“You’re ditching us?” Mina said.

Mina had spent the last half of Midnight’s class slowly sliding down in her seat and sneaking a multitude of glances at each of us in some kind of attempt to figure out who exactly was mad at her.

“I finally got Bakugo to agree to eat with me,” Eijiro said, shrugging. “I’ll be back before lunch is over.”

“Hisoka?” Mina said, keeping her voice bright. “You’re still going to eat with us, right?”

“Sorry, Mina,” I said, tracking Toru’s progress across the room and out into the hall. “I have something I would like to do before lunch is over.”

Tsuyu followed my line of sight to the door while Momo watched Mina as the pink girl’s nerves started to get the better of her.

“You don’t need to worry, Mina,” I said, stepping around the lingering Eijiro. “I’m not upset that you told Midnight; you should stop worrying about it.”

“Oh, thank god,” Mina managed, looking relieved. “Well then, if I don’t have to worry about that, let’s go find some replacements! Momo, think you can pull Todoroki?”

The shadows of Momo’s face grew harsh as she leaned forward, staring at her with wide eyes.

“Hisoka might not feel upset, but that doesn’t mean what you did is fine,” Momo said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “Come on, let’s go find a seat so I can properly chastise you.”

Tsuyu positioned herself behind the pink girl in order to help push her away as she dug her heels in.

“Wait!” Mina squeaked as she was dragged away. “Eijiro? Sure I can’t eat with you and Bakugo?”

“Not a chance, devil girl,” Eijiro said, long after she’d been dragged off. “Hey, Hisoka—Todoroki is the strong silent type, which makes him your replacement; who do you think they’ll get for me?”

I took my eyes off the door; Toru was far out of sight anyway, already moving up the stairwell out in the hall. I considered the question for a moment, trying to match one of our classmates to Eijiro’s personality.

Rikido would have fit well, as the two had shared a lot of outward similarities—positive outlooks, energetic and upfront with their words. Mashirao as well, although he was far more restrained and levelheaded. Tenya held a lot of those traits as well, but they were tempered by strict adherence to authority that Eijiro didn’t really have. Denki was all three, but he seemed to exist slightly more inside his own head than the other two.

“Denki,” I said, “Or perhaps Tenya.”

“Those two? I’ve got it rough out here, man,” Eijiro joked, “Hey, you want to come to eat with us? I don’t think Bakugo will explode if it’s you—or even if he does, you’re more likely to survive it than most.”

For a moment, I considered suggesting he recruit Midoriya, just to see his reaction, but the moment passed, and the comment was left unsaid.

“Sorry, Eijiro,” I said, considering what to say to excuse myself. “I want to speak with Toru about what happened at the USJ.”

I stilled for a moment, unsure of why I’d said anything at all. I’d shone a light on my own intentions when I hadn’t needed to; I could have told him I wasn’t feeling well or that I had to speak with a teacher about some obscure subject. Instead, I’d given Eijiro all the pieces he needed to discourage me from my decision, and I had no idea why I’d done it.

“You were the one that found her, weren’t you?” Eijiro said more quietly, patting me on the shoulder. “That’s going to be a tough talk, man, but it’s you, so I’m not that worried.”

There was no judgment, no attribution of ill will, and no attempt to discourage me or steer me away from my goal. Eijiro had elected to show empathy, a startling understanding, and a simple endorsement of my social ability to connect with a classmate—I was entirely unsure what to say in response.

“Thank you, Eijiro,” I managed, feeling a bit offbeat. “Enjoy your lunch with Katsuki.”

Eijiro clapped a hand onto his bicep and engaged his quirk, as I’d seen him do on several occasions—it was starting to become something of a heroic pose in the making.

“Will do,” Eijiro said, grinning, “Better keep my guard up though; I am walking straight into ground zero.”

I smiled.

Several people at U.A had an unrestrained advantage when it came to encrypting their feelings. They fell loosely into three types, where the first type was entirely because of costume choice, while the second and third types were both related to heteromorphic quirks and the inborn features they had inherited or developed.

Lunch Rush, Power Loader, and Thirteen were all people who hid some or all of their bodily communication behind equipment. Thirteen, for example, was predominantly covered by her astronaut-styled costume; therefore, there was no instance in which you could truly read her. I’d seen her without it in the aftermath of the USJ battle, and her uncovered face was just as expressive as any other—albeit pain was far more universally understood. As far as I knew, the damage that had been caused to her back during the fighting had rendered her unable to move, but she had been stabilised by Recovery Girl and the other medical staff. Given the time wounds of that magnitude could take to heal, even with Quirk-based assistance, she was likely no longer on the campus.

Nezu, Cementoss, and Fumikage Tokoyami all fit somewhere inside the spectrum of the second category—their quirks had warped their appearance to some degree, or they possessed some qualities that couldn’t be mapped perfectly onto that of a human and thus required more effort to decode.

I found it particularly difficult to read Fumikage; almost all of his expression came from his eyes, while his mouth had been rendered entirely blank of emission. Fumikage had developed ways to move around this. He was prone to exaggerated body language and dramatic tone choice, and he possessed a wide vocabulary—all of those things pulled enough weight during a conversation to bring it into line with the normal range.

Manga Fukidashi, Kojiro Bondo and Hagakure Toru were all examples of the third type—their quirks had taken them beyond the pattern matching available to most humans, and the encryption ranged from the absurd to extremely difficult, to physically impossible to decipher without assistance.

I knew that Toru presented herself vocally as energetic, cheerful, and exaggerated in her responses, all things you would expect from someone entirely incapable of visual communication. All of that auditory expressiveness had to have developed from living with her quirk; Filling the air with noise, making big, universally understood signs with her gloved hands—thumbs up, okay, pointing, clapping, spread fingers.

Toru typically broadcasted herself in a way that would be heard because; if she didn’t remind people that she was there, then she risked being forgotten. If she didn’t keep those around her updated on how she was feeling, then she would be assigned an emotion based on her last vocalisation.

How often had someone said something hurtful, abrasive, or rude, and Toru had never vocalised that it had affected her? For most, confrontation was a scary thing, filled with hidden traps, ruffled feathers and tongues that rent flesh. To confront a friend, publically, was akin to warring with the sun and knowing in the back of your mind that it may just turn its gaze elsewhere and leave you to the dark.

Perhaps Toru held onto those moments of hurt, disappointment, and of being unheard, thinking that a time would arise later to address them—hoping that perhaps, those around her had noticed her discomfort, or they would go through the level of introspection needed to discover that other people existed outside of the purview of sating their own egos.

But, in a world where Toru Hagakure was angry, hurt, scared, or alone. In a world where those around her couldn’t check on her state with a glance, something that every other human on the planet did countless times a day with everyone around them. In a world where Toru fell into a state where she felt uncomfortable bringing it up, in a world where she began to regularly dismiss her own hurt, and in a world where she was simply tired of trying to make herself heard. Hours, days, weeks, or even years spent waiting for the perfect moment to vocalise how she felt—only to never say a thing at all.

I opened my eyes and stepped out of the stairwell to find Hagakure Toru, looking out through the chainlink barrier that ringed the roof, gloved fingers clenched around the metal.

“Hello Toru,” I said in greeting.

The collar of her uniform twisted oddly before she turned around, planting one of her feet flat against the concrete half-wall. One of the gloves let go of the fence, and she leaned back first against it, her right hand holding her there.

“I get the first name treatment too, huh?” Toru said. “Do I start calling you Hisoka now?”

“That would be best,” I said, crossing the distance, angled to her left. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I would like to speak with you for a moment.”

“About what?” Toru wondered.

I closed my eyes for a moment as I came to stand beside her, going over the openers I’d considered on my way up the stairs.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t say anything about Koji and Rikido when I found you,” I said honestly. “It was an attempt to keep you from experiencing additional stress on top of what I assumed was a concussion.”

The fence creaked slightly, the sound originating from where her hand was still holding most of her weight. Beyond the fence and massive walls surrounding U.A, Musutafu stretched out into the distance, a million sheets of glass sparkling in the daylight.

“I’m not angry at you, Hisoka,” Toru said, the twist of her uniform suggesting she was looking over at me. “That’s reserved for the villains.”

I felt a flicker of something there, like a connection between them or perhaps a parallel path.

“I’m angry at myself, I think,” I said quietly. “If I’d been faster returning to the USJ, it may have ended up differently.”

“I doubt it—you’re not that fast,” Toru murmured. “They were on us before I even hit the sand; I didn’t even see what got me.”

Given the powers of those who’d been inside the Sand Biome, it was either the concussive eye blasts or the man with the blurring speed. Even one of the others, positioned in a spot that gave them an advantage—unknowable unless one of the villains spoke.

“I think that’s the worst part about it all,” Toru said, fingers of the glove distorting slightly, catching on the wire her weight against her arm. “I didn’t even see it happen, I don’t know who killed them, and I don’t know who to hate—hating all of them feels too vague.”

I spent years hating an invisible monster whose shape defied any attempt to shape it into someone recognisable. The overwhelming relief and the agonising pain of finally having a face to direct that unfocused rage towards was—I wasn’t sure any description I could invent would describe accurately enough.

“I know the feeling well,” I said in response, pressing my forehead against the fence. “Toru, is there a reason why you are not eating anything today?”

There hadn’t been anywhere near enough time for her to have done so between leaving the class and arriving here, and there was no evidence that she had brought the black container she usually brought up onto the roof.

“Out of the frying pan, and into the topic of my eating habits,” Toru said, wondering. “Did you really follow me up here to talk about that?”

“Originally, I didn’t come up here to talk about your eating habits,” I said truthfully, “But I find myself very much interested in your response.”

Toru turned further, fingers of her left glove stretching further before being left behind, stuck in chainlinks. Her foot slipped back down to the ground, and the fence bulged outwards as she leaned against it, hip first. Her lack of usual energy, the proximity, and inability to see the expression on her face felt strangely dangerous.

“You’re so weird, Hisoka,” Toru said. “If you really want to know, I’ve been on a very strict diet since I was little—and I left my bento on the kitchen table this morning.”

I had a line of questioning to follow there, to determine whether or not she had done that because she had chosen not to eat or if it had simply been a moment of forgetfulness. Unfortunately, my innate desire to learn more about the mechanics of her quirk and how it had affected her development was pushing me down a different track.

“Your diet—it’s because of your inability to interact with sunlight,” I said, unable to stop myself.

“Yeah,” Toru said, drawing my gaze as one of her shoes lifted up off the ground in front of her, dangling oddly—had she kicked it off? What was the purpose of such a thing? “I do receive some amount of UV, but it’s like a hundredth of what a normal person gets from just existing.”

I stared at where her leg might have been—if she was receiving even that much, then either her quirk was performing that part autonomously, or her invisibility might have some other unknown effect attached to it.

I knew that some forms of invisibility quirks were based on conditions rather than bending light. Those types of conditional quirks were rare; ‘A human male cannot see me,’ or, ‘Anybody under five feet tall is unable to perceive me,’ as opposed to the light manipulation type; ‘the light passes through my body without effect,’—It was magnitudes more likely to be the second type.

“Vitamin D is responsible for all sorts of things,” I said in response, working through the problem. “One of the ones I’m most familiar with is a reduction in serotonin levels; lethargy, depression, fatigue, weakened immune system, weight gain—”

The fence moved again as she straightened up slightly.

“I know the effects—you don’t have to list them at me,” Toru said, interjecting. “Why do you know them?”

Her tone was far more level than I would have expected from an interjection. Was she angry that I’d speak about her medical issues? Or was she frustrated because she was being reminded of them? Or was she simply surprised that someone else knew about it?

“When I was younger, there were concerns about my health and how I presented myself,” I said, “My lack of physicality, low energy levels, and general detachment was initially interpreted as extreme lethargy, and through that, I learnt about the symptoms associated with serotonin deficiency.”

Most of that knowledge had come from researching the medical terms and completely failing to understand any of it—too young and uneducated to read such complicated strings of words and derive any kind of meaning. As I’d gotten older and revisited it, It had begun to fall more easily into place.

“In saying that,” I said, “I find myself curious about your normal demeanour; even if you do follow a strict diet to alleviate the negative effects of your quirk, I would expect you’re on some kind of supplementary medication to boost your levels of serotonin further?”

The shoe that had been earlier dangling from her toe was now on its side on the rooftop, and the glove that had been threaded through the fence had been entirely left behind. Two limbs, now entirely invisibly and unaccounted for—I turned towards her as she stepped closer, that same sense of danger rising higher.

“What did the doctors tell you when you were little, Hisoka?” Toru said, her voice edged like glass. “That you’d grow out of it? The older you got, the easier it would be for you to work through it? Maybe, they told you that if you took the right combination of drugs, in the right amounts, for just the right amount of time, then you’d fit right in with all of the other kids—that sound about right?”

I didn’t respond because some of that had been bizarrely on point, and secondly because I was trying to determine exactly how far away her hand was from my face.

“See, there’s a difference between what you were talking about before and about me,” Toru said, now very much inside my personal space. “Maybe there is a right combination, and there might just be a perfect dosage to get me back to ‘within normal range’, but guess what, Hisoka?”

I’d pushed her, by accident, into a state that I was more than familiar with and one where Toru was more than willing to broadcast. My quirk had risen into the air around me in response to her aggression, tiny grains spreading through the area in such a diffuse manner that they could hardly be seen—her hand was directly in front of my face, fingers splayed before my eyes.

Her vocalised anger and my unconscious use of my quirk were enough that I could decrypt Hagakure Toru for the first time.

“It doesn’t matter how long you medicate or how well you curate your diet,” I said quietly. “Because so long as your quirk exists, the underlying problem will never be dealt with. This isn’t a problem with a cure or a phase of your life that you can overcome; this is your life.”

Toru let her hand drop at the words, the lethargy she’d possessed since the USJ returning almost as quickly as her fury fled.

“Yeah,” Toru mumbled, “A lifetime of this? Eating the same things every day? Taking the same pills? My entire life is mapped out ahead of me—kind of takes some of the fun out of it, you know?”

Toru slumped back against the fence, and the movement dislodged her missing glove, which fell through the air and onto the ground beside her discarded shoe.

“Did you skip breakfast as well, or was it just lunch?” I asked, silently memorising the pattern of sand that would result in her face.

“Both, but I’m having something of an off day,” Toru admitted, her remaining glove rising to her face to rub at her eyes. “You going to tell me off too, Hisoka? I get enough of that outside of school.”

To maintain the current, safer conversation, I sourced a joke format that Eijiro had used only half an hour earlier.

“A strict diet and strict parents?” I said, adding a lilt to my voice. “Toru, you’ve got it rough out here.”

Toru snorted.

“Don’t worry, my parents are too busy to be strict,” Toru admitted, attempting to disperse some of my sand with her ungloved hand, and when it didn’t work, she spoke. “Hisoka, your sand is getting in my hair.”

I lost sight of her as I retrieved my sand, but I could almost see her face now, a million motes linked together in my mind; I’d have to work on recreating the pattern later when I was alone.

“If your parents aren’t the ones who tell you off for not following your diet,” I asked, watching the place where her face had been. “Who were you talking about?”

There was a pause that was just a few shades out of place to be normal.

“Nobody,” Toru said. “Guess I misspoke.”

Without my sand, and without her anger, she had become encrypted once more, and despite my general inability to read her—I was absolutely certain that Hagakure Toru had just told me a lie.

Hisoka’s Apartment, 8:14 PM.

Monday, 11th 2149.

Finding a specific person could be easy if you knew the correct details about them. If you knew their address, you could find them at their home; if you knew their name, you could find their address, and if you knew their city, you could scour social media to locate familiar landmarks to narrow down where they were.

None of these were applicable methods for someone without a social media presence, without a known name, and without an address—This left me to begin a much more broad and far more systematic search to find my target.

I had five locations to search, two of them physical and three of them independent databases.

The first was the restaurant where Nanami’s birthday had taken place; if they kept payment records, security footage or some kind of regulars list, I may be able to find out the identity of whoever spent money on that night. There was no guarantee that the blue-skinned man had paid for his own meal, but if I could find one of the people from the table, it would eventually lead me to the others.

As for security footage, storage technology has come a long way in the last hundred years, and it is possible that such a high-end restaurant may have a database for storing the footage long-term.

The second location to check was the port in Shimoda, specifically the café in which the man had sat at. It was far less likely that a small café would have the resources or reason to keep their own security footage for that long, but the possibility existed. My main goal would be the payment records, although once again, I wasn’t certain they would still possess them after so much time had passed.

The restaurant was in Musutafu, which was convenient for me—I’d be able to physically check it on the weekend. However, Shimoda would require more preparation; it was located within the Shizuoka prefecture, only a few hours away from Hamamatsu, and we’d already been planning on visiting the castle. Given that Golden Week was swiftly approaching, and all of us would have some free time, I’d have to bring it up with Eijiro, Momo, Tsuyu and Mina soon—each of them would need time to invite the ones they’d mentioned the last time they had spoken about it.

Option three was a long shot, but it was entirely possible that the blue-skinned man was, in fact, daylighting as a hero—which is why I had been searching through the official hero rankings to make sure he wasn’t hiding in plain sight. So far, it had borne no fruit, and I hadn’t discovered him within the top one-hundred rankings, which only left four hundred other entries to go before I’d exhausted that list.

Number four was the online, user-curated and contributed ‘List of Villains,’ a publically available information source about villains, including the events they could be tied to them and the quirks they had used in public. As far as sources go, the vast majority of it was speculation, first-hand detailing of encounters and other user content that hadn’t been verified, fact-checked, or otherwise validated as accurate. However, it did host countless hours of video footage of those same villains; security cameras, phone recordings, and everything else the users could dig up—those video files were harder to discredit.

The List of Villains was the second most likely place I thought I would find something, but it hinged entirely on whether or not the blue-skinned man had revealed himself as a villain in the first place. I knew of two occasions that he’d been In public, and both times he hadn’t at all been hiding—if he was comfortable enough to enter a restaurant and a café without covering his face, then it was very likely that his civilian identity wasn’t tied to his criminal actions.

The fifth and last option was the Quirk Registrar, and while it was the most likely place that I would discover the man’s name, it was also the hardest to access. I was aware that each new QR entry was entered into the system on the same day as the Quirk Appointment. That meant that since it had been implemented as a mandatory, nationwide system, everyone who had been born afterwards should be present within the database. But it wasn’t a perfect system, and there were plenty of gaps for people to slip through—foreigners, for instance, were not present in the system, and thus visitors to Japan that ended up becoming villains while they were here were not listed in the QR.

The Hero Public Safety Commission, government offices, the health care system, law enforcement agencies, select research facilities, Hero agencies and private investigators all had different levels of access to those databases.

According to data available online, three percent of the population had been expunged from the QR database in every way except for a legal name and an identifying image—in one percent of cases that was rendered even further down into an alias and an image which pointed only towards a costumed identity. All Might was in the one-percent category along with a large portion of the top one hundred heroes—within that range, government agents, politicians, and other highly placed families were also accounted for. In some cases, those in the one-percent category had most of their personal information plastered all over the internet, regardless of their wishes.

Endeavour was one of those; his civilian identity, the identity of his family and more were all well known at this point. All Might, somehow, had managed to avoid that same fate, despite the fact that he must have attended a school growing up, have had classmates that knew him, or neighbours that had seen him, and he must have interacted with doctors at some point—the sheer lack of information about All Might was one of the contributing factors to the grand mythos surrounding him.

Off the top of my head, I could list a handful of others that were easily identifiable as being within that one-percent; Thirteen, Hawks, Mirko were three of such who were still in active roles, while others, such as the fallen hero Nagant, were all some of those who’d had their data mostly expunged.

All in all, this meant that in order to perform an exhaustive search of the database, I would need unrestricted access to the Quirk Registrar—ergo, I would need to enter one of the organisations that had access, find a computer with the correct privileges, and then perform my search on site. The optimal target was one with the laxest security—in this case, it would be a hospital, where the staff would be overworked, tired, and not looking for anyone trying to access the system in the first place.

Like the vast majority of cities in Japan, Musutafu had a hospital as well.