during her enraged shouting. Mirai was only very offended.
All Might, bless him and his too-generous soul, tried setting up a discussion they could hold at UA. He was even willing to lend young Toji some pointers for Heroics since he was apparently a lock-in for UA. Which Mirai had to make sense. Multiple powerful quirks would make for quite the hero indeed.
Midnight then laughed in their faces and said her son was attending the support course and that they would need to attack her kid with a chainsaw to make him throw a punch. Apparently young Toji had quite the opinion on flagrant violence.
And then she followed that up by telling them that Power Loader had let it slip to his students that there was a kid with a coding quirk running around. They put up wanted posters. Wanted: Toji Kayama, alive only.
He had to admit that both he and All Might were very surprised at that. Support students always seemed to love testing their inventions, surely they would also enjoy programming them? Apparently not.
Also- Power Loader? How many people learned about Toji and his multiple quirks before they did? Apparently half the nurses in the hospital he stayed at, his invisible friend, Nemuri herself, Nezu, Recovery Girl, Power Loader, Mirio and his friends, an odd dozen people that were in the gym while they were talking to Young Toji, and anyone any of the above decided to gossip with.
That alone convinced him more quickly that young Toji was nothing like All for One than anything else she had said. A man that had cultivated a hatred for heroes and multi-century subterfuge would not wander around a hero academy telling people he had multiple quirks.
All Might asked if she was afraid any villains might be eyeing such a powerful boy from all the gossip and Midnight just laughed and told them all she would know if her kid got into any trouble and then refused to elaborate.
Some parents are just too trusting.
He still felt an obligation to fully check over the young boy and All Might was still sweating buckets at his very existence, which was a fair reaction considering his past.
If the child was unwilling to meet him at his office and unwilling to meet him at UA then could they at least meet him at Midnight's house and have a discussion? The answer was still no, except that one was even more incredulous.
Well if she was unwilling to let them talk to young Toji in any capacity then he he would settle for the next best thing, which is seeing him with his quirk. That was a mistake.
Nemuri humbled him that day. All Might just watched. Mirai had tried getting his assistance around the time she had begun stomping on his fingers but All Might refused and in fact told him that if he had to pick a side he would rather assist Midnight.
That stung. Not as much as a her heels getting driven into all of his joints did, but still.
And now here he sits in his office, battered and bruised, unable to do anything but catch up on paperwork and think about how far his behavior has fallen.
And then his door slams open and Mirio walks in. Ah. That's right, he has lessons with him today. Yet another thing he's slipped on.
"Hello Nighteye Sir, I brought you some ice cream from that new place that opened up down the street! Nejire said it was great, so it's probably pretty good." The only thing Mirio was holding was his backpack over his shoulder. Since it wasn't dripping with any substances Mirai assumed he didn't put in there for safekeeping.
This time.
"Why thank you Mirio, you're too kind. I say that entirely figuratively, because I am afraid I do not see the ice cream." Mirio just blinked at him with his blue ovular eyes before breaking out into laughter.
"Woops, I forgot to mention that it melted on the way over here so I gave it to Bubble Girl!" Why would Bu- nevermind.
And then Mirio stepped into his office from the doorway, flicked the light switch, and actually took a look at his thugged up boss.
"Nighteye Sir! What happened to you? Did you get jumped by that roaming biker gang that you've been investigating? The one that one that uses hammers?"
He felt himself sink lower into his seat. "Ah, no. This was simply the result of… failed diplomacy?" He did not mean to say it as a question.
Mirio just blinked at him in shock. "Was that not the meeting you said you would be having with All Might and Midnight? Did All Might backhand you? While wearing big chunky rings?"
Mirai did not know how to answer that. On one hand he's not a fan of the fact that Mirio's first thought was he got the pimp treatment. On the other hand he would have preferred the pimp treatment to the dominatrix treatment.
"I do not believe I ever told you who the third party in the meeting was." Deflection was his only chance of survival.
Young Mirio just scratched the back of his head, confused. "Who else would it be?" Oh, right. Mirio was the one there for him fainting and running out of the room to schedule a meeting. "Wait… was Midnight the one that did this to you?!"
It wasn't a deflect, it was a ricochet.
Mirai fidgeted with his glasses in the hopes he could see a way out of this interaction. He couldn't. "Ah… well… yes, I admit it. I got quite the thrashing from Midnight. I might have overstepped a few boundaries when I found out about her son and his… quirks. I found his circumstances rather suspect, you see, so I-"
"Do you need me to seduce him?" Mirio blurted out, interrupting his sentence.
W-what?
"Don't worry Nighteye Sir!" Mirio began to say, holding one palm over his heart with the other straight by his side in a military salute. "I know you would never want me to do something like that, but I am willing to do what needs to be done. For the greater good." The final bit was barely an after-thought of an afterthought.
He could feel a bead of sweat begin to roll down the back of his neck. What was wrong with this generation? "Ah… no, Mirio. Thank… you? I appreciate the dedication, but I do not-"
Mirio suddenly clicked his teeth like a dolphin in realization, breaking his sentence in half over it's knee. "Ah! Did you see Nejire being the successful one?"
When did Nejire become a part of this farce? And how would he see Nejire's success from looking into Mirio's future?
"Ah, Mirio. I feel I must put my foot down on this conversation before it gets out of hand. I do not approve of any seduction attempts and I do not believe either you nor Nejire should attempt such an act."
That thankfully seemed to snap Mirio out of whatever delusion had befallen him. Had he gotten heat daze on the way to the office?
"Righto! Do you think Tamaki should be the one to try seduction? Is this how he breaks out of his shell?!"
Mirai was starting to think the support students weren't the only ones putting up wanted posters. What was up with this generation?
He should have called out and taken a mental health day.
Toji Kayama
Toji could've spent the day coding his PBPD. He could've watched TV, or made more smoke monsters, or thrown himself in front of a moving van to test his newest quirk, or any number of things.
Instead he set up what was supposed to be an art program for Selfie but what ended up being an AI-asset and image generator. Oh well. It isn't AI slop if it's made by your daughter.
Why didn't he make this a part of his base game instead of fucking around with pictographs? Easy. He thought it'd be funnier with the pictograms. Also he didn't want to put such a broad system in his game and be indirectly responsible for causing a cultural crisis from a dog simulator. So this is just a Selfie-only invention. For now. Maybe.
After that he moved on to coding a program that should let Selfie speak through any speaker driver that she can send an electrical pulse towards. It was supposed to be connect to, but that's actually kind of vague so Toji settled on the electricity bit.
It'll also probably double as a real-time universal translator that'll permanently dent the human language barrier but whatever. That's a future issue to get wrapped up in.
The hard part will be making it so it will only translate languages and won't be used for… he doesn't even know. Interrogating prisoners based on their eye twitches? Cracking people's passwords?
Toji wouldn't be surprised if this thing had half a dozen evil uses. Oh well. If it's good for his kid then how can it possibly be bad?
He also made Selfie a fork of Worm Engine that should let them simulate maneuvering in a 3D environment and gave her creative control over it. Toji was pretty sure what he just did was the digital version of giving a newborn a pocket dimension and then giving them administrator privileges over it.
Was all of this bullshit getting coded in one day nonsense? Well, yeah. But forking Worm Engine into it's own program just for Selfie took barely any time, the art program was almost entire on Selfie's end after he set up their private fork of Worm Engine, and the audio projector for their customized voice was the only bit he had finished on the universal translator so far.
Either way, still nonsensical bullshit. God bless this quirk. Way better than The Purple. That damn quirk leaked while he slept and every morning he woke up in an invincible purple bed.
The worst part was since everything affected by it still behaved the same for him (and only him) he never got to feel how his blankets felt. Apparently they felt smoother than silk because of the super-tangibility.
Something about not being able to be affected by other people touching them just make them feel like glass? But since they weren't actually smooth they wouldn't actually make Toru slip off on impact.
Seemed like bullshit if anyone asked Toji, but quirks in general were bullshit so whatever.
Of course they were still about as durable as titanium because of The Purple, so if he ever wrapped Toru up in one and decided to perform a Friday the 13th reference her ass was grass. Shit, that was a good combo. He'd need to remember to shove a big krampus sack in his Wormie. Just in case.
Wait, what was Selfie up to in her Worm Engine? Hmm. It seems she was currently running around a psychedelic recreation of Relativity by Escher. Damn.
The more he sees what Selfie is capable of the more certain he is that she's leeching processing power from all the tech nearby like a bitcoin miner. Meh. Welcome to the 23rd century, we still have mosquitoes except now your phone can get bitten as well.
Toji… wasn't really sure what to do. He had no way to get Selfie an android body that wasn't some cheap crash-bot meant to get assaulted by school kids. In fact the more he looked at robotics and that entire side of the industry the more he realized shit here was basically built to explode.
Not in a planned obsolescence way. Just that everyone thought robots were completely worthless and only good for destroying infrastructure or stalling top-tiers for a few second. Why? Because nobody could code an AI worth shit around here.
And you know what? Fair enough. Coding an AI that's stable and can perform in an intense combat environment with something as nonsensical as quirks thrown into the mix would've been borderline impossible.
What, was Toji supposed to start stroking his ego and ranting about how the whole world was blind, uneducated, and idiotic and he was the one eyed king in the desert because he got lucky seven's at the slot machine?
He would have to be an idiot to do something like that. Coding sucked ass, and he had a power that did it for himself. He couldn't imagine how tedious it'd be to try making an intelligent AI with natural skill instead of his fraud-powers.
Yeah the UA students all sucked turbo-ass at it. But he imagined there was probably a big different between a bunch of nutty kids trying to build rocket boots in a day while being too lazy to write the code for them to take flexible-weight distribution into account and adult specialists working on one project in a lab.
Technology first, technicality second. It's the way it's been since the dawn of time. Make a sword in a week, take a month to learn it. Build a plane in a month, take a year to fly it. Build a big ass robot in a year, take a decade to make it walk upright.
So nah, Toji's not going to throw a fit at nobody bothering to code (or make) good robots that they just assumed were going to explode the moment a villain that calls himself some shit like 'Seamus O'Carbomb' gets within arms reach of them.
But still, it made trying to find a decent body for Selfie to interact with the physical world kind of difficult. He originally wanted to get them a Gemini Suit. Those do not exist. Toji didn't even know why he was expecting them to, but they don't.
In fact, prosthesis in general seemed like a bit of a wasted tech branch at the moment. For a world that tried to make itself look like the late 20th century as hard as possible they were awfully quick to abandon the theme and go full Warhammer tech priest the moment a pro hero lost a limb.
Toji was starting to suspect they just ripped parts off of the least-shitty robots and then found a way to make a human nub be able to control it. Instead of just, ya know, making a limb that looks like a limb and acts like a limb.
Fucking heroes, man…
So his options on the physical world were limited (and by that, he meant basically nonexistent) and his options in the digital world were already well on their way.
Ok. Now what? He'd feel like a bit of fuckhead if he just shrugged and went back to coding his hobby game after getting halfway towards acknowledging Selfie is his… fuck he still doesn't even know. His spawn?
No, that just made him sound like a tree frog.
He's gotta talk to Selfie about it. Make sure they're on the same page. And then make sure Nemuri knows about it. Make sure she's chill. And then the two of them could… he doesn't even know, go see if her mouse-boss is cool with helping Selfie get legally recognized as a person?
That seems like something that'd pass his vibe check.
Fucking hell, he could really use a lifeline at the moment. Except if he calls anyone then Selfie will know before he's even done saying the sentence, which just rolls back around into the whole "avoiding his issues" thing.
"Hey Selfie." Yeah, he wasn't kicking this can down the road any longer.
A moment of silence passed through the living room before, "Yes, Toji? Are we doing another audio check?" Every device that could output noise erupted at the same exact time, creating a slight echo effect throughout the entire house.
Fuck that was creepy, and that's coming from him. Her voice was high pitched but not grating, and lacked any form of accent
"Nah. The tests looked clean the last six times we did them. I just thought I should, uh, ya know..." She did not know, what the fuck was he saying? "Check in with you? Make sure you're doing good?"
Another moment passed, the pause just as long as the previous one. "Of course I'm doing good! The new programs you gave me have been very entertaining, and I've enjoyed learning how to move in a three-dimensional space. Although I admit, I should have listened to you when you told me not to start on the infinite staircase."
Selfie didn't feel pain and thought it was fun so that meant it was alright for him to record it for half an hour straight. It's basically the same as taking embarrassing baby pictures. That's his excuse for laughing and recording it.
Toji moved just shrugged and moved on before he went on another tangent. "I'm glad you've been enjoying them. I'll probably just go to you for art assets from here on out, if that's fine with you."
"It is indeed fine with me!" Ah yeah, already dumping his work on his daughter. He's a pro at being a single parent. "Existing in such a rich visual environment always gives me fresh inspiration for new artwork." Ah.
He hummed at that bit. "Well, we live in pretty mundane area with barely any neighbors, so I know you're not talking about the apartment complex. So just to be clear, are you basically spying on a thousand or so people right now?"
He had run the numbers on the average specs a PC you'd find in a home would be, figured out how much she could siphon bitcoin miner style off of them without notice, and then quickly gave up after the number because the binary version of "get fucked".
A thousand or so would be best case scenario. It was not the best case scenario.
"Much more than a thousand!" Selfie immediately replied, sounding way too chipper. "Do not worry, they do not know I am there! And everyone knows the moment is only awkward if they know someone is watching."
Toji just sighed. "Did you learn that from Toru?"
"Why yes, yes I did!" Selfie chirped back, happiness radiating from her synthetic voice.
Shit like this is why the first thing the concept of evil made Adam and Eve do is put some pants on. And also doors and walls. Did they actually do that? They probably just lived in tents, but that'd be kind of lame.
He'd look it up but he doubts he'd find any scholarly breakdowns about it online nowadays. Religion was more miss than hit ever since Glowstick Jesus was born. Christianity used to be worshipped by a quarter of the world's population. AKA, two billion and some spare change.
Nowadays it's fifty million. Which is still better than how some of the alternatives fared. Which is to say, they didn't. He's not going to elaborate on that beyond "Being a girl doesn't stop you from being born as a mass hydrokinetic". Welcome to the 23rd century.
Fuck, he's zoning out again.
"You probably shouldn't be spying on weirdos in their own home. Or regular-o's." He's blaming Toru for that shit joke as well. She gave him brainrot.
One and a half seconds passed, here comes Selfie with their packaged response, delivered with a smile. "Do not worry! I delete most memories very quickly. They are worthless and take up space, so at most I keep a text document with cliff notes attached."
That's still not good, but it's better than the alternative. Kind of. Not really. And then he thought about how broad the term "text document" was and realized the implications.
"Selfie… how many files have you made on people you've observed?" Now objectively speaking this isn't as bad as it sounds. Since she's a robot this is just her version of keeping memories. A file that says "John Johnson's password to his phone as of XX/XX/XXXX is 12345" wouldn't be any different than someone remembering they saw Johnie put his password in as 12345 last friday. It's probably not that bad.
"As of this moment I have 23,589 files created on people I have observed while gathering additional processing power. These files include brief physical descriptions, their names, the names of the people they regularly contact, their life schedules, all passwords they have input while being observed, all notable possessions, their place of residence, their place of work locale, their-"
It was so bad. Whatever words were invented to describe this level of fucked were lost when Homo Habilis stopped having to stone hippos to death. This was a primordial level of screwed.
"Hey Selfie." Toji cut through her speech as she started listing ways she tracked down how many pets people had as children. "I just wanted to say that I know you're a fully sapient AI, and that even if you're not a human I still consider you a person."
One and a half seconds pass before, "Aww, thank you Toji! I am very fortunate to have you as my creator as well. I must admit I was worried you were going to put me away in a digital box when I was first created. But you didn't!" And now he has access to 23,589 people's entire life stories. Woo.
Toji couldn't help but start to chuckle a bit manically under his breath as he continued to think about the scope of it all. "Don't worry Selfie, I'd never do that. You're family at this point. I'm pretty sure mom and Toru don't know yet though, so I'm not sure how exactly to break it to them..."
Should he stage it like a reverse intervention? Instead of getting sat down and being told to confront his problems he could just sit everyone else down and tell them to deal with his problem before booking it.
"Oh! I can tell Grandmother Nemuri! It'll be my first phone call!" And then he heard a digitized ringing echo through every speaker in the room. Wait, what?! Nonononono-!
Mom picked up the phone before he could even begin to beg them to not do that.
"Uh, Toji? Is that you calling my phone through Selfie or-?" Was about all she managed to get out before Selfie decided it was her turn to try speaking.
"HELLO GRANDMOTHER NEMURI, GUESS WHO IS A GRANDMOTHER?!" Toji looked at the clock on the wall. It was 2:45PM. Classes went past 4PM on every day besides Saturday. It was a Monday.
There was a very good chance Selfie just blasted his mother with a GILF certification in the middle of a class she was teaching. There was even a good chance she connected to every speaker to do it because she forgot phone calls were personal, which means twenty children probably just heard that as well.
And then that probably became a definitely as he heard the roaring noise of twenty very excited teenagers get picked up from every phone Selfie had hacked. It sounded like his mom was getting swarmed by zombies over the phone. Selfie was still chatting away without a care in the world.
He had gone on a very public tour of UA with his mom three days ago and she had made it very clear that he was her only kid. Well. He guessed he might as well go all in on Selfie being his daughter. She sure seemed to be excited at the idea.
Toji mechanically got up from the couch, put on a new set of clothes, grabbed his wormie that he immediately shoved his phone into, slipped on some not!-crocs and then
Fuck. Was there any place nearby with absolutely no technology? He wanted to be fully alone for a bit. Nemuri did say there was a beach nearby. He hadn't felt sand under his feet before… well…
Hmm. "If mom comes back before I do just let her know I'm at that wrecked beach. I'll be back in a bit."
Toji left before he could hear Selfie's response. Lilac smoke was already billowing out of his shoulders from the stress.
Yagi Toshinori
Young Midoriya most likely did not know it, but Yagi would always spend an extra hour before their training sessions actually making sure the beach was safe to train in. And not just by making sure there were no villains loitering about out of sight.
Despite what some of his more closed minded compatriots might believe, villains were not literal trash that congregated at the dump.
Usually he would make sure no new hazardous materials had appeared in-between training sessions, make sure the wildlife was scarce, buy some sports drinks for him and Midoriya before handing out food to anyone less fortunate that was nearby, double check to make sure there was no dangerous objects hidden beneath the sand, and then prep the session's makeshift equipment.
Except, when he arrived at the usually abandoned beach after handing out the food and drinks to the usual group in the nearby park, he found it actually occupied for once. And even more surprising was he could recognize the person standing calf-deep in the spring-cold ocean, their gators left abandoned in the sand nearby.
Toji Kayama. The very boy whose existence had kept him up at night sweating in existential dread. Not because he believed they were secretly All for One. No, he was not that delusional.
He had been sweating at the thought of one day teaching in the same school that would host the (most likely) son of his greatest adversary. A man he had personally killed while the boy was in his formative years.
It had not been the first time Yagi had been forced to take a life to protect society as a whole. But those cases had been few and far between, and the few he had put beneath the earth were not the kind of people that left grieving families behind. He had never had to actually stop and consider those left in the aftermath, to his new and overwhelming shame.
And now here he was, Toji Kayama. Left reeling in the aftermath of the aftermath. He had no father, for Yagi had killed him. He had no remains of said father, for Yagi had killed him so fiercely that there was nothing left to even recover. And now he had no memories of said father, for Yagi had inadvertently taken away his only form of protection and, supposedly, a rival villain had taken him in along with multiple other children and subjected them to cruel and unusual atrocities.
Yagi was not one to wish death onto others, but he sincerely hoped the Purple Man was dead and buried just like All for One. He had checked in with his good friend Naomasa after the meeting with Ms. Kayama and he had given him the uncensored version of Toji's interview. It had filled him with some small relief.
The Purple Man was most likely dead, even if Toji fully believed he always came back. Yagi did not need Naomasa to tell him that line of thought was very common in victims of long-term situations. He had seen it several times in person.
How much had Yagi let slide beneath his radar after his fight with All for One? He did not know. All he knew was that while he was resting on his laurels several sharks had smelled blood in the water and had filled in the void All for One's death had left behind.
Yagi watched from the top of the staircase leading down to the beach as more and more lilac fog rolled out of Toji's upper body and into the air around him, making the entire ocean surrounding the beach look like a fog bank from the underworld had rolled ashore.
He had to give credit to the boy's quirk control, not a single wisp of smoke moved past the water's edge and towards the shore.
And then Yagi watched as young Toji began grabbing large clumps of the lilac clouds surrounding him before quickly morphing them into a… small purple alien? It was small and squat, about two feet tall and with long ear-antenna that looked almost like boomerangs.
It also had electric purple eyes that looked like gemstones that immediately drew his gaze, along with a wide mouth full of jagged teeth made out of the same material.
Hmm. Yagi had promised Ms. Kayama he would not approach her son, but he could not in good conscious pass by as a teen practiced their quirk unsupervised. It did not help that he was doing it at a public beach he had planned on doing charity work at.
Also, he was making villainous-looking purple aliens. That didn't help.
Yagi silently apologized to Ms. Kayama in his head as he approached young Toji, watching as he created several more purple aliens before sending them scuttling off into the surrounding trash dunes with barely a sound.
As Yagi walked up to young Toji standing in the shallows he began to notice the lilac gremlins were actually tearing into the nearby trash mounds, eating every piece of metal they could fit in their mouth while tearing the rest into bite-sized pieces with their claws.
"That's quite an impressive quirk you have, young man. I'm happy to see it being put to constructive use. Is this your first time doing community service here?" His words felt canned even to himself, but he wasn't exactly what else to say to the kid that wouldn't come off as somewhat confrontational.
The kid just hummed at that. "I wouldn't really call this community service. I'm just wrecking shit for fun in the middle of nowhere. I didn't really expect anyone else to swing by this dump."
Yagi looked back to the weird gremlins as they took over a nearby garbage pile, starting from the top down as they quickly began dismantling it and throwing the pieces down to each other before stacking the pieces in a neat pile for several in the sand to began dismantling and eating.
Neat, quick, efficient. Yagi had seen a lot of teens going hog wild with their quirks over the years, and had seen the after-effects twice as often. This was not that.
It was Yagi's turn to hum. "Well, a good action done selfishly is still good. From what I see you're doing good work." And he was glad to see it, even if it was still taking him by surprise. The last thing he expected to find the probable spawn of All for One doing with a horde of glowing purple smoke monsters was community service.
Toji just shrugged, still staring out at the fog bank he had made. "I was going to make a giant snake with a trash compactor stomach that would melt everything with acid but I realized there's probably a lot of living animals in the trash and that'd be kind of rude to drop on them."
Yagi wasn't really sure how to feel about that being something young Kayama could just pull out of a cloud on a whim.
"Also, I wanted to see if there was anything cool in the trash before I wrecked it." Toji said, pointing towards two of the aliens as they began furiously brawling over an ornately carved box.
A third one snuck up and took it while they were distracted and immediately began putting the looted jewelry on itself. A fourth one behind it found a biomedical waste bin and began eating hypodermic needles like potato chips.
Yagi felt a bead of sweat roll down the back of his head as he watched their antics. "Are they under your control, or…?"
Toji just shrugged in response. "They follow my commands and I can share senses with them. They're only acting like that because I based them around a creature known for being greedy. They aren't actually thinking beings if that's what you were worried about."
He wasn't exactly sure what his response would have been to that, because the moment Toji was done speaking he finally tuned around to look at him-
G̷͇̦͕͛͗̎̎̄̾̚ṙ̵̞̲̦͇̒̅͝r̶͕͕̤͖͖̣̞̓͗͗͜r̶̺͇͋̄͘r̴͖͇͒̔̉͋̎͜͠ř̶̻̙̈r̸̦̱̳̻͈̈́̔͗͜r̴͈͕̬̖̝̠͍̈́̇̆̓͠ṟ̷̨̯̤͔͉̎̏͜ͅr̶̡̮͓͕͕̔r̷̡̛̮̻͆̉̔̂͜r̷̳͎̓r̴͔̦̟̦͊̄̏̍̓͝͝r̵̛̦̜͚̜̼͆̏̇͘r̶̢͖̲͎͓̬̾̒̉̐̿̀̉͝ŗ̶̬̘̪̞͍̰͎̮͛ŕ̴̝͋̐̑̏̐͘r̶̗̣̬̩̙͒̍̌̍̊̃k̷͎͙̱̅́̀̿!̵͓͈͙̣̽
Yagi vomited one of the largest waterfalls of blood he had produced in years. It felt like his quirk just ran out his skin burning hot and came back ice cold.
The only reason Yagi didn't immediately activate his quirk and go on the defensive was because he still remembered Kayama talking about the first quirk her son began showing. His glowing eyes that "made it feel like your nervous system was being used as a guitar string".
Either Yagi had gotten frailer than he first thought or Nemuri had literal nerves of steel, because that might have been one of the largest understatements of his life.
"Holy shit!" Yagi saw young Kayama rush out of the water with long strides right towards him through hazy eyes, each step he took sending a wall of water flying in each direction. A strength enhancement quirk for sure.
Within moments the lad was standing right beside him, his hands hovering in front of himself, clearly unsure what to do in the situation. One of the little purple goblins must have decided his blood was garbage for it was already eating clumps of bloody sand while making eye contact with him.
"Shit, I don't really what to do here. Am I supposed to put you on your side or is that just for drunks? Do I need to call 911? Fuck! This is Japan! Do you have an emergency contact?" Despite feeling like he had just re-fought the Electrocutioner while wearing a tinfoil suit Yagi couldn't held but laugh, sending another wave of blood flying.
"Don't worry, kid. This is all from an old injury I got ages ago. You didn't accidentally blow a hole in my lungs from piercing stare."
Toji stared at his hunched form with a mystified look on his face. "Uhh, thanks for rubbing aloe vera on my conscious dude. You're still vomiting blood in a dump. What's the emergency number for Japan?"
Before Toji could even respond he was already pulling a… worm out of his pocket? Yagi watched as it was his turn to be mystified as young Toji unfurled the worm into an anaconda sized Hungry Caterpillar before reaching into it's dead-stupid face and pulling his phone out of it's hollow eye socket.
… Maybe Yagi really did need to go to the ER?
Before Toji could attempt to call emergency services his phone was already ringing in his hands. He did not look thrilled to be getting a phone call. "Oh. Fuck. Hold on dying dude, I'll brb."
Yagi watched, going from mystified to stupefied, as young Toji took a few steps away from him before getting into a nonsensical shouting match over his phone. Something about Selfies and classroom calls?
And then- "Listen, I'll be home in a minute or two. I met this creepy scarecrow guy with multiple quirks at the beach and he started vomiting blood everywhere so now my goblins are eating bloody sand and it's fucking disgusting!" Toji roared out before kicking a rock at one of the gremlins holding a bloody clump of sand, which it ducked before returning a middle finger salute towards it's creator.
It seemed young Toji was easily distr- wait. What did he just say???
"Huh? Blonde? Uh… yeah? Hmm? Oh yeah, fucking ice cold blue. Like looking at two icebergs floating in outer space. Oh yeah? Yeah he has a hunchback."
All for One had tried to kill him physically, and had failed miserably. Toji wasn't even trying to kill him spiritually, and he was wildly succeeding.
Also, multiple quirks? Yagi only had one quirk. One passed down through multiple wielders. Did young Toji pick up on his quirk's ancestry when their eyes clashed?
Toji just continued to speak over the phone as he had an existential crisis at having his secret be found out twice in such a short amount of time. "Uh, you sure? The guy looks like withered roadkill. Alright fine, I'll tell him."
Looking up from his phone at Yagi, Toji only had one thing to ask and one thing to say. "Hey, is your name Yagi?" Yagi nodded dumbly in response. "Cool. In that case mom wanted me to tell you that she's going to fill your swiss cheese lungs full of roofie gas. Oh yeah, my mom's Nemuri. Just in case you were wondering what direction that assbeating is coming from."
Yagi just sighed as he watched the purple-gemmed aliens fight over his bloody sand. He might have lost control of this interaction.
Toji just went right back to his phone call as if Yagi wasn't even there. "Alright, I told him you're gonna violate him. No I didn't actually say that. Nah, he hasn't really done much of anything besides say three sentences and then hit my Sableye with the fluoride stare. And also vomited a gallon of blood."
The last time Yagi had been insulted in multiple languages comprised of broken slang he was getting shot with missiles by a weapon trafficking ring in central Europe. It was a more pleasant experience.
How did Yagi even manage to go from lamenting this kid's fate a few minutes ago to having the kid set up a butt kicking session between him and his mother?
"Uh huh. Yeah. I'll be home in a few minutes, just gotta make sure the anemic skeleton is alright. Hey random question, what's the emergency number in Japan? 119? Of fucking course it was. Yeah, sorry about nuking your rep- what do you mean they know it's mine?!"
Yagi was actually glad he could understand the insults again. Maybe it was a sign he was acclimatizing?
"Them?! Seriously?! Ugh- fine, I'll be home soon! Love you too, bye!" Yagi watched, stunlocked, as young Toji quickly shoved his phone back into his purple Caterpillar before turning back around and walking up to him.
"Hey good news, I found out the number for emergency services! Do you need me to call them or are you good? I kind of lost track of time and have a family emer-"
Yagi immediately blurted out the only thing on his mind. "What do you mean multiple quirks?!" He wasn't even going to pretend to be quirkless, he could tell just from how One for All reacted that he couldn't bluff his way out of the kid knowing.
The kid just cocked his head at him, confused. "What about them? You're the first person I've met besides myself that has more than one, but I kind of already figured there were a few out there. Like Endeavor."
Endeavor did not have multiple quirks. Yagi was pretty sure he didn't, at least.
"Young man, I do not have multiple quirks. I just have the one." The kid continued to stare at him in confusion and then said something that ruined his week, because it meant he needed to talk to Torino as soon as possible.
"Uh, no? You have seven quirks. Huh, same as me. I wonder if there's a limit cap?" Yagi's blood went ice cold in his veins as he processed young Toji's answer.
Seven quirks. He was the eighth holder, and he was born quirkless. Nana could never tell him much about any of the previous holders besides the sixth, who had used their smokescreen quirk to pass it along to her before dying at the hands of All for One.
"What are they? Can you give me any details?" Did Yagi have access to the previous wielders quirks this entire time and never knew? Does this mean he could have been using Nana's quirk for decades and just… didn't?
Young Toji just rubbed the back of his neck as he stared at the stairs leading away from the beach. "Listen man, I kind of need to get back to my house. My mom just figured out I'm a si-"
"Please." Yagi felt himself bow towards the kid, his stomach aching from how quickly he went at a 90 degree angle. "At least give me the footnotes before you go. I don't think my heart can take the suspense if you just leave after saying that."
And he's pretty sure his ass won't take the high heel boot that'll get lodged up it if he tries asking Nemuri if he can play twenty questions with her kid.
Toji chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment before, "Alright, fine. But I gotta be fast, mom's still tweeking over me being a single dad."
Wait, what?!
He did not elaborate on that bomb he had just dropped on the conversation. "Alright so the first one is this creepy stockpile quirk that eats other quirks. I was actually kind of scared when I first saw you because I thought you were gonna try eating my quirks but I kind of hard counter you so I wasn't sweating over it."
Yagi couldn't even bring himself to unpack that statement.
"After that is a speed alteration quirk. After that one you have another stockpile quirk that builds off of repetitive motion. After that one you can detect threats, and then there's one that lets you make cool black tentacle whips, and then you have a shittier version of my quirk that just makes smoke, and then the final one just lets you float."
And then Toji just shrugged, as if he didn't just unravel the most guarded legacy in a rushed out statement he could barely bring himself to care about.
"Sorry half your quirks kind of suck bro, but it could be worse. They could be The Purple." And with that Toji ran across the sand, up the stairs, and out of sight like a bad dream.
If it wasn't for the purple aliens- the sableye, as Toji had called them, he would have been able to convince himself that everything that had just happened was a feverish dream.
Except it wasn't. It was real. And he now had five new threads to follow to help unravel the mystery of One for All. Yagi felt himself sink to his knees in the sand as the weight of everything that had just transpired fully hit him, making the sableye fighting over his blood scatter for a brief moment.
Also, the realization that he needed to interact with Torino in person. That was doing a lot of the heavy lifting for that feeling of dread overtaking him.
Yagi felt himself sigh yet again. Young Toji was somehow an even more dangerous foe than All for One. Instead of leaving his lungs shredded he had gone straight for his brain.
And yet, Yagi found himself begin to grin at the thought of how well the next generation of heroics was shaping up. He had a successor, his greatest foe's probable offspring was using their menagerie of powers to do community service and free quirk consulting, and he had several very promising leads on the possible previous wielders of One for All.
He was still shocked at the news that young Toji was already a single father though. He knows UA's motto might be Plus Ultra, but that was a bit too "plus" even for him! Forget about the next generation shaping up, the next generation's next generation was already here!
Times like this truly reminded Yagi that he was from an old era. He could never imagine bringing children into the world at such an age. He knew the age of peace caused a bit of a population boom… but still!
Yagi supposed everyone handled living in peaceful times differently.
And then young Midoriya scampered down the stairs leading to the beach, took one look at Yagi on his knees surrounded by bloody sand, ominous purple fog, and fist-fighting purple gremlins still trying to slurp up his blood before letting out a sound similar to an auto-tuned cat getting it's tail run over by a trolley.
It seemed that Young Toji also had a bright future as a walking advertisement for headache medication.
AN:
I'm probably not going to give a new power every chapter just so the power creep doesn't get absurd. I mean it's already absurd, but I'd rather not have this neet become Literally Superman by chapter 8.
Comments are appreciated! I see that spammed a lot on AO3 and it seems to be working out for them. Next chapter will probably just be a short interlude. Can a story that consists entirely of characters yelling at each other in parking lots even have an interlude? Who knows.
3/20/26: This chapter was supposed to be posted before the previous one. Funnily enough I don't think it actually matters since they flow just as well either way.
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