chimaerakirin

[chimaerakirin]

also pls tag the first game you remember playing

[chimaerakirin]

Transmasc Tomu.

Transfem Tomu.

Fluid Tomu from either starting point.

Tomu is like The Best Character to play with the gender settings of, why is this so much fun?

transmasc tomu....

[chimaerakirin]

Okay so, I went back and checked this.

The egg metaphor first comes up in Chapter 6.

Sorry for the weird cropping, that's all I can fit on my screen and I can't open the individual images in different tabs on this site... Anyway.

So from there, it just repeats the egg metaphor and the word "regulate" until it gets to the sports festival. Which is entirely in Midoriya's head by the way. There are no more on-screen discussions between the two until the Sports Festival itself. Not even in the infirmary after the USJ, or in the teacher's lounge after the SF is announced, where they have a moment or two to speak alone.

Jumping forward to chapter 32.

This is right before the first tournament match, the one versus Shinso, just like you said. Let's say it's an hour before the match against Todoroki, because Hatsume Vs Iida and Kirishima Vs Tetsutetsu take 10-15 minutes each but the rest last between 5 seconds and 5 minutes. (Fights actually aren't that long in real life, and these are 15 year olds so they have less stamina to drag it out with, so 5 minutes is kinda generous.)

That's it.

So yes, you're right, percentages DO come up before the fights, thank you for pointing it out. I don't like giving misinformation even by accident, so I appreciate the correction.

Unfortunately, it doesn't really change my assessment of All Might's teaching skills here.

It's clear that neither of them really comprehends what the other is saying, at least as far as intent goes. Midoriya is Concerned, All Might gives two sentences of information in one panel without actually offering any advice or reassurance, and Midoriya comes out of it thinking he's even weaker than he had assumed. To which All Might... whacks him and basically calls him a moron.

(While also giving him the standard retail customer demand to smile more, because that particular mindset isn't enough of a plague in its home industry.)

And then Midoriya's only thought during the opening move of the fight against Todoroki is about reacting in time. Numbers and holding back don't even cross his mind.

This does answer the question of whether this is All Might not being able to tell the difference between his own 5% and Midoriya's 100%, or him not recognizing it's the only thing Midoriya can do though. It's the latter, apparently, if only by process of elimination. He's at least vaguely aware of Midoriya's physical limits here, although how he arrived at the number 5 is a mystery to me. But he doesn't seem to be aware of the fact that Midoriya still can't hold back.

My ultimate point in the original post was that All Might doesn't understand his student's capabilities in the subject he's supposed to specialize in, and that hasn't really changed. It just has more nuance in now.

So I went back to chapter 38 to check Midoriya Vs Todoroki for dialogue purposes, and I found this:

Right after the first attack exchange. Leaving aside the assertion that there's "no other way to defend against that ice", I have to ask...

What in the fuck is All Might talking about here? Five percent? This is before the internship with Gran Torino. Percentages haven't come up at all with Midoriya's use of One For All. He's currently stuck with all or nothing, and his only control is how much of his body he breaks with it.

We know All Might can control how much power he puts into every attack, because he can punch the weather. Casually. There is no way he went big against the Sludge Villain. And if he wasn't restraining himself all the time in Muscle Mode, he'd crater the pavement and kick cars across the street with every step, blast people through walls with every wave. So he has to have some concept of proportion for how he uses One For All.

The problem is that Midoriya doesn't yet. All Might never mentioned it. His sole and only advice for using this monstrosity of a Quirk is "clench your buttcheeks and yell 'smash'." Nothing before, nothing since. And it doesn't seem to have occurred to Midoriya to point that out.

Therefore, in this panel, All Might has no clue whatsoever what he's saying. It isn't that Midoriya didn't know how strong Todoroki's attack would be, and it certainly isn't because "there's no other way to defend against that ice." (What, he can't just try to dodge, then break the ice from the inside if he fails?)

No. All Might either can't tell the difference between "five percent power" the way he'd use it vs "one hundred percent power" the way Midoriya uses it, or he's just incapable of recognizing that this is the only way Midoriya has EVER used it.

Given that he's a supposed to be a teacher, I don't know which is worse.

[chimaerakirin]

Where Villains Are Heroes

Are you satisfied? That's the question that rings in their ears after the great saviors of society send them flaking away into dust on the wind. And no, of course they're not. How could they be? So when they're offered a chance to try again somewhere else, they take it. They have, very literally, nothing left to lose. Tomura wants to see a world where the Villains have their own heroes. Kurogiri just wants to do a better job at taking care of Tomura. And whatever god-voice thing is asking has just the right destination in mind! This place is weird, though. What the hell is a Devil Fruit, and why is the map nothing but islands? Good thing neither of them gets seasick...

A BNHA x One Piece crossover, picking up post-canon and mid-timeskip respectively. Currently rated somewhere between T and M. Will eventually reach E when I get around to writing more of it.

Index

<- 1 - 5 - 6 - 7 ->

Salvage Rewards

Tenko is actually helping Kurogiri work on the inventory when Mata comes back from her big meeting. "—bit over 30 grams to the troy ounce, roughly fifteen thousand yen for a gram as of… not quite a year ago, I think? Discounting those stacks over there, which are maybe two-thirds of an ounce if I remember right, and those square ones that I can't really judge on, and assuming gold prices aren't too different, we should have… four hundred million? Just in this set."

Kurogiri blinks at him. "How do you know that?"

"Uh, basic math?"

"No, I mean the gold prices. And how big an ounce coin is."

Tenko gives him a flat look. "You try looting a mansion with Mr Compress and not learn anything from his pissed-off lecture about exactly how obvious it is that all of the drops are fake. You want four ways to tell a real diamond from glass? He told me six, I forgot two of them. He showed us a whole stack of real Tokugawa koban so we could see how the luster changes depending on the purity of gold, and he passed around some old American coin with a cow on it. He wouldn't shut up, it would have been more annoying not to learn."

"Fair enough. I remember him going on about brandy."

"Yeah? How long did that last?"

Kurogiri gives him a vaguely traumatized look. "I physically couldn't tell him to knock it off and just drink already."

"Suffer with me," Tenko deadpans.

"Already done, kid. So, you see any fakes in the rock pile here?"

Tenko grabs a sapphire and starts scratching at the colorless stones. "Write something really small and see if you can read it through the bigger ones. If you can, it's probably not a diamond."

"Still counting the salvage?" Mata asks from the doorway. "What's the tally so far?"

"Dunno. What's gold worth by the gram?"

"Not sure, I'm not an economist. I do know it's gone up in the last… twenty-five years, I think? A Kanese pirate fleet hid a few hundred years worth of plunder then lost access to it."

Tenko blinks. "…Well that was fucking stupid. How'd they do that?"

"I think the admiral took an injury that prevented him from using some kind of proprietary special attack, and it was the only power strong enough to break open the ice sheet everything is buried under."

Tenko looks from her to his hands, then at Kurogiri.

"Tenko, no. I'm not Mr Compress, I can't store that much in the cloud."

"You wouldn't have to! It's already impossible for anyone else to get to, we can just grab what we need! Come on, Giri, just once we run out of other loot!"

"Is money that important?" Mata's mother asks. Where'd she come from?

"Nah, not really, I guess." Tenko shrugs. "But the asshole that used to have me and Giri on a leash had basically infinite money since he was sort of like one of the Pirate Emperors except he didn't have any competition and he ran things for like two hundred years. And he didn't want me to know there was a leash, so he was pretty generous. Then he cut me off and I had to learn to get my own resources."

The chief blinks. "…Any Emperor in particular?"

Tenko scratches his forehead. "If the newspapers I read weren't lying… Blackbeard, what with the ability theft."

It's silent long enough that he glances up from the gem pile to see her trading looks with Mata, who wins whatever debate they're having with a serene smile.

"Did you need something?" he asks after a minute.

"This one gets to the point, I see." Okay, where did this guy come from?

Scratch that, when did this guy come from, Tenko thinks as Mata and her mother move out of the doorway to let him through. His voice sounds like gargling rocks, and Tenko would assume he's smoked three packs a day for the last twenty years if he didn't look older than he knows the Doctor really was. He can barely see the man's eyes through the wrinkles, and the sheer amount of ink hides his skin tone just as thoroughly. He's wrapped shoulders to ankles in what looks like a blanket, one hand sticking out to hold a cane, which he leans on heavily as he stumps forward to squint at them.

"Who're you?"

"No one of importance in this day and age, boy. Which is less than I can say for you."

They stare at each other, and Mata sounds faintly strangled as she handles introductions. "Honored Koroua, this is Kurogiri Tenko, and his father by whangai, Shirakumo Oboro. Tenko, Oboro, I present to you Muturangi, Tohuka Nui and head of the Priesthood in particular."

The old man laughs. "No need to be formal, child. I'm old, not divine, and their ways are not ours."

Tenko snorts. "Good to know, I don't do formal."

"No you don't, do you, young Rangatira? You see no need to bow to anyone you don't respect, and you respect no one who demands you bend your spine. That is always the way of your type."

"What type? And why'd you call me Rangatira?"

The old man raises his eyebrows. "Interesting. Those who don't know they have the mana of a chief generally cause a great deal of fuss when it first appears, and yet no one rushed into the marae in a panic."

Tenko opens his mouth, but Kurogiri must see his annoyance because he cuts him off. "The killing intent thing. You kinda blasted a little when you were trying to set your artwork on fire with your glare."

Tenko blinks. "Wait, that's Rangatira Mana?"

The old man smiles. "Indeed. It has been a very long time since a Saltborn came through with it. Longer since it was one who had natural abilities. Remind me, what was yours again?"

"Which one?" He snorts. "I've got a few."

"The one you knew you had to start with."

Tenko eyes him warily. "Decay. It turns things I touch into dust."

"Anything you touch?"

"Yes," he bites out. "Anything. People included."

Mata opens her mouth, and the old man holds up a hand. "Peace, child. You, young Rangatira have an ability many of our priests would consider most useful."

"Really."

"Indeed. Hawaiki has many gods, you know. In opposition to many, Tane-mahuta most of all, there is Whiro. He who consumes the dead to grow in strength. The buried sink ever deeper into the earth, until they fall into his maw." The old man smiles wider, sharper. "So we do not bury our dead. He cannot eat ash."

"You cremate," Kurogiri says.

"We do. So yes, young Rangatira. Your power is noa. Blessed, you might say." The old man stamps his cane on the ground, then looks at Mata and her mother. "Full support. And mastery upon return."

Mata looks like she's been slapped with a fish. Her mother is a little more calculating. "Full support?"

"Oh yes. I believe young Ihenga would have a suggestion or two on that score."

"Wait, what? Full support for what?" Tenko blurts out.

"Why, your voyage, of course. Don't look so surprised, young man. We have no hatred for pirates here. Maui was one. The first, by our records."

"And what's this about mastery?"

Both of the bigshots look at Mata. "You didn't tell him?" Huia asks.

"I thought it was obvious…? Why else would I be allowed to help oversee all those lessons?"

"Oh Nezu. You're actually the Big Kahuna. I thought that whole thing seemed familiar."

"Giri what the fuck?"

"The surfing. It got appropriated in a movie way back before Quirks, so the best surfer on the local beaches tends to be called the Big Kahuna, but the word kahuna is related to surfing the way doctor is related to medicine. An MD is just one type of doctorate, there's also psychology, history, math and physics, basically anything you can study in university. And it's a direct analogy. Kahuna means expert in a field, and it's pretty much exactly the same as the Maori word Tohuka. Same root, they're both Polynesian languages. Like the Hawaiian Ohana and Maori Whanau." Kurogiri grins crookedly. "Ohana means family. Family means no one gets left behind or forgotten."

The old man's eyebrows go up. "You're from a place like Hawaiki then?"

"Ish. Anyway, Mata's got the same tattoos as the teachers, that's why she's got more. A multi-disciplinary expert in training? A… What'd Kenny call it, a Kahuna Nui? Well, a Tohuka Nui, you said that earlier."

"Ah… sort of," Mata says, looking embarrassed. "I'm not to get full mastery in everything, but the basics in most and all of a few things. But the council has suggested a test of those things in the old way."

"Which means what?" Tenko asks.

"It means that the Tohuka council has voted to sponsor your venture into piracy in full," Huia says. "Ship, starting provisions and equipment, and an experienced crewmate to support and advise you… If you accept."

He squints warily. "What kind of crewmate?"

"A navigator, pilot, warrior, and watercrafter."

"I'm not loading up my party with— Ow! Giri, why?!" He rubs the back of his head where he got flicked.

"Skill check failed, grind Social and try again," his dad says in Japanese, before switching to English and looking at Mata and her mother. "Sorry, I wasn't allowed to socialize him as a kid. He didn't realize you meant one person with a list of skills."

"…Oh. Who—" He ducks the incoming dope-slap and turns to glare at Kurogiri, then follows his outstretched index finger to… "Mata?"

Well. That makes sense. Too much sense, now he feels like an idiot. She told them she could teach them to run a Hawaiki boat, and how navigation works, and she's in on their combat and mana lessons, and the swimming and diving and the surfing probably count as watercraft, and the old man said mastery on return.

"If you'll have me," she says.

He squints. "Do you actually want to come? Or did you get volunteered?"

"It was my choice. Why?"

"The last time someone got volunteered to join my party, he didn't consider himself one of us and a shitload of people died. I don't believe in making people do things they don't want to. Not unless they've already fucked me over. I don't take orders, either. If someone's mine, I'll see their wishes granted. If they're not, it's none of my business what they want. If they try to force me to care, they won't like the kind of interest I take."

"As is the way of Rangatira," the old man comments. "I will leave you to your discussions. Don't forget the final treasure you found, young man. Choose its fate wisely. It may very well be worth more than everything else in your find."

Tenko snaps around to look at him, but he's already leaving. "Wait, what?"

"Oh right, that." Kurogiri hops up and goes into Tenko's room, and comes back with a small chest. It's not the same one he pulled out of the hidden compartment in that drowned desk, too big, and it's sealed with a padlock. Chest and key are plunked down on the table in front of him. "So, the little box was kinda falling apart too, Huia provided this one to keep everything contained. No idea what's in it though."

"There are few things chests like that are used for, and only one would justify hiding it so well," Huia says. "To say nothing of it having a Voice."

Tenko stares at her blankly. "What, like voting rights?"

"No, although it likely does have a say of sorts. There is a power, rarer than Rangatira Mana, called the Voice of All Things, to hear the whispers of things that do not speak. My bloodline carries it, that is why we have always been chiefs of this island. Not all of us have it, but my grandmother did, and Mata does as well."

"Tane-mahuta spoke to me. That's what the meeting was about," explains Mata.

The way she put her hands together. Like she was praying. "Do I need to know what it said?"

"It's… tribal lore, mostly. I can explain in detail later if you want, but the Koruoa brought up the treasure, so…" She gestures to the box.

He unlocks it, but doesn't open the lid. "It's not gonna bite me is it?" he asks warily.

"Only if someone else bites it first."

He blinks at her. She stares back, dead serious, and he decides fuck it. He lifts the lid. The chest he actually fished out of the wreck is in there, and he sees why it had to be put in another box. It cracked in half as it dried, worse than the bigger chests, and at least two of the walls must have collapsed because part of the lid is lying in a slant on whatever is inside. He starts fishing the pieces out, then blinks at the contents for a minute before dumping it onto the table. Huia goes over to the bookshelves to search for something.

Completely undamaged by who knows how many years of water, not even crusted or stained with anything, even salt, it's a single object about the size of his fist, rich pink in color with a velvety texture. It's also covered in vaguely unsettling cloud-like swirls, and has the exaggerated shape of a cartoon peach, with the stem on the wrong end, fuzzy and curled.

"So that's a Devil Fruit," Kurogiri observes. "What kind, do you think?"

There are three kinds, they read. Logia, the elemental body type, the rarest. Zoan, the animal shapeshift type. And the most common Paramecia, which covers everything else. They read kind of like Quirk classifications to him, if you can shuffle Mirko into the same category as Ryukyu (and if he ever sees a rabbit Zoan he will not assume they're anything less than a player) to make room for people like Snatch. There's a subcategory called Special Paramecia, which as far as he can tell is just a Logia of man-made substances, but there are no mechanical Zoans. There are, however, goddamn dinosaur Zoans. He doesn't think he'd ever eat one of these things, but he does have to admit that'd be pretty cool. Like, a Utahraptor or something. He and Spinner spent hours talking about Ark Survival.

"Most likely a Zoan of some kind," Mata says. "They have the strongest wills. Well, strongest Voices, at least. There are stories of them slipping through the fingers of people who have sought a specific one, too, so it's theorized they can avoid being eaten by a person they consider wrong, and animals are actively attracted to them when they're mostly indifferent to Logias and borderline repelled by Paramecias."

"You mean like the takoyaki guarding it?" Tenko asks.

"…Well, now that you mention it. As big as that octopus was it should have been able to rip the desk apart itself if it knew where to look though, so I'd assume the fruit was avoiding it. Fish don't make good Devil Fruit users," she says wryly.

He snorts. "I fuckin' bet."

"Fishmen on the other hand… I've heard that they have some protection. They're still hammers, but their gills don't stop working so they can survive until they're rescued. Most anyone else is pretty well screwed though."

"Why don't they just use that Taolf wood?" Kurogiri asks.

"It doesn't grow on every island, or even most. We do that here, you may have seen Taika's necklace, but Hawaiki is lucky. We have both Taolf trees and an Adam Tree."

Giri tilts his head. "Adam?"

"Adam is the strongest wood in the world, as close as it gets to indestructible. It can be destroyed, but it requires the power of an Emperor or an Admiral. The ultimate mastery test for Kaitiaki Mana involves an Adam staff and lava. Our best waka are made from it." She pauses. "If I understood the subtext right, Koruoa Ihenga will be offering you one of those."

An indestructible ship? Sounds good to him. "And Ihenga is?"

"Tohuka Nui of the seacraft arts. One of the few Hawaiki to have taken a full voyage outside of the archipelago, and head of the Tohuka Tarai Waka in particular, the shipwrights. He was all in favor of sponsoring your crew—"

"Our crew," he corrects automatically.

She smiles, bright and warm. "Our crew then. But you're the captain, and he didn't care whether I joined or not."

"Aha. How'd that get onto this shelf…" Huia yanks a particularly thick book off a low shelf and sets it on the table next to the Devil Fruit.

"An encyclopedia?" Tenko flips it open. "There's no pictures…"

"There are not," Huia agrees. "For the most part, at any rate. More have descriptions, but that isn't guaranteed either. This is a rare book. Ownership of it is restricted to significant individuals in World Government member nations and sufficiently ranking Marine officers. This one is, of course, stolen. By Ihenga, in fact, on his final trip, so it's a bit outdated. They recompile it every four years in time with the Reverie. There are rumors of a properly illustrated edition that can only be given with the approval of Mariejois."

He scans the pages. "These things are named in Japanese."

"Wanese, but yes. No one is sure why, but we know for a fact that Devil Fruits predate the Unwritten Days. Hawaiki history aside, the Roger Pirates had with them a woman whose Devil Fruit allowed her to have been born back then."

"Immortality?" Kurogiri asks.

"Time travel. But only forward."

Tenko reaches the Zoan section and finds a photograph of a fruit that looks similar to a dog's head in shape, clipped to the page for the Inu Inu no Mi, Model: Maikong, along with sketches that look like Taika in his transformed state. "You add to it when you can?"

"Of course."

He keeps flipping through the pages. There are a few photos in the Paramecia section, and one ink drawing in the Logias, but no pictures like the fruit on the table, printed or added. "Hey Mata, you can hear this thing talking, right? That's how you found it?"

"Yes?"

"What's it sound like?"

She sits down next to him and holds out her hand, and he gives it to her, half-expecting her to hold it up to her ear. Instead, she holds it in both hands and closes her eyes, more like listening to headphones than to a conch shell. Or probably meditating. That's probably more likely.

It's a few minutes of silence before she speaks. "Mischief. Defiance. Resilience. Wisps of something, more substantial than air but less than cotton. Heavy like a feather, light like iron. It… echoes, like standing between two mirrors, but to the ear instead of the eye. And… laughter."

She sets it carefully back on the table, at a very deliberate distance away from herself. She doesn't want it. "It's not for me. I'm not who it wants."

Correction. It doesn't want her, apparently. Fruit making decisions. This place is fucking weird. He reaches out to pick it up, then withdraws his hand. " …What'd… Muranga?"

"Muturangi," Huia corrects.

"Yeah him, what'd he mean by it being worth more than the rest of the haul?"

"It wasn't in the books anywhere? A completely unknown Devil Fruit sells for millions of beri. A hundred million average, equal to the bounty of a pirate considered Officially Problematic by Grand Line standards instead of just a nuisance. Certain Devil Fruits, if properly identified, are worth way more," Mata explains. "What was the record, Mother?"

"That I know of? Five billion beri for the Ope Ope no Mi. I believe Ihenga said a pirate crew in the North Blue found it and tried to sell it to the Navy. And they sent Vice Admiral Tsuru to retrieve it, so they might actually have intended to pay for it."

"What, did they change their mind?" Tenko asks sarcastically.

"No one knows. But the Marines don't have it now and the selling crew vanished, so no one got what they wanted back then. Meanwhile, it's speculated that any of the Emperors' Devil Fruits would go for an equal amount." Huia gives them a minute for that to sink in. "There is a rule on pirate crews, as we were told by Roger. Not universal, but any crew that doesn't follow it is not worth sailing with. He who finds a Devil Fruit chooses what happens to it. If he wants to eat it, sell it, or even give it away for free, even the captain can't overrule him."

Find keep, Mata told him, carved into wood. Finders keepers. He reaches for it again, fingers hovering over it. Then he stops and looks at Mata. "It doesn't want me either, does it?"

She stares at the space between his hand and the fruit, then shakes her head silently. "It wanted to be found, which means it's where it wants to be, but you're… a carrier. A vehicle. Not its destination."

He withdraws his hand again. He didn't want it anyway, so no real loss. He'd normally be more skeptical, even Quirks don't discern willpower in inanimate objects (he'd know better than most if they did, since only All For One ever had more experience with them than him), but the fact that she found this thing at all, the way it was hidden—

"You said it's a Zoan, right?" Kurogiri's voice breaks through his thoughts.

"Almost certainly, yes," Mata says cautiously.

Kurogiri grabs the Encyclopedia and flips through it, pausing to check the index at that back because the order they're listed in doesn't make much sense — that isn't alphabetical in English or by katakana — then sets the book back down and picks up the fruit, turning it in his hands. He either doesn't notice or pays no attention to how Mata stares fixedly as he starts to talk. "Every summer when I was a kid, my Mom would take me down to Kaua'i to see the cousins. They didn't usually come visit us, but a few times in the winter, they did. When I was in middle school, they came up for Christmas, and we all went to Jigokudani Park in Nagano. This thing… this reminds me of that."

Tenko blinks. "Jigokudani? That's an onsen, isn't it?"

"A very particular one too." He pops a cloud into being and starts squishing and pulling at it with Mana-black fingers. "It's a two-kilometer hike through the woods in an area that snows four months out of the year, I had to carry the three youngest cousins back down on a cloud at the end, but everyone loved it. It's where all the macaques went after the ski resorts on the other mountains drove them out, back before Quirks."

He picks up the fruit again, rotates it a few times, then jams it into the cloud sculpture, which gets shoved into the middle of the table. "There ya go. Look about right?"

It's a rough sculpture of a short-tailed monkey. Specifically, with the Devil Fruit taking the place of the monkey's bare pink ass, the stem as the tail.

Tenko stares, then groans. "Oh goddammit it does. I am definitely not eating that."

Mata breaks down giggling. "That… is accurate to the impression I get, yes."

Kurogiri grins brightly. "Great! Because check this out." He spins the book to face them and slides it under the cloud-monkey.

He looks at the page. "Saru Saru no Mi, Model… Really?!"

"Yep. See where it describes the thing?"

"According to Kanese historical accounts… Derived from a peach, yeah it would be wouldn't it, with minimal deformation, yada yada yada, why the fuck does this read like European heraldry? Look at the wording on how the stem and the swirls are described." He skims the text, looking at the abilities. Fixates on a couple of specific sentences. Firecracker pops and crumbling purple-black Shuts his eyes against memory. Then he yanks the fruit out of the cloud sculpture and shoves it into Kurogiri's hands. "It's yours."

Kurogiri fumbles and nearly drops it. "Really?"

"You heard me. I'm never gonna eat one of these things, and I'm practically a fucking SPARTAN already. You're the one that needs more HP and DEF." He glares. "Especially if you're gonna fucking auto-tank for me like last time. You're not allowed to die again."

Kurogiri stares at him, then stuffs the fruit into cloudspace and comes around the table to hug him. "All right. Give me a little time to think it over though, okay? It's not a Quirk and there's no All For One, it doesn't have takebacks. I can't think of a better power for me, but it'd be nice to swim a little more first."

He leans into the hold, tension falling out of his shoulders. "Okay…"

"Damn," Mata says suddenly. "Maybe wait until after we make another dive?"

Tenko stiffens again, but just a little. "Wait, what?"

"Remember those ships we skipped? The big ones?"

"Yeah, why'd we ignore them?"

"Because they wouldn't have had any gold. They're Marine battleships, you can tell by the cannon emplacements and the round mid-castle. But I forgot the seastone. It's too useful not to have, it's literally hard as diamond but not as brittle. Possession is regulated, so we have almost no chance of getting it otherwise, and there should be plenty of it in the brig. Maybe the armory too. There's only so much we could use, but it's worth more than its weight in gold because of the regulations, and it's not exactly aluminum."

"Mmf… All right. In a week then. Is the god gonna be there again?"

"Not likely."

"Good."

[chimaerakirin]

Hehe a villain

[chimaerakirin]

Shiggy doodles

[chimaerakirin]

Number 7 for the touch prompts??

Hi Jade! Thank you so much for the prompt (from this list: unsure fingers braiding hair). This one was fun to write. Canon, post-PLF war, reader is a member of the LoV. Angst, some variety of pining if you squint. No idea on word count because I wrote it on my phone.

The door opens and you look up, only to sit back in shock. “When did your hair get so long?”

“I don’t know,” Shigaraki snaps. He looks pissed off, which is weird — far from being angry all the time, which is what you’d expect from your supervillain boss, Shigaraki’s actually pretty chill. Chill doesn’t mean friendly. “It keeps getting in the way.”

“So cut it.” You shrug and go back to reading, only for Shigaraki to yank the book out of your hands and toss it aside. “Hey! Can’t I catch a break for a second?”

“We’re in a war. There aren’t breaks,” Shigaraki says, even though there’s nothing else to call what you and most of the League are doing right now but a break. “I can’t just cut it.”

“Why not?”

“The regeneration thing. Every time I cut it it grows out longer the next time.” Now that you think about it, the ends of Shigaraki’s hair look like they were cut pretty unevenly. “I need your help.”

That’s weird enough to set you on edge. Sure, Shigaraki needs help sometimes — like anybody else — but he almost never asks for it, and not at all since he leveled Jaku City, got burned alive for his trouble, and broke All For One out of prison along with every other criminal in Japan before coming back to you and the others. Coming back different. You think anybody would come back different after all of that, but different’s not the right word, when you think about it. Wrong. A lot of the time, something’s wrong with him. You can’t put your finger on what it is.

Not right now, though. Right now he’s the way he’s always was before, the same guy whose League of Villains you joined way before it was cool. You quit mourning your lost reading time and focus in. “I can help. What do you need help with?”

“I can’t cut it and it keeps getting in my face,” Shigaraki says. You’d be annoyed, too. “I need you to do something to it. That thing you did for Toga one time.”

You only did Toga’s hair one time — right before the Hassaikai mission, because she wanted to look extra cute in case she saw either of her hero crushes. You didn’t do much, just embellished her usual style. You’re pretty sure Shigaraki’s not asking for space buns. “You mean braids?”

“Yeah. Those.” Shigaraki plunks down on the floor in front of the crate you’re sitting on, just like he must have seen Toga do. “Hurry.”

Why does he need you to hurry? It strikes you as weird, just like everything else about this — but you know it’s really him asking. You might as well. “I’m not good at this,” you warn.

“Better than me. Just do it.”

It occurs to you as you pick up a few strands of Shigaraki’s hair that you’ve never touched him before. Sure, you’ve been with the League a while, but other than Toga and Twice, the League isn’t the most touchy-feely group on the planet. Twice has touched him. Spinner, too. You remember feeling weird about that for no good reason, but now it’s your turn. “Do you want some kind of style?”

“Just get it out of my face. I don’t care what else you do.”

He told you to hurry, but you hit an instant slowdown in the form of how tangled his hair is. Undoing the knots takes time. Undoing the knots without hurting Shigaraki takes even more time, even though he tells you he doesn’t give a shit if you pull his hair. Once you’ve finally got it in a decent condition, you start in on a French braid. They stay in place better than regular braids, and he’s got a lot of hair. You need to start containing it at the top.

Shigaraki stirs when your fingernails scrape across his scalp, gathering the first few strands of hair. “That feels weird.”

“Sorry. I’ll be more careful.”

“Weird. Not bad.” Shigaraki’s head tips back, giving you a better view of what you’re working with. “Keep going.”

You fumble your next strand of hair, and the one after that, too. Why are your hands so unsteady? It can’t be because you’re trying to avoid touching his scalp, after he said he was fine with it. You order yourself to get it together and keep gathering strands of hair for the braid, trying not to notice the way his shoulders are relaxing. When was the last time you saw that? Ever since the war began, Shigaraki’s been tightly wound, whether he’s himself or not. If this is all it took for him to loosen up, you’d have volunteered in a heartbeat.

You get distracted, and the braid starts to go crooked. While you’re undoing the last few inches to fix it, you start talking, hoping Shigaraki won’t notice your mistake. “Have you been — okay, lately? The first battle was tough, but —”

He’s shaking his head. “I don’t feel right. Not hurt. Not like me.”

“Yeah?” Your hands are actually shaking now. “It seems like you’re different. I’ve noticed. I mean, we’ve noticed. Not just me.”

“Yeah. Sorry — about that.” Shigaraki’s breath huffs out in a sigh. “I feel more like me with you guys. He doesn’t like it.”

All For One? Yeah, you’d buy that. He treats you and the others like his toys. Tomura’s never treated you like that. He’s treated you like friends. “Can we help?”

“You’re helping,” Shigaraki says. He glances over his shoulder at you, and you know who you’re looking at. You catch sight of what might be some color in his cheeks before he looks away. “It feels good.”

“Yeah?” Your face feels warm, too, and it doesn’t fade when Shigaraki doesn’t answer. He doesn’t like to repeat himself, and you know what you heard. “This braid looks really bad, though. I totally screwed it up.”

Shigaraki doesn’t answer that, either. You dig up some courage and try again. “I guess I have to start all over again.”

“Mm.” Shigaraki makes a sound halfway between a sigh and a quiet laugh and leans back against your legs, his pale hair spilling over your lap. “Guess you have to.”

[chimaerakirin]

idk if you’re taking the touch prompts but if you are, #1 with a character of your choosing!

hi Grace, thanks for requesting this prompt!! yes, always taking requests from the prompts I share! I typically default to Tomura Shigaraki but went fem!Shigaraki this time. I can also see that it came out oddly specific so if it's not your thing, let me know and I can absolutely write something else!

from Touch Prompts: knuckles brushing across a cheek

Yuri fem!Shigaraki x reader

for some reason I really felt like writing a cutesy college AU this morning, it's based very loosely on the song Under My Skin by Rachael Yamagata short read//reader-realizing-they-are-gay fluff

She's just the girl across the hall.

You're friends.

At least, you think you are. She formed a pretty close friend group at the beginning of the year when you all moved in that you've never explicitly been a part of, but you've been around them enough. They invite you to play Mario Kart on occasion or stop by with cookies when Magne makes too many. At no point have you felt unwelcome around them, they're all nice. It's comfortable. You even watch her Twitch streams sometimes and say hi in the hallway. That has to count for something like friendship.

So why do you have a weird feeling in your chest as Tomura takes the seat next to you in your intro to stats class? She's your friend, there's no need to feel nervous around her.

The professor begins the lesson, diving into the syllabus but you struggle to pay attention. All you notice is the way her fingers grip the pen as she scratches notes straight onto the page. How her sparkly black fingernail polish is chipped around the edges. She never struck you as someone who would wear a lot of glitter, but it's cute. Subtle.

Part way through class, she stretches with a yawn. It pulls her huge black hoodie over the curves of her body in ways you never thought to imagine. Leaving you wanting for something you can't quite place. As her arms fall back to the desk, the sweet smell of her hits you. It's the same smell as her room, nothing you haven't experienced before. So why does it all feel so different now?

And why are your palms sweating at the thought of asking her to study for the exams with you?

She's your friend, there's nothing weird about it. And she's a girl. That's safe, right?

Class ends and you have no idea what you just missed. You turn to Tomura, hoping she paid more attention than you did. She seemed to be taking notes at least, which is more than you managed.

She moves her books to her bag, pausing for something. Tomura then looks down at her nose, trying to swat a hair out of the way.

"Here," you lean in, heart pounding in your chest, "let me help."

You carefully catch the offending hair, pulling it gently behind her ear. Your hand slides into the warmth of her hooded sweatshirt, knuckles grazing over her cheek as you move. Her skin flushes under your touch and based on the burning of your own face, you would imagine yours are doing the same.

When you look back at her, you find that she's not staring at her nose anymore — she's looking directly at you. Her deep red eyes hold yours, sucking you in. They're the kind of beautiful that make you feel like you're lost in another universe and you never want to leave. As she peers into your soul, you realize your hand has been lingering over her jaw. Reluctantly, you pull away and will yourself back to the world around you. But you want to stay. You want to do that again and again for as long as she'll let you.

Suddenly, you get it.

shigaraki masterlist

oops, this barely hit over 500 wc so I forgot to add the taglist at first. sorry!!

taglist: @kitkat13001 @kennys-partner @amira-44820 @its-evee16 @thesecond2demonking

@shigarakislaughter @flamesofdestruction @minniessskii @vaval3ntin @ykyouluvme 

@dummi666 @lotus-flower420 @nonominchan @softnfuzzy @mysticalhills 

@reireitaka @crwavee @baby-pink-flowers @drlucichen @frieren-imposter

 @lou-the-naga-queen @multifandomidk @love-for-yoosung-kim @venom-barf @shiiigaraki

@thetinas21 @spam-1 

[chimaerakirin]

Imagine the League of Villains screwing around with their Quirks. Once Round 17 of the Pokemon Trainer Compress Game is finished, someone points out that the marble don't actually stop time inside them. You're still aware. You can even still use your Quirk, it just won't work on the marble itself. Tomura can't decay his way out.

Everyone looks at Kurogiri.

With a long-suffering sigh, Kurogiri agrees to try warping out of the marble.

It works.

Except... It didn't decompress him. Kurogiri is now the size of a pencil eraser, standing on the bar and glaring down at a scratch in the wood he never noticed before. No one can hear him scolding Toga for putting it there.

Luckily, he's easily restored to normal size by warping back into the marble and being released the normal way.

[chimaerakirin]

Saw a beautiful woman on a huge motorcycle with her skinny ass boyfriend holding onto her on the back. Girl one wind tunnel and it’s over for ur paperclip boy

[chimaerakirin]

have u ever drawn tomura? he's my favorite so I'd love to see him in your style if u have! :)

what a guy

[chimaerakirin]

So I went back to chapter 38 to check Midoriya Vs Todoroki for dialogue purposes, and I found this:

Right after the first attack exchange. Leaving aside the assertion that there's "no other way to defend against that ice", I have to ask...

What in the fuck is All Might talking about here? Five percent? This is before the internship with Gran Torino. Percentages haven't come up at all with Midoriya's use of One For All. He's currently stuck with all or nothing, and his only control is how much of his body he breaks with it.

We know All Might can control how much power he puts into every attack, because he can punch the weather. Casually. There is no way he went big against the Sludge Villain. And if he wasn't restraining himself all the time in Muscle Mode, he'd crater the pavement and kick cars across the street with every step, blast people through walls with every wave. So he has to have some concept of proportion for how he uses One For All.

The problem is that Midoriya doesn't yet. All Might never mentioned it. His sole and only advice for using this monstrosity of a Quirk is "clench your buttcheeks and yell 'smash'." Nothing before, nothing since. And it doesn't seem to have occurred to Midoriya to point that out.

Therefore, in this panel, All Might has no clue whatsoever what he's saying. It isn't that Midoriya didn't know how strong Todoroki's attack would be, and it certainly isn't because "there's no other way to defend against that ice." (What, he can't just try to dodge, then break the ice from the inside if he fails?)

No. All Might either can't tell the difference between "five percent power" the way he'd use it vs "one hundred percent power" the way Midoriya uses it, or he's just incapable of recognizing that this is the only way Midoriya has EVER used it.

Given that he's a supposed to be a teacher, I don't know which is worse.

[chimaerakirin]

Where Villains Are Heroes

Are you satisfied? That's the question that rings in their ears after the great saviors of society send them flaking away into dust on the wind. And no, of course they're not. How could they be? So when they're offered a chance to try again somewhere else, they take it. They have, very literally, nothing left to lose. Tomura wants to see a world where the Villains have their own heroes. Kurogiri just wants to do a better job at taking care of Tomura. And whatever god-voice thing is asking has just the right destination in mind! This place is weird, though. What the hell is a Devil Fruit, and why is the map nothing but islands? Good thing neither of them gets seasick...

A BNHA x One Piece crossover, picking up post-canon and mid-timeskip respectively. Currently rated somewhere between T and M. Will eventually reach E when I get around to writing more of it.

Index

<- 1 - 4 - 5 - 6 ->

Adaptation

What Mata offers turns out to be some kind of oil, and a sponge thing to apply it with so he doesn't even need to get it on his fingers. Which was always the problem he had with lotion, to be honest. Within three days, the dry cracks near his hairline and directly around his eyes are clearing up. The worst of the rash isn't doing as well, and Mata brings in an old woman with similar tattoos on her hands to look at it. When he refuses to be touched, the old woman — a Tohuka doctor, apparently — is weirdly accepting of the explanation that the last time he let a doctor near him he woke up possessed, and gives Kurogiri instructions, both for the check-up and for a prescription. The resulting pumice scrub takes off so much ruined skin he half-expects to see raw muscle in the mirror, but instead he just sees overly pink but mostly smooth skin, which requires a different kind of oil to keep it from scabbing over and ending up worse than it started out.

He does still have eyebrows though, it turns out. Thin and kind of patchy-looking, but they're there. Mata tells him he has good arches. He has no idea whatsoever to do with that, so he ignores it.

A third oil — one that tastes vaguely like vanilla — is used to treat his chapped lips. It takes about a week for his face to heal, altogether, and his eyebrows are visibly growing back in. Still almost invisibly thin though, and what used to be a thick layer of dry flakes is now a web of fine scars. By then, he and Kurogiri have both finished the Saltborn books and started picking through the rest of the library. Kurogiri stops eating like a black hole and starts eating more like Rawiri apparently expected Tenko to the first day he was here. Two of those heaping basket-bowls in a row, but not half a dozen. Tenko himself still can't be bothered to eat more than one at a time, but Kurogiri must have talked to someone when he wasn't listening, because he keeps giving him snacks between meals, so he's probably eating that much total.

Then, it's time for swimming lessons. Tenko doesn't particularly enjoy them, but he does like the pseudo-weightlessness of floating in the water or drifting under the surface when he's being tested on how long he can hold his breath. It feels… familiar, somehow. Once Kurogiri and Mata both think he's proficient, she gives both of them weird masks with breath dials attached and teaches them diving.

Only then does she explain where they're going to get money.

"The Taniwha eat ships, sometimes. Those who try to sail the Calm Belts, mostly. And as big as Taniwha get, the ships can stay in their stomachs for the rest of their lives. But since they come here to die…"

"There's sunken treasure down there in the graveyard, isn't there?" Kurogiri asks.

"In their skeletons, yes. We harvest the meat and some of the bone when they die close to shore, but not all of them, and the biggest ones are at the edge of the Reinga Gate."

She doesn't explain what the Reinga Gate is. Instead, she continues the lessons. Tenko is able to dive a lot deeper than Kurogiri can. Then again, that American Rule 63 All Might knock-off did punch him into the seabed that time, which was way deeper than this. Probably. He's not entirely sure, he was kinda busy being one, dazed from the impact and two, fighting All For One's control. But the water pressure didn't hurt him then, and it's not hurting him now. Kurogiri on the other hand has to stop at less than half the depth, and Mata and the old man helping with the lessons stick him in the boat as a spotter.

All the swimming is intercut with combat practice, especially once the diving starts. Mata makes it clear that going that deep underwater every day is not a great idea, so every other day they go to a wide stretch of sand and spar. The old man that oversees this activity, one of the ones with his whole face inked, quickly bans Tenko from fighting any of his students except for one that keeps snarling in a suspiciously canine manner whenever the match gets rough. Then again, that's the only one that can keep up with him.

You were given gifts. You may keep them if you choose.

Apparently that means he gets to keep all the surgical enhancements. And some of the Quirks, for some reason. None of the strength or speed ones, so he's not as OP as when he came out of the tank, just ridiculous instead of impossible. But the old man accuses him of already knowing Matakite, or Seer's, Mana when he keeps dodging attacks he can't see. He knows that stabbing feeling in his head, though. He's still got Danger Sense. And Hyper Regeneration, he finds out when his designated opponent, Taika, turns out to be a dog Zoan of some kind (and Devil Fruits are the weirdest thing he's seen so far) and hits him too fast to react to. The strike breaks both the taiaha and his collarbone, and Kurogiri freaks out twice over, first when he doesn't react 'appropriately' to the pain — which he doesn't feel — and then to the way the dent in his shoulder visibly reshapes into an intact bone over the course of about three minutes. Which is way slower than it used to be. He can only assume he doesn't have any spare copies anymore, since he's pretty sure the Doctor shoved at least five into him. That's probably why 63 Might fucking one up did so much damage…

Hyper Regen is the only Quirk from All For One's loadout he can find though. Air Cannon, Radio Waves, Search, all of those are gone. He doesn't mind much. The healing is useful, but the rest of his former Sensei's hoard don't really match his playstyle, former or currently developing.

Kurogiri has a much easier time of it in the sparring matches, at least as far as dealing with people goes. For one thing, he actually knows how to fight, which he very gently points out that Tenko doesn't. Annoying, but fair. Shigaraki Tomura never had to learn, not when his win condition was 'touch enemy with all five fingers.' So all Tenko can do is dodge and slap people, which worked just fine against assholes like the Creature Rejection Clan or the MLA, but since he doesn't want to kill anyone here… Kurogiri spends a lot of time teaching him some basic form, when he's not beating the old man's other students with a stick. Or getting beaten. He's visibly getting faster and stronger as the days and weeks pass.

When the Mana training starts, Kurogiri picks up both types at what the old man calls a good rate, but while Tenko learns Kaitiaki, or Guardian's — the black sheen that appeared on Mata's legs when she danced in the fire — even quicker, he has no idea what they're talking about with Matakite at all. Danger Sense doesn't care if he's calm or not, it works either way, but other people's emotions have nothing to do with it.

His own emotions turn out to be the key to what few other Quirks he does seem to still have though. Namely Flight Ring, one of those odd ones in All For One's collection that had no 'voice' attached to it, and Blackwhip, the one Midoriya was relying on the most in their last fight. He's not sure how he still has that last one, but considering Midoriya was actively shoving One For All pieces at him… Maybe they count as gifts? At any rate, Flight Ring seems a lot weaker now, he can't pull those joint-popping pinball-bounce maneuvers with it anymore, and according to Mata it triggers when he's particularly happy. Which makes no sense compared to how it worked before, he assumes he'll be able to make it work regardless of how he feels eventually.

Blackwhip, on the other hand, is the opposite, and runs on anger. Like Flight Ring, it mostly seems weaker than before, when Midoriya had it, but it's still strong enough to rip up the sparring ring when it first appears, and Taika can't dodge it at all when it grabs him. Tenko didn't actually mean to make it do that, he was just so. Fucking. Aggravated. A solid ten minutes of trying to grab the dog-boy in hybrid form, with its OP AGI buff, he just… lost it. He couldn't let go, either. The old man had to grab the tendrils with Kaitiaki-covered hands and rip them apart. Which. He didn't know was a thing. But it's a good thing it is, otherwise he'd have accidentally strangled Taika. The old man tells him not to use Blackwhip in the ring until he can control it, which means he's benched for three days. It takes him that long to figure out how to turn it off. It just stays wrapped around his arm the entire time, flicking out occasionally to grab at something if he's thinking about it.

He wakes up after a nightmare on day two to find Kurogiri sitting awkwardly on the floor next to his bed, head tipped back against the mattress as he sleeps and one of the tendrils clinging to his hand.

"What was it?"

He forces the strand of energy to unpeel from tanned fingers. "The USJ. That Bakugou brat. He said he'd kill you. And he did."

"Yeah. In the end, he did." Kurogiri stretches his arm out, then moves to sit on the edge of the bed. "But I came back."

"You came back," Tenko repeats, sitting up. "Why did you bring them with you?"

"You're not talking about the nightmare."

He remembers. He was hardly present in his own head at that point, but maybe the god-voice gave him hindsight memories, because he remembers what happened. "You brought Eraserhead back, and all those others. Why?"

Kurogiri sighs and leans on his shoulder. "It's… not that clear. I told you I went into standby mode when they captured me, right? My job was to take care of you, but you weren't there, and I wasn't supposed to interact with the enemy. But after they figured out who I used to be, they brought in Shou and Yamada to see if they could get me to respond. And… it worked. Not well, but Shou managed to wake the part of me that never stopped being Oboro up. I told them about the Doctor's hideout. Then I shut down again. Maybe it was some kind of failsafe, maybe it was just backlash from breaking my programming, doesn't matter. They moved me somewhere else after that. Tokyo Central Hospital, I think. Kinda funny, I was born there. The next thing I remember, I hear Yamada screaming, and Spinner's holding out one of your hands — don't know how it got all scorched — and telling me to save you."

"Spinner? You saw him? Is he okay?"

"He… didn't look good. But it was a hospital, and they don't choose who to help." Kurogiri looks away. "I was sort of on autopilot. I remember moving Dabi to All For One and a completely ridiculous amount of Twices to… basically everywhere—"

"That was probably Toga. Twice died the day I woke up, but she'd already worked out how to use other people's Quirks, and she was the most upset about losing him."

Kurogiri winces. "I can see why the Witch wanted him dead, no matter how little he deserved it… Then I was told to bring All For One to you, and you didn't want me to."

"You couldn't disobey him." The whole idea is unthinkable. Literally. Noumu just don't work like that.

"And the order that mattered most was to protect you. He never told me he wasn't a threat to you." Kurogiri grins, blinding but brief, then goes back to melancholy. "So I didn't really know what to do. Not until Twice, well, Toga, tried to throw Shou and Yamada out of the sky. I didn't really decide to do it, I just… moved them. Then Shou asked me for help. Me, Oboro. And I just thought… Maybe if I helped him save Midoriya, they'd help me save you. At the very least, you could see Spinner again."

"Then Bakugou killed you."

"I was already falling apart at the seams. Too much warping on no maintenance. Trying to get to you was the last thing I was ever going to do anyway. Wasn't any different from saving Shou and Yamada either. Automatic." Kurogiri wraps an arm around his shoulders. "I'm still here though. So are you."

His dad fiddles with his phone for a minute. "Ah. I know… Here."

A second later, a vaguely familiar tune drifts out of the device. "Gripping with my cold hands, all the shapes I used to take. Hollow like a straw man, but it's easier to push away…"

Tenko lets the lyrics wash over him. It does kinda match. League always had the best music for everything. Then he blinks. "Giri? That's not from Arcane. That's one of the old seasonal cinematics."

"Oh. Well, you're pleased anyway, aren't you?"

"…Yeah. Have you got Phoenix on there?"

~WVAH~

It takes three months for the designated old person of the diving lessons to agree with Mata that he's capable of making a salvage dive. The final test, which Kurogiri managed but seems to have hit his limit on, took them down to a skeleton that gives him his first good look at how big Sea Kings are, and Mata tells him the skull the size of the bar building in Kamino is just from an average one.

The salvage process involves two canoes in a trench coat — a catamaran, Kurogiri corrects — and a weighted tarp thing that the treasure can be loaded into so the boat crew can pull it up on a winch. When Tenko points out exactly how heavy gold is (nineteen metric tons for a cubic meter, thank you, Mr Compress), Mata shows him how the iron weights unscrew in the center of the sphere to expose the same peach-colored wood as her surfboard, which turns them into floats. He's not sure that's how buoyancy is supposed to work, but he's not going to question it.

The dive isn't fast. If he hadn't already dealt with the hours of hiking around after Kurogiri was captured, he'd be bored out of his skull. In fact, it takes long enough that he and Mata each have several spare breath dials for their masks. The bones down here are distinctly bigger than the ones at the exam dive site. As in, that skull is closer in size to the USJ dome than to a three story building in a commercial district.

He's not sure how far down they are. Probably far enough that a pre-Quirk human shouldn't be able to manage with this kind of gear. He knows Kurogiri said something about scuba instructors being reduced to gibbering confusion. It's not any darker than twilight, he can still see just fine, but once they get into the ribcage he does turn on his lamp dial just to deal with the intermittent shadows. Mata wasn't wrong, there are ships down here. Broken up to varying degrees, more than a little corroded in places, but recognizably ships. This is where the lamp dial is absolutely necessary, because now they're not only fuck knows how deep underwater but also about to go indoors.

They don't find much in the first ship. It had cargo, crates and bales of something, but whatever it was, it's been ruined by time and water. The second and third ships are enormous, four-masted, armor-plated, and equipped with triple-barreled gun emplacements, and Mata waves him past those with hardly a look. The fourth ship, what looks like a classic Chinese junk, has more promise, and she points him into the rear of it — it's broken completely in half — to search while she checks the front.

He does find something here. The first ship must have been some kind of merchant vessel, because the remains of the cargo in it don't compare to the chests in this one. Some of them don't contain anything special, that one has a load of clothes, this one is full of medical equipment, there's a bunch of carpentry tools here… But here's a small one that contains metal bars, finger-sized and gleaming silver where he scrapes it with the little knife Mata gave him. Another container, the same size, is full of shiny rocks. A third, full of jewelry. Then there's a toolkit full of little pliers, tiny files, needle-thin drills, and similar things. He ties all four of those shut and packs them into a net bag, clipping them to the guide-rope the way he was taught and shoving it toward the main diving line.

Then he finds what looks like the captain's cabin, and the instant the door opens there's somethING IN HIS FACE—

Danger Sense shrieks, Blackwhip rips out of his arm — fuck that hurts, he has no idea why when nothing else does but Blackwhip feels like getting stabbed every time he loses control of it — and the energy tentacles are wrestling furiously with fleshy ones before he can even identify the octopus. He's not sure he can kill it without decaying it, it doesn't have any bones to break and his knife is way too small to be sure he can hit anything vital as big as this thing is. Shit, that's a lot of takoyaki. Does Kurogiri know how to make takoyaki? Blackwhip, working on autopilot, somehow manages to stuff the entire thing into a sphere, which he can tell it's still trying to escape, and he stares at it blankly. Then he almost smacks Mata in the face with it when she flashes her signalling dial at him from behind.

She points at the ball of tentacles and tilts her head in question. He takes a minute to figure out how to explain, then he uses his knife to carve a crude drawing of the animal in question into the nearest bit of wall. Just a circle with eight slashes curving out of the bottom, nothing fancy. She offers her knife, which is bigger than his, and he hesitates, then shakes his head. Instead, he returns to the room with all of the non-treasure chests — probably crew quarters — and dumps the clothes out of the big one. He shoves the captured octopus in it, strapping it shut and carving a few kanji into the lid before adding it to the guide-rope, then swims back to the captain's quarters.

Ohhh, yeah. The octopus was totally a boss. This is where the loot is. There are no less than three decent-sized chests sitting in the corner. One of them has a cracked lid, and another has the fittings on the front corner split, but that just lets a few of the coins spill out and hint at the contents. It's outright stereotypical pirate treasure, really. Gold coins, silver tableware and candlesticks, bullion the size of flip phones, gaudy jewelry, uselessly blinged-out daggers, ropes of pearls, the works.

Getting all of that attached to the line requires going back to the tarp and getting out the extra canvas, otherwise the loot will spill out of the cracks in the chests. Nets won't hold it. The chests also have to be taken all the way up the guide-rope one at a time, it's not as sturdy as the main line. When he goes back to the captain's cabin after the third chest is loaded, he points up in question.

Mata, hovering in the center of the room, shakes her head slowly and taps her ear and eye with her thumb and index finger in an L-shape. The gesture for Matakite. He points to his knife, and she shakes her head. With a glance out the door toward the stick-figure octopus on the wall, she draws her own knife and scratches a few words into a cabinet. Special. Hidden.

Bonus loot. Got it. He nods sharply, then starts swimming around the room, poking at the walls and furniture. There are no hidden panels in the shelves or cabinets, not that he can find. The desk, though, when he manages to rip the drawers out, turns out to have a hidden space in it. Inside the cavity, there's a wooden chest about the size of a jewelry box, which he offers to Mata.

She nods, but doesn't take it. Instead she scratches find keep into the desk and gestures to his belt, where there are clips to hang smaller carry-nets from. Once he stores the box, she tugs the guide-rope and gestures upward.

They head back to the main diving line and secure the pile of chests, tying everything up in the tarp like it's a giant tote bag, then Mata unscrews a smaller weight hanging from a loop around the line. It must be of Taolf wood too, because it goes shooting up toward the surface. She waits a minute, then starts opening another weight. The tarp with the haul immediately starts rising, if slowly, and she gestures up again. Thus begins their ascent. A few minutes later, she stops, body language the same as when she noticed the hidden loot, and turns to stares down at the far side of the skeleton.

Tenko turns to see what caught her attention, and his jaw drops behind his mask.

So that's the Reinga Gate…

'Pit' isn't a big enough word. 'Hole' is laughably insufficient. It's an abyss. He knows it's not a straight cliff, he can see just far enough to see the rim curving into a crescent at the very least. You could drop Mount Fuji down it and not fill the void.

And then.

And then.

Something swims out of it.

He almost stops breathing. Gigantomachia would not ask to keep this fishy. Gigantomachia would be more likely to wake up crying from a nightmare about it. The fact that it's pink with rings of white fluff like a chimaera of a poodle and a flamingo means absolutely nothing compared to the fact that one of its eyeballs is at least as big as the giant bodyguard at his full size. And it's still emerging from the Gate. He can't see all of it. He's not sure he'd be able to comprehend it if he could.

But it can see them.

He doesn't know why.

He doesn't know how.

This thing is so big it shouldn't notice them unless he somehow managed to start decaying it. But it. Is. Looking at them.

It edges closer, and he sees Mata out of the corner of his eye putting her hands together. He doesn't do the same. He can't move. He can't afford to piss it off. If it can see them, it can see the rope leading to the surface. Leading to Kurogiri. He doesn't want it to see Kurogiri.

After an absolute eternity, it leaves, and they resume ascending. He doesn't remember a bit of the trip up after that. He just crawls across the boat's deck to huddle against Kurogiri, shivering and staring blankly at the giant fucking seagull perched on the end of one of the canoes.

"Tenko? Tenko, what's wrong?" He doesn't answer, and Kurogiri looks up at Mata. "What the hell happened?"

"Nothing bad, just… Tane-Mahuta was in the Reinga Gate."

"WHAT?!" comes the shriek from the rest of the crew.

He sort of… zones out after that. They're back in Mata's house, after sunset, before he really wakes up. He's showered at some point, changed, with some medicinal oil on his face and a plate of takoyaki in front of him. From the taste in his mouth he's already had at least one piece.

"Giri?" he asks. His voice sounds small, young, and he would normally hate it but right now he can't bring himself to care.

"I'm here. Are you back with us?"

He nods shortly, then looks around. Not only is Mata sitting at the table with them, her mother is too. "Huia? I didn't notice…"

"That is not in the least surprising. Very few ever see the Atua That Swim in person. That the first living Taniwha you encountered is one of them… Honestly, you've taken it remarkably well."

"Atua That Swim?"

"Atua are what you might call gods. Tane-Mahuta is the Father of Birds, and one of the greatest. Tangaroa and Ikatere are also very recognizable. There are more, but those three have lived since before Hawaiki began, in the days of Nika's last avatar." Huia sips at a coffee mug. "They aren't divine, but we title them such out of respect for their power."

So these things are immortal. Great. "What was that one doing down there, if it wasn't dying?"

"That would be the question. The Tohuka have been sent for. They will start arriving tomorrow, and then my daughter will speak to them about the encounter."

"Will they wanna talk to me too?"

"Unlikely. The meeting will be entirely in te reo, councils like this always are, and if you can speak enough of that to understand any questions, let alone answer them, you've been hiding it very well."

"Good." He drops his gaze to his plate and starts eating.

~WVHA~

All skill-grinding is suspended for the next two days, since the Old People are busy with something. Kurogiri spends it sorting through the loot. The chests started coming apart pretty much as soon as they were exposed to air, which makes sense. The set of four small chests Tenko found in the crew quarters are jeweler's supplies, and while the tools are mostly ruined, some of them are good, and the materials and products mostly need cleaning. The three main chests are just a scrambled mess of precious metals and pretty rocks, which requires taking an actual inventory. Tenko mostly leaves him to it. He does take notes when Kurogiri calls something out to him, but mostly the paper in front of him is getting used for sketching.

He's always liked drawing. It made a good dexterity exercise when he was younger, a pencil isn't held with all five fingers, and he always liked looking at fanart for League and the pre-Hero manga Kurogiri would give him. He liked the idea of making his own. But he was made to destroy (made specifically for destruction, by All For One, he knows now), so he never really let himself indulge in it. He does now though. It's not like he's got any games to play, and no one's going to tell him he has no right to create here.

So while Kurogiri counts out gold coins and separates rubies from emeralds and pearls from diamonds, Tenko draws. Wrecked ships in the sand, skeletons like small towns, a field of bones around a gaping maw of darkness, a bird-like eel with a humanoid speck in front of it.

"Is that the Atua?" Kurogiri asks over his shoulder. He nods, and Kurogiri squints. "You for scale?"

"No," Tenko says as blandly as possible. "Machia for scale. Ulti-mode Machia."

Kurogiri freezes. "Understandable. Have a nice day."

Normally he'd complain about how old that meme is. That's practically a running gag between them, Kurogiri does the dad thing of making dated references and Tenko complains it's inflicting psychic damage. But now he's thinking about how helpless he felt, faced with that thing, and he's annoyed. He hates feeling helpless. He hates it almost as much as being helpless. He had more than enough of that before All For One ever slipped him Decay like a razor blade in a candy apple, and in hindsight almost every bit of his life after that was no different. Right up until his grandmother held out her hand to keep him from falling into nothing.

Right up until he died.

It got his League killed too, or as good as. He never gave a shit about Moonfish or Muscular, they weren't his picks, and he was ambivalent about the condiment kid, who just seemed petty in all the wrong ways. But Magne was killed by Overhaul. Mr Compress lost his arm and then his freedom. Twice was butchered by a literal poster boy. Spinner… He's not sure what happened to Spinner, but Kurogiri said he didn't look good, and he thinks he remembers All For One offering him poison extra Quirks, so he might have Noumufied. Toga fell somehow, that's the only reason the Twice clones would have stopped overwhelming the Heroes long enough for them to come help Midoriya, and he can only hope she thought it was a good trade in the end. Dabi probably burned himself out, Endeavour and the peppermint brat showed up in the final arena so he obviously didn't manage to kill them. Kurogiri definitely burned himself out.

So. Helplessness leads to death. His, and the people he cares about. And he refuses to do that again. If he has to rip a god's throat out with his teeth, he will. He doesn't mind washing blood out of his mouth. He's done it before.

(He wonders if Midoriya ever even realized he bit back.)

No one will ever take what's his again.

~WVAH~

Oboro looks up from the silver goblet he's polishing at the edge of bloodlust in the air. He's not quite got the hang of keeping his Observation Haki (he tries to use normal Linian words for things, since they won't stay here forever) up passively all the time, but he's got the feeling he wouldn't need it to sense this.

Not when there's a faint but very literal light in his eyes, coloring his pupils the same red as his irises.

He knows Tenko better than anyone else, alive or dead, in this world or the last. He always has. It's why he broke down bawling when he heard the word 'dad', because it meant that Tenko was finally able to acknowledge it.

So he understands why his son (his son!) is so unhappy. He hated seeing him so petrified. He knows only one thing could have caused it. And looking at the drawing of the Sea King, he doesn't blame him at all.

Now there's the fingers of a shinigami trailing down his spine, creeping cracks and flakes of dust on the wind brushing past his soul, and he doesn't mind one bit. Even as Tomura, taught to be cruel and dancing on gaslit strings, his kid was objectively a better person than the monster that created both of them.

("Disposable pawns? Don't be stupid… They're my valued comrades. Even if they have different goals.")

And Tenko, even if he's not sure what he's doing, still has all the best parts of Tomura. The threat and promise of destruction bleeding off of him aren't being held against Oboro's throat. They're shielding it.

He's okay with that. Even if it means dust in the wind and funerals without bodies. Hell, he'll even be proud of him.

After all, Shouta always told him it's the natural price of pissing off the Sunshine People, brilliant and feral. Tenko may be moonlight, but he's getting brighter by the day. Why wouldn't he be proud of that?

~WVAH~

In the marae, Matariki looks up from Koroua Wiremu mid-sentence, turning sharply toward her home. Fangs bared like Tumatauenga, blood dripping from their edges, dust swirling like ash around the steps of a haka and black lashes of pure mana curling protectively possessively around her even as they reach out for hearts to crush.

"Never again."

"—iki!"

Her eyes snap open and she looks back at the gathered Tohuka, who are glancing at each other in a mix of irritation at her poor manners, confusion at the uncharacteristic rudeness, and interest.

Koroua Henare, the Tohuka o Tumatauenga, is part of the last group. "What did you hear, child?"

"Rangatira Mana," she answers.

"From the Saltborn?" her mother asks.

"It's Tenko's Voice."

"What does his Mana demand?"

"That his Taoka not be taken from him again."

"What do you think his Taoka is?" Wiremu asks.

"People." There's no doubt whatsoever about that. "His father, most definitely. Possibly others. I felt… protected. It's… I think it's like the stories told about Roger with his crew."

The Tohuka exchange looks, the ones upset by the distraction turning thoughtful.

"This may change things…" one of the Kuia says. Her tattoos say she's a weaver and her canoe came from Raranga Island, but Mata doesn't know her.

"No," Koroua Ihenga snaps back. They've been disagreeing almost the whole meeting. "It changes nothing. You simply no longer have a shield for your denial."

"I deny nothing of reality! I'm just reasonably wary! Your head is in the clouds!"

"And yours is in the sand. Of the two of us, I think I have the clearer view."

She likes Ihenga. He knows how to make a point.

"Ihenga is correct," Mother says, making the weaver squawk. "There is no more reason to doubt. My own decision is made, and I will follow through on it. If this runaka chooses not to support it, then so be it. I will face the sun alone."

The remaining dissenters recoil slightly. Such words are never spoken lightly. The point of being Hawaiki is to have your people beside you as you dance through the night.

"Enough."

Everyone straightens their spines and shuts up, facing the speaker. Muturangi is the head of the ahurewa, and thus most senior of all Tokuha, and while no one is really sure how old he is, no one would disbelieve him if he claimed to have met Maui. As a result, his word may not be law but it is most definitely order, and this is the first he's spoken this meeting.

"The Atua has spoken, and the records agree. It is time. I will face the sun with Pikimene Huia."

Assent sweeps through the marae, beginning with the weaver and ending with Mata herself.

[chimaerakirin]

something i’ve kind of noticed with the surfacing of this whole “the best smut is a character study” kind of mindset is the pipeline to a borderline “when i write porn i do it intellectually unlike some of you SICKOS” type of mindset and i just wanted to remind you especially in our current political atmosphere that writing porn doesn’t have to be intellectual to have value. it can be just horny. thanks

[chimaerakirin]

I love how at first I thought my Tomura obsession was going to last for a few months like all my other obsessions…. It’s been a year and it’s only getting worse

[chimaerakirin]

He’s so amazing <3  Happy Birthday, Tomu

[chimaerakirin]