Post USJ Rattling

[wrecking_yard]

The place is dark when the door opens; it doesn't set off much of a jump, not when I could hear the key in the lock, the lights in the other room get turned on, and it's a familiar pattern of footsteps. There's rustling from things getting set down, then footsteps heading into the room where there's signs of life, then he's leaning on the back of my chair to see what I'm doing.

"....You know, this's....probably not the most healthy thing to be dwelling on right now." Worried and a little disappointed, but he doesn't sound that surprised.

"There were some things I was curious about that I couldn't see that well from where I was, so I was just checking to see what I could find." Of course they left all the cameras running; they wanted to make a statement, a message. They didn't want any kind of SOS getting out, but they wanted the world to see what happened.

He drapes over the back of the chair, arms dangling over my shoulders and chin on top of my head. "And did you figure it out?" He's worried and still doing the clingy thing - I did give him a pretty big scare - but he's at least humoring me on this.

"Well, I found a few things." I bring up one of the wide-area feeds, skipping back to an earlier timestamp - just as they made their entrance. "This is all that I saw from where I was - the big portals they definitely wanted to draw attention with.... but." I bring up a second window with one of the closer feeds, the one watching the hub, zoomed in as much as it'll allow on the two that seemed like the ringleaders. "The warper's already watching the exit and he's looking back past me - toward the students....and from where we were, we didn't see these." I tap the screen where there's smaller portals - one in each of the various zones. "They were already spreading their people out, and the warper - Kurogiri, if I heard it right - was getting everything set up and watching the students, for an opening to get most of them away from one of us." I shift back, half leaning back, which does mean leaning more into him. "All the small fry are scattering out from the portals, but these two - Tomura and the Nomu - are staying right here, in the center hub. They have about the best view of the area you can get in there, and are dead center to get to any of the other zones."

It was a big, brazen show of force with a very calculated plan. "If All Might had been there from the beginning, he would've been the one stepping forward to get between the villains and the students - he'd be the most rational choice among us for that kind of front line defense, after all." Thirteen avoids combat missions because of how difficult it is to use her Quirk for combat without friendly fire happening - Black Hole is an area effect, she can't generate one big enough to be useful in a fight without hitting everyone. "I'd have been covering the students, Thirteen would have gone to open an escape route. Kurogiri would've moved in to pick a fight with her; she'd have enough space to throw Black Hole at him, and he was already prepared to turn it back against her. He would've done the same thing he did here to get the students scattered, and even though All Might would've taken out some of the small fry, you know what he would've done immediately there."

Mic nods without budging from resting on my head. "He would've dropped everything to go after the kids."

"I still would've been bogged down in the middle with the cannon fodder, so he'd be separated from us and be focused on the ones attacking the students - so these two, staying out of the fight, could head toward whatever zone he'd gone to even if Kurogiri were occupied somehow. All Tomura would have to do is touch him while he was preoccupied with the kids to do some damage, and as long as the kids were in danger he wouldn't focus on the Nomu enough to defend himself properly...and with that much going on, there'd be other openings for Tomura to make it worse."

He just makes a little uncomfortable noise in the back of his throat; it was well planned out. If All Might hadn't exhausted himself in the morning, they would've gotten him. None of us were expecting the Nomu, after all.

"There was something else I noticed, though." I reach up to juggle around, finding the feed that was centered on the hub and skipping ahead - too far at first, enough to need to pull it back a little; tuning out the part of the feed where I'm getting trashed by the Nomu only goes so far. "Watch Tomura here. I know you've seen this before with students."

I'd caught that something was up with him at the time, but it was hard to pay much attention to him when I was focused on Not Dying; the most I could really afford to mind was whether he was approaching and about to try and tag me again. Finding it in the feed had been miserable, but.

"That's....a meltdown? Like the overload thing?"

We've had students on the spectrum before. Japan's not great at handling any kind of mental health thing even with people that don't fall through the cracks somewhere, and while I haven't had a chance to go looking through records yet, I'm dead sure Tomura's one that went through the cracks. "Yeah. You can hear it later, too, just before they leave - he's stressed, there's a lot going on and they're losing, and he has a bigger one loud enough for the cameras to catch some of it. Now look at this-," and I'm pointing as Kurogiri appears behind him; you can't make out whatever he's saying, but the body language and effect on Tomura's obvious. I pause it there, tapping on Kurogiri on my screen. "That's not a minion of his. That's his handler."

Mic shifts a little, tilting his head, still propped on mine. "So you think he's actually the guy in charge?"

My headshake doesn't need to be much of one. "I don't think so.... not with that there." I don't bring up the feed for where the Nomu is, in the middle of all of my blood and the scarves scattering, but do motion the direction it'd be off-camera. "They said what it was straight up - that's not some random quirk user they scraped up and groomed. That's a bioweapon, engineered and tailored to go up against All Might. That's the current culmination of a huge amount of time and effort."

There's another uncomfortable noise, almost a whine.

"Tomura's way too young to've been there from the beginning, and it doesn't match their pattern for the mastermind to show themselves like this - Kurogiri's probably controlling a local chunk, and they'd want us to think he's in charge." I leave the videos where they are, folding my arms; it's got to be Them Again. "The students all noticed that they had no clue what any of the kids could do; someone that secretive with that much funding and ability isn't going to just walk out when there's a bunch of unknowns even if they are banking on the kids being easy marks in their first week."

There's a few long seconds ticking by, then he pulls back, standing up and grabbing the back of my scarves to tug me out of the chair. "Right. Well, now that you've got all that figured out, I've got takeout and movies and you are going to actually take a break like you're supposed to."