She wakes up.

She's laying on grass, face up to the sky - the sun is at the wrong angle for Japan, almost directly overhead - She is a clone of the original Yaoyorozu Momo.  She belongs to the Pirates (- Sable Maya Ruby Neo Hailey -) now.

Her support gear is...  All still there and functional.

There is one other human body laying on the tiny chunk of Skyblock.  (...That was strange.  She's never heard of that before, but she knows what it is.)

This other human probably needs her help.

A Hero's work is never done.  Up.

She pushes herself upright and looks around. She's on a grassy island, and all around her can be seen clear blue sky. There's a tree nearby, with five fruits hanging from its branches. Each one is shaped like a peach, sized like a grapefruit, and inexplicably a vibrant blue, shading toward purple where a mundane peach would be reddish.

Huh, that's definitely not an Earth fruit.

And then her eyes land on the black-haired girl across the island from her.

Oh. That's Momo. She's... prettier in person, but that's not the point right now. No liberties, no assumptions, not until they have a talk and Momo makes decisions about this stuff for herself.

She kips up the rest of the way — wow this new body is agile — and waves curiously. "Hi."

"...Hello."

There is still, despite everything that the Company did, a wariness in her.  You can't take that sort of wariness out of a professional Hero and still have them be one.

"You are...  The Pirates, then?  The Company has... informed me that I am at your service, if so."

"Yeah, we are. Didn't expect them to explain anything about the plurality stuff. And well... 'at our service' may be the official description, but we're not going to do this the normal way."

Sable frowns slightly, looking down at her hands. Not the same hands she's had for her life up 'til now. Better ones, that suit her more. Different, though.

"The usual thing here," her tone reveals just how disappointing she finds typical behavior for people in this situation, "would be to lean on the imposed bond and take liberties and make assumptions and take advantage of this whole... fucked up slavery mess. We're not doing that. I won't lie; all five of us are absolutely interested in you in all sorts of ways. You're clever, impressive, thoughtful, hard-working, heroic, and gorgeous to boot. But we're not doing anything unless you independently decide you're interested in such, because very nearly everything about this situation is fucked up.

"We don't like the Company. They," her breath hitches a bit, "killed us to coerce our posthumous recruitment. They're multiversal slavers, they're a pox upon the multiverse, and we're going to do what we can to bring them down. That'll be a long quest, though. In the meantime, we're just focused on making this new life on this island a good one."

"...I appreciate both your goals, and your candor.  And your compliments, for that matter, as much as I do agree that it would be a bad idea to do anything with this information at this moment, given what you have told me.  As far as ensuring we have a pleasant experience - as best we can, given...  Everything that has happened to the both of us...

"Well.  I have found myself doing a lot of disaster recovery, lately, and while this isn't quite the same, the skills such work needs do seem quite transferable."

"Yeah, I think you're right, that'll be very applicable," Sable replies, smiling slightly. "Probably the first things to do are unbox our survival kit, set up the tent, and see what else we need."

"...Yes, let's.  We will also, I think, want to begin propagating that tree.  I'll need the calories if I want to do anything truly impressive."

"...We should prioritize water reclamation, I think.  Both in making sure our existing supply doesn't evaporate, and in making sure we can reuse it.  Food's handled.  Water is not guaranteed to us, especially with the weather being 'random', and while I can make more, I'd rather not make myself so immediately critical to our day-to-day survival.  Certainly I could handle that, it's not all that much mass, but...  Accidents happen."

"Propagation shouldn't be too hard, we just plant a seed from each of those blue peaches we eat. Space 'em out far enough to prevent crowding," Sable replies, nodding and humming. "Probably we want a mix of filtration and distillation, at a guess? I don't have a lot of experience with water reclamation, unfortunately. My only other idea for water is maybe we can build some kind of moisture condenser?"

As she talks, she walks over to the wooden crate, prying the lid off with ease to reveal a packaged tent, sleeping bags, axe, pickaxe, shovel, knife, flint & steel, MREs, and canteens. "Probably we save the MREs for emergencies, too. They're not renewable."

"...Yes, a moisture condenser would be a good idea.  I have blueprints for that.  For most everything, really; my agency's support staff got somewhat competitive about preparing me for even absurd hypotheticals.   I had been more focused on preserving our supply, but since we can add to it, that would be better.  And yes, save the MREs for energencies."

"...The other medium-term concern we should have is probably erosion."

"Huh, good point. Hadn't thought of that. And while we can buy more soil in worlds we visit periodically, I don't know if the rule about the soil having enough nutrients to grow crops is fiat-backed and tied to this particular soil, or just the starting state. If it's the former, then skyblock soil is a valuable resource we don't want to lose track of."

"...Hm, we'll have to test that."

"Maybe if we pot the trees, we might be able to see if they stop germinating in unchanged soil..."

"...but then, the trees have their own rules as well, don't they?"

"Either way, while I probably have blueprints for any number of things that could be used to test this more directly, I don't have the training to use most of them properly."

"Probably need to buy textbooks in the first world likely to have them. Keep 'em in a watertight box to start with, digitize 'em when we have the software for it," she muses with a smile. "As for testing, we could pick up seeds for a fast-growing plant of some sort, and I think farm supply stores will have soil testing kits?"

"Probably.  Although I actually can provide quite a bit of software.  The support techs took it rather personally that if my tech ever got broken in the field that I then wouldn't be able to repair it myself, because I couldn't replicate the software, and therefore equipped me with more software than I ever expected to need."  Her hand drifts to one of the additions to her 'canon' costume - USB sticks, discreetly tucked away in little pockets where parts of her costume have been (quite flatteringly, to be honest) padded a bit more than they were.  "One of them had been talking about some sort of hardware memory that I could just make, something about hoops and wires - but I don't think that had gone past wild speculation about how small they could make the physical footprint while still having it be useful, yet."

"Honestly, working with them like that...  I have to know a lot of engineering to make my Quirk work for heroics, but it's made it quite obvious to me that I am not a support engineer, because I'm a very different kind of absolutely insane than they are."

"That sort of cleverness is really quite impressive. It's requires so much thinking outside the box, looking at things the hero hasn't thought of, ways their Quirk isn't being used. It takes a mix of engineering skills and training skills and a good helping of 'hey what if' madness." Sable smiles fondly at the thought. "Honestly I wonder what you'd make of our powers, or Quirk, I guess. It's... not originally ours, came with this body, which we switched to both to be less useless and also to get an instant transition, but it's decently versatile. Modest super-strength and durability and regeneration, substantially enhanced agility, the ability to stick to arbitrary surfaces (useful for climbing), the ability to shoot webs from our wrists and swing from them, and short-term danger sense."

She pulls the tent out of the crate while she talks, and then gradually everything else, laying it all out in rows to inventory it.

Hm.

(She busies herself with the tent while she thinks.)

"A wingsuit.  If you are less reliant on anchor points to turn direction, it can only be for the better, even if you will still have problems getting started in flat environments.  Additionally, exploiting your strength as a power source."

"...There has to be something Quirk-enhanced adhesion could be useful for beyond just sticking to things, I'm sure, but I'm not our class's quirk analyst."

"Ooh, a wingsuit is a great idea," Sable exclaims as she helps with the tent (which wound up a few meters west of the pond). "I wonder if we could work it into the costume in a storable way. And your mention of the adhesion actually gives me an idea: sure I can use webs to disarm, but also when I'm in melee I can get a better grip on an enemy's weapon with a single touch then they've got with their whole hand."

Then she laughs cheerfully at the thought of Izuku's analysis. "Yeah, if Izuku were here we'd probably be treated to an adorable mutter-fest and a bunch of ideas neither of us even considered."

"...I am assuming that the Midoriya you're used to is a boy, because I cannot imagine that someone who has, herself, seized an opportunity to transition, would willingly deadname Kiyuko-chan."

Sable whirls up to look at Momo in shock, cheeks flushed with embarrassment. "Oh shit fuck I wish I could apologize to her!" She shakes her head. "Yeah, in my old world the supposedly 'official' depiction didn't depict her as trans, only a minority of fanworks did. Always liked those ones better, but I didn't expect you'd be from one of the timelines where she transitioned. My bad."

"...As you have done no harm to her, you should owe no apology, I should think.  It's okay.  You neither knew nor had much reason to suspect, as far as I understand what you've said.  Do I have it right, then, that...  You read stories about us?"

She nods, smiling a bit now. "Yeah, our old world was one without any noticeable magic or quirks or superpowers or fancy technology at all. We came from the 2020s, so it was well into what you'd think of as the past, too. And lots of worlds that I now know for sure are real had fictional depictions, including a version of yours. There was a manga, and then an anime adaptation, along with a bunch of fanworks. We had theories that maybe the multiverse was big enough that all these worlds we wrote and read about had matching universes somewhere out there, but no way to check."

"...What a way to find out they were right."

"Yeah, 'all those cool theories you had about the multiverse were right, but surprise, there's also an organization of slavers and they just murdered you to force you into a job interview.' Kind of a shitty way to discover the multiverse. At least we've got the Opposition too."

...She doesn't think the way the Company fucked with her head is behind her desire to reassuringly engage in human contact (read: gently lay a hand on the Pirates' shoulder).

(She doesn't do it.  But she does want to.)

"We do?  Who is this Opposition?"

"Eheh, oops?" She grins sheepishly. "Should've mentioned them earlier. So, when we were being recruited, the tablet showing the options glitched and a chat box appeared, with a message claiming to be from a group opposing the Company. Said they could fuck with our integration into Company systems if we took the Skyblock, make sure we couldn't be observed here in the Skyblock world, and then they tweaked the system to discount this body for us. This was one of our ideal options, but would've been out of budget. No way to know for sure, but the Company had us over a barrel after the whole murder thing. Taking whatever option was available to come back to life was already the only choice we could stand making, given our desire to find a way to fight them."

"...Hm.  Well.  We can't do anything with that information right now.  It's odd that you're that desirable to them, though.  Unless they're doing some sort of prophecy thing."

She nods. "Yeah, I'm not sure what it is they saw in us. They definitely saw something, said we 'have the potential to be quite useful in taking action against the Company', but didn't get into how. Presumably it's something we'll grow into."

"I certainly hope so, because as it is, I'm not sure what we could hope to do against multiversal slavers with the kind of abilities they've already demonstrated."

"Same. It's quite the mountain we're hoping to scale."

And as she says that, Sable snaps the last hook of the tent into place. It looks reasonably spacious for a two-person tent, big enough that they won't be forced to cuddle at least.

...She's not going to think about whether her maybe wanting the tent to be smaller was the Company's fault or just her own honest lesbianism.  She's just going to bask in the successful tent setup.

(She would have made a second tent if this one had really been too small.  But she is not above noticing when girls are pretty.)

"Tent: assembled," she states with a pleased grin. "I think we'll probably want a camp shower, and maybe some kind of latrine we can pipe off the side for easier disposal, given that we're planning to solve water acquisition with a condenser. Definitely some kind of little divider to put up around it.."

"And probably things to wear that aren't our costumes, though I'll leave the question of that and a shower curtain up to you," she adds with a faint blush.

Oh.  Oh, no.  Clothes.

She doesn't kink on clothing.  But to be so personally responsible for a specific someone's clothes, carries a great and terrible intimacy to it, for her.  (Making a box of spare clothes for disaster relief reasons is an entirely different matter, but for some reason she doesn't want to think about it like that.)

"I.  Yes.  I can.  Make.  Some clothes.  And all the other things let me just do that.  And I'll need to know what size to make them!"

(Focus, Momo, you're in the middle of a disaster, there's no time for flirting yet!)

Making things!  Making things is a good distraction from not being able to think straight!

...This isn't really a lot of things to make before she has to return to the thing she's putting off, is it.  Even if adapting to the challenge of building things that reach over the edge of the skyblock into a terrible and empty void is...  Almost uniquely distracting.

She makes a lead (well, actually, not lead, but denser-than-standard-Earth-surface-pressure-allows) balloon, to see if there is a point at which it floats.

The balloon falls. If the pressure gradient ever reaches a point sufficient to support the balloon, it's sometime after it's too small to be visible.

Sable looks over the side after it. "Ooh. Checking the air pressure?"

She notices the blush, for sure, but she's not going to comment.

"Mmhmm."

She makes a lighter than air balloon next.  Just for thoroughness's sake.

"Probably should have stuck a tracker on it."

"Anyway.  I probably shouldn't put off the clothes any longer.  Ah...  I am going to need to know what size I should make yours.  Here.  Um.  Have a measuring tape.  And I can make up a piece of paper with the measurements I'd like to have.  And do you have any preferences for - style, I suppose?  I'm not a fashion expert, but I do know how to make more than one outfit."

Sable starts measuring her lovely new body — fuck this body is great — and noting the measurements. "Our styles run a bit goth and punk? Well, Maya somehow adds a bunch of elegance to that, and a note of... I guess you could call it sex-positive sluttiness? Hailey leans more punk, Ruby more goth, Neo more sharply-stylish, and me a bit witchy? But honestly, if you start with things Kyoka would like you'll be in the right neighborhood. All of us will either love that or find it enjoyable-enough."

...Oh no.

"Yes... I can do clothes that Kyoka would like..."

Now, if she can do them without spontaneously combusting, she does not know.

"...Would you like some sort of - thing you could use, to indicate who's in front?  I...  I wasn't planning on making more than one change of clothes, though - and sleepwear, if you'd like.  ...We don't have very much slack until we start getting more of those trees.  Both of us need food to do things."

Blush. "Oh, heh, yeah, I didn't mean to imply you need to make multiple outfits. Although, yeah, Ruby at least would be comfier with some kind of sleepwear, maybe a cami and PJ pants, and... yeah, something to indicate who's fronting would be really nice if you don't mind. Maybe a bracelet or something? Two-sided beads, one a signature color and the other a neutral?"

"I could do something like that - what colors would you like?"

"Purple for me, orange for Maya, green for Hailey, pink for Neo, red for Ruby?"

"I can do that!  Is there anything you'd like on the back?"

"Oh hm. If the backs were different that would make it easier to tell which one we're looking for when switching. Maybe make the back of mine black, and Hailey's silver, and Neo's brown, and... hm. The other color or material element for Maya is steel but that's hard to distinguish from silver, or alternatively bronze, but that's hard to distinguish from orange depending on the orange. Hm. And Ruby's other color is black like me, although she occasionally adds some cream accents? So the back of hers could maybe be white or cream or something."

"...Would gold be an acceptable substitute?  Or I could do a patterned steel, or blue it.  And, hm...  I think I could do something like that for Ruby's bead, yes.  ...Or, hm.  Gemstones, speaking of.  That would make the side that's facing up more distinct even if it's similarly colored."

"Ooh!" She grins at Momo. "Patterned steel, maybe with a hint of blue, would be great for Maya. And yeah, gemstones would absolutely help distinguish sides even when the colors are similar, I agree." She bounces excitedly.

...Oh no, she really is as cute as the Company wants her to think she is.

Anyway!  Beads!  And then clothes!

Sable's is black and set with an amethyst, Maya's a rippling patterned steel set with a citrine, Neo's the only nonmetallic bead - wood, set with a pink diamond - Hailey's silver and emerald, and Ruby's the same metal as Sable's, but ringed with a soft white gold accent.  (And, of course, set with her namesake gemstone.)

"If you want to arrange these however you want them arranged, I can make the rest of the bracelet.

"I was thinking, though, that you might also want something like Kiyuko's brooch, for your heroics outfit.  Bracelets can be a bit of a hazard, when you're fighting.  They get caught on things."

"Oooh these are gorgeous! Thank you, Momo!"

Then a confused headtilt. "Kiyuko's... brooch? D'you mean as a heroic emblem? Or..."

"Was she like us?"

"...I can't say, one way or the other, because - well, her Quirk's haunted, I assume you know that already - and she's not sure how that works, especially given that one of the people the Quirk is haunted by is still alive.  But in practical terms...  It does work similarly."

Sable grins and clenches her fists and shakes her hands a bit. "Oh wow! I never thought of it like that! I forgot about the vestiges, and we'd never really considered that that could manifest like plurality! Oh that's cool. So she had a brooch for showing if one of the past bearers was fronting?"

"She does!  It wouldn't be hard to rework the design for the five of you."

"Oh that'd be awesome! You're so sweet to make this custom stuff for us!" Sable blushes a bit as she grins at Momo's kindness.

"...Well, one, it's just the right thing to do, you know?  And two...

"...So far, I'm pretty sure the Company should have just stayed out of the way, if they wanted me to uncomplicatedly like you.  Maybe they did, I can't tell."

"Yeah, if 'no bindings' was available I would've taken it. But they're hell-bent on complicating things. I wish that'd been an option."

"Especially if..."

Wait... 

They should've "stayed out of the way"?

She blushes brighter, eyes suddenly meeting Momo's for a moment.

Why yes, she did just say that.

"...We'll find a way to make this better.  We're heroes, it's what we do - and even if you haven't trained for it, I think you very much have the heart of one."

Still blushing, Sable smiles warmly at Momo. "That's quite possibly the best compliment I've ever been given. Thank you."

And then it shifts to a confident grin. "And yes, we will."

"...I'm glad you liked it," she murmurs in reply.

(Sable is very much not the only one blushing.  Especially once she deploys that confident grin.)

"Yeah, we're gonna make this work. They don't get to ruin anything for us. Not allowed."

Her expression firms.  "No, they don't."

Anyway.  She has clothes (and a brooch) to make.  She's going to do that.

...And not think too hard about why she knows how to make so many of Kyoka's outfits.  Now is decidedly not the time for dedicated introspection.

She's aiming for casual and practical wear, so what the Pirates get isn't hugely stylish - but it is, to the extent of her ability, still aesthetic.  Black denim cargo jeans, with silver fastenings.  A couple t-shirts; one of them has a decorative pattern that she added almost accidentally.  Some good walking boots.  A sports bra.  A winter coat that she made just in case it starts snowing.  A rain jacket.  Pajamas.  Three pairs of underwear and socks.  Period products, just in case.

(And, of course, the brooch, which by clever mechanisms too complex to fit in this parenthetical allows one to press one of the five buttons on the sides to switch which of the five triangular wedges - made of same materials as the bracelet's beads - is unobscured.)

Sable gasps. "Momo! This is so much! I expected like... one outfit, not all this. And it's all so good! It's perfect!"

She carefully sets everything down and pulls Momo into a tight hug, lifting her off the ground with supernatural ease and twirling her about, laughing delightedly.

"You're amazing," she exclaims when she sets Momo back down.

And then what she just did hits her and she looks down, blushing.

"Um, sorry if that was too forward."

"...The hug was quite nice."

"And, um, I mean, it really wasn't all that much?  I - you'll probably need most of these at some point, you know?"

"I mean, yeah," she replies, smiling and still blushing lightly, "but not necessarily all of it immediately, you could've spaced it out, or waited until it was more pressing. Just... You're really good."

"I...  Well, I do try to be.  And if I don't have to wait to do something good, something useful - which I didn't - then why should I?"

Sable frowns, looking down. "Because I don't feel like I deserve it," she whispers.

...It is now Momo's turn to initiate a hug.

"But you do.  You do, a thousand times over."

Sable lets herself be folded into the hug, and wraps her arms softly around Momo. "Why though? I'm sitting on a pile of unearned, relationship-imbalancing power. Trying not to abuse it should be the bare minimum. I should have better ideas, better ways to fight back, some way to pry the binding off so everything can be your own choice. Any of your classmates would've trained harder before even ending up here. Kiyuko would have a million better ideas. I'm just some fool of a girl who couldn't cope with a tamer world than yours and shattered into two when I was twelve over it not being loving enough."

"To correctly understand that the world we live in is not kind, and try to make it so, especially when it looks hopeless, is already moral conviction that so many lack.

"But," and she draws on all the elocution lessons she has ever had in order to convey just how seriously she means what she says now, "and much more importantly, you don't need to save the world to justify your own existence in it."

"...And one more thing: Kiyuko would tell you herself, nobody can save the world alone - and I think you were trying.  That you're all still here in the face of a burden that no-one can carry, that you're still trying even when the stakes have escalated so far beyond everything either of us have ever faced, means that you have so much more strength than you think you have."

Someone she's looked up to, a girl whose power required study and skill to use, a hardworking, generous hero who'd put the work in and knew what she was talking about, turning the standards she applies to the care of others back around on her? It's enough to knock down the wall and cut through to her old hurts.

That just about does Sable in. She lets her face sink into Momo's shoulder, tears rolling down her cheeks, squeezing tightly to her as she sobs.

Because yeah, she had been trying. With nothing but love and stubbornness, one soul at a time.

"There you go, it's okay, just let it all out..."

To be honest, she's trying to hold back tears herself.

She diverts her focus from needing to be on not-having her own breakdown by getting Sable a nice soft blanket to be wrapped up in, as a supplement to the hug (and also perhaps the gentle petting of her hair).  "You don't have to do this alone anymore."

The blanket and hair-petting help a lot.

Eventually the sobbing slows to gentle tears and sniffles, and Sable squeezes Momo tightly.

"Thank you," she murmurs. "I think I'd been holding that in for a good few years too long."

"...Any number of years of pain remotely like that pain, is too many years.  I'm...  Glad I could help relieve it, in some small part."

She smiles sheepishly. "It's probably not going to stop hurting, on some level, until we accumulate enough power to start making worlds actually kind. But having people close to care about keeps me going. Fills back up what the cruelty drains down. So your care and support helps a lot."

She presses her forehead against Momo's gently, looking the black-haired girl in the eye. "Thank you."

She just smiles softly, even fondly.  "I repeat myself, but...  I'm glad I can help."

"Well, it's mutual," she replies, taking Momo's hands in her own and squeezing them, "so if there's anything I can do to make this mad life we've got better, or any messy emotions I can hear out, I'm here for you, no matter what."

"Well, um, thank you...!"

Send help she's so gay.

"There might actually be a project I could use your help with, come to think of it.  I'm still worried about erosion, so I want to put something down the sides of the island to keep the dirt from falling off, but obviously I can't really get down to the rocky bits with a drill and some bolts without more infrastructure than we can really afford to have me make, right now.  And you can.  So - once you're confident in your sticking to things, I was hoping you could help."

"Oooh. That we can do. Wanted to practice swinging, climbing, and rappelling, anyway. We've got instincts, but that's no substitute for practice, y'know?"

She nods.  "Practice is very important.  You're not allowed to go flinging yourself into the void until you have good enough aim to hit a small target at range, though!"

"Spoken like a girl who's got lots of experience with both heroics training and reckless dorks," Sable replies with a wry grin. Then she kisses Momo's forehead and whirls out of the embrace to whip a hand at the tree, fingers easily flexing into the classic gesture used by Spider-Men and -Women everywhere.

Thwip

A strand of webbing shoots across the grass and just barely misses the trunk of the tree.

And then Sable freezes, mouth hanging open, staring down at her outstretched left hand.

"So, are you stunned because you actually just did that, or stunned because you missed?"

And Momo's voice is the interrupt they need to jar them out of the freeze.

Hailey steals front, bursting into mad cackling. "Ahahahaha fucking suck it, Sable! This is justice! We're a fucking lefty now, justice for all my years dealing with you dorks getting to have a body that grew up right-handed!"

She twirls about, laughing and grinning. Her voice is ever so slightly higher and a bunch sharper, vowels held a bit tighter and tone losing some of Sable's almost-musical bounce and warmth.

"Oh, hello.  A pleasure to meet you - and Sable, I should have said long before now."  She doesn't seem all that surprised to see a switch like this.

She hums, considering something, and then speaks.

"...Ambidexterity is a good skill to have in our line of work."

Hailey looks up at Momo, smirking sharply. "Hiya. I'm Hailey. You've obviously deduced the last dork was Sable. Probably-important fact about me is that I'm fuckin' weird about touch, it hurts, makes my hands and arms cramp up. Weird exomemory reasons. Anyway, good t'meet ya. And yes, ambidexterity will be great. We'll need to train it a bit, but we've got a headstart from all those years of being a righty transplaanted into this lefty body now."

Oh, that must be deeply unpleasant.

"...I don't know if there's any way I could help with - whatever is going on with your reaction to touch - but if there is, I would most likely like to do so."

"Sweet of you." She tuts for a moment, looking away. "What I've seen so far is I gotta work through it for each person separately, and it comes from restraining the fight-or-flight instincts. It doesn't happen in fights, because I don't need to resist the urge to desk whoever's touching me, I can just swing, no cramps. Dunno if explaining the exotrauma it's about would help with ideas, but can if y'want."

"...If you were willing, it might help to have some idea of what seems to have conditioned the response.  But I think I might have an idea of that already, because you mentioned that it's your fight-or-flight response that's - hypersensitive.  So the idea, then, would be to render the person you're seeking to desensitize yourself to, unable to pose whatever threat that response sees."

Hailey gapes at Momo for a moment. "That... just might work. The thing I'm reacting to is memories of my uncle — mine, not Sable's — suddenly grabbing me and dragging me off to whip my back bloody. So if you couldn't move your arms, if you couldn't grab me, that might make the instincts shut up long enough for my hindbrain to learn you're safe."

"Would sitting on my hands suffice, do you think, or would we need something more - elaborate?"  ...She's fairly sure that there are people who do such things, even if she's been far too busy with everything to find out if she would like to be one of them.  She hopes that the Pirates do have practical experience...

Well, at least she knows her way around handcuffs for other reasons, if it comes to needing them.

"Think you'd need an actual restraint of some kind." Her cheeks flush faintly at the thought. "Technically I've always got some handy, now, though we don't know how comfy they are yet."

Her eyes land on the line of webbing lying on the ground, and then on her wrists.

"...So you do; I had been thinking I could make handcuffs, as another option - I have to make them for heroics reasons often enough.  But if you know how to tie someone up, and you'd prefer that...  Well, I've an open mind on the subject."

"Keys can get dropped, and while I can probably rip the metal of a pair of handcuffs, I can't imagine your wrists would have a fun time there. And we know the basics: a few knots, to check circulation, to fit two fingers under the ropes, to have a safeword."

"I can just make new keys if we drop them.  I've become quite good at picking locks, for that matter.  But if you know how to handle things with ropes, then let's do it that way, since we already have one available."

"...A safeword - like tapping out of a fight?"

"Yeah, like the standard check-in system is red, yellow, green, for stop, slow or caution, and ooh harder. Gets used for both domme checking in with the sub and asking, or just either party interrupting with a color."

While she explains, she gathers up the existing webline and examines it: it's textured and a little grippy on its own, but not rough or uncomfortable against the skin. Doesn't have much give to it.

"I, ah, I see.  I've never..."

"Well, I've been very busy."

"...Might I also propose that 'safeword' itself also be, well, a safeword?  Out of an abundance of caution, more than any real expectation, but I'm not sure the red-yellow-green will stick in my head in the moment."

...Might she touch the web, actually?  She just carefully reaches a hand out to wordlessly ask, not getting in Hailey's space.

"Yeah, that's also pretty common, as is using both."

She spreads her hands apart and holds it out, leaving plenty of room to get a good grip without touching hands.

"Might be able to vary the texture some, I think. This is a swing-line, sticky at one end and not the rest. Haven't tried for smoothness or comfort before, but who knows?"

She touches the line, and hums, considering.

"If you do just, a line of this, it should be fine - does it cut?  Or rather, what would we need to cut it?  In case that comes up."

"Swing-lines are mostly tensile strength, not shear, just enough shear strength to keep from failing against sharp objects in our path."

She moves her grip to a section near the end, hands about a foot apart. "Probably good steel shears would do it, but even if not, we're fine, 'cause while this shite has the tensile strength of high-grade steel cable," she starts pulling as she speaks, muscles in her arms and back tensing under the skin-tight material of her costume, tension increasing, putting more and more strain on it.

Until it snaps, a sharp pop sounding as the webbing fails, ends whipping outward for the barest moment before Hailey sharply pulls her arms down and away, keeping the ends from coming anywhere near Momo.

"We're stronger," she finishes with a grin.

"Oh my.  Yes you are."

The grin shifts to a sharp, almost dangerous smirk. "Wrists or torso, Momo?"

"Just, um, only my arms, please, to start with - I'm trying to not move faster than I would have, um, before all this happened, and - you're very pretty but I do barely know you yet.  Even though I do... Rather find myself thinking about things, after that display."

(...She was never going to get between Kiyuko and Ochako, unless they both wanted her between them, that happens sometimes, right?  There was whatever was going on with Kayama-chan from 1B where she was flirting with both of them all the time and they didn't seem to mind... but...  This isn't the first time she's had thoughts about strong ladies.)

There is a significant extent to which Hailey is taking refuge in audacity. It has been two years since they had a girlfriend and five since they tied her up and Momo is a lot more stuck with them she cannot screw this up.

So audacity.

"Probably," she starts, tying a bowline at the end of the rope, "if I get the rope on one of your hands before touching, the cramps while I finish the tie won't be as bad. And that'll shorten the time 'til they stop by giving me a headstart."

She steps closer.

"We don't have to do this today. Either way, this doesn't mean anything about what you're deciding."

"...I...  No, I think I have decided.  We don't have to do this today, but I want to, and you do too."

She offers up her hands.

"This is...  This is green, Hailey, as much as our entire situation is inherently yellow or even orange."

"I'm just trying to balance my raging crush with the knowledge that everything's fucked up and we need to be careful that you're not going to end up feeling like you pushed me into something I didn't want, whether or not I do want the thing."

"I think...  There's no way we weren't going to end up in some kind of relationship, even if we had just both been dumped here without all the rest of the Company's...  Everything.  There's just...  Too much, that fits together too well.  And I'm glad of that, that I'm stranded on an island with some people that I'm definitely going to like, but I'm also incredibly pissed off at the Company for making me have to stand on my reservations, because we're both resolved that we won't let them win."

"So...  Tie me up, so we can prove to eachother that we'll do whatever it is we're doing on our terms, and not theirs."

Hailey's cheek flush, and her smile softens. "Bloody hell, Momo. Warn a girl 'fore you kick her right in the gay, yeah?"

"I, well..."

"I hadn't thought that I was going to?"

"I probably should have; it would have worked on me."

"But let's not get distracted, hm?  We have the desensitization to start doing before all our gay can go anywhere."

"Too true." She laughs and grins, cheeks still flushed, and loops the rope around Momo's right wrist, cinching it a little tighter before stepping in closer and taking her arm.

Her hand twitches and tenses, and she grits her teeth ever so slightly, but there's no other observable sign of the pain as she loops the webbing around Momo's wrist, forming a rope cuff as the base of a forearm bind. Two fingers slip under, and she nods, then looks to Momo. "Check-in? Anything pinch or tingle or too tight?"

"Seems good so far?  If anything feels off, I'll let you know."

"Good," she replies with a smirk — the expression maybe faintly stiffer than usual.

She loops the rope around the other wrist and ties a matching cuff, again checking for tightness, before something in her starts to subtly loosen, ever so slowly. The tension in her wrists doesn't build any further as she works her way up Momo's forearms, looping figure-eights around them, just tight enough to keep her arms pressed together without biting in at all, before running the end through the loop alongside Momo's left arm and tying the end around the spot where the two cuffs meet.

"Still good?"

She gently tests the binding.  It feels...  Nice.  "Still good."

She runs a hand from the binding up to Momo's bare upper arm, checking to see if she cramps again when she hits bare skin.

Nothing. Just the gradual loosening of the previous one.

Her cheeks flush brighter again, expression complicated as she processes this.

Then her mouth drops open for a moment. "It... worked," she murmurs, before continuing a bit louder. "It bloody worked!"

She just...  smiles.

"That's good.  That's great, even.  I'm glad.  How... How are you feeling?  If you want to talk about it, which, you know, you don't have to - but that looked like a lot."

She smiles, softly, a bit shyly even, running both hands along Momo's arms with a bit of wonder. "Started cramping the second I started tying, but pain's an old friend, so I could bloody well cope, especially for this. Once I got a basic cuff tied on your other wrist, it started easing up a bit, gradually slowing further as I looped your arms and you kept not doing anything."

More and more tension is dropping out of her muscles, her whole posture looser and looser.

"I more meant emotionally speaking, but that's good to hear too."

She adjusts the rest of herself a bit, for comfort; she might be here for a while, and it is going to be worth every second if it means that Hailey won't get hurt from touching her.

...Oh.  Oh Hailey is relaxing.  Oh, wow.

"It... was a shock. This's been constant for me, for as long as we knew Sable and I were separate, as long as we knew what my memories were. To touch was to fight, or to hurt for not."

She steps a little closer, her hands wrapping around to Momo's back, running over her shoulder blades, then down her sides.

"And here you were, going out on this absurd limb for me, letting me tie you up just for a chance at fixing that. Unbelievable..."

Hailey fixes Momo with a look, frowning, cheeks still flushed. "You're bloody mad, you know that?"

"A certain degree of insanity is necessary to look at all the violence of the world you live in and decide that you are going to hold the line against pain and fear and suffering with yourself.  Besides, this really isn't all that much of an imposition, especially compared to the relief it's given you."

She laughs and steps closer, tentatively turning the caress into a hug, pressing her body to Momo's and squeezing close. "Fair. Never said I'm not mad myself, did I? We're quite the set, aren't we?"

"A well-matched one, I daresay."

...yeah, she's leaning into the hug too.

She holds Momo tightly, resting her head on the other girl's shoulder, siiiighing out with relief. "Fuck. I get to have this."

She's not quite leaning on Momo, and actually making sure to provide some support in case she loses her balance or something, restrained as she is, but she's damned near limp apart from that.

She tries to burn this experience into her memory, burn everything about it into her heart, make sure that her hindbrain learns Momo from this experience.

"Mhm!  You do!"

(She'd probably be fine even if she did lose her balance, even without her bag of tricks, but the thoughtfulness is appreciated.)

Hailey spends another minute or so like this, soaking in the closeness—

Before a thought suddenly occurs to her.

"Why are we still standing?"

She crouches down slightly, twists a bit, and slips an arm under Momo's legs, the other supporting her back, and lifts her off the ground with no visible effort at all, then sinks smoothly to the ground, setting her into her lap and squeezing her close, burying her face in Momo's dark hair.

Why are they?  More like why were they!

She's very glad she's not standing, because if Hailey had put her down still upright she would have fallen over from swooning.

That said, as much as this is much, much nicer, "...Maybe give me more than a moment's warning if you're going to be scooping me up like that, hm?  You rather surprised me.  Not that I mind what you did," she murmurs, "but you're not the only one who has reflexes."

"Eheh. Fair point. Sorry, Momo."

She gives her an apologetic squeeze and keeps cuddling there, sighing and letting herself keep relaxing into the experience.

"No hard feelings."  She would do much the same as Hailey did, but it's hard to hug someone with your arms tied up, so she just...  Leans into Hailey a bit more firmly, or so.

(...Honestly, she's finding this rather relaxing too.)

She sighs more and actually nuzzles her face into Momo's shoulder, just drinking up the contact now that her literal decade-plus of touch-starvation was over.

"Thank you," she murmurs, not lifting her head at all.

...Hailey really needed this, didn't she?  "Just glad I could help."

"If I could've touched any of the others, wouldn't've been this long wi'out friendly touch, 'cause the other Pirates are safe, but we can't, not for real. It's been a long time."

"Then I'm even more glad that we figured this out."

"Me too," she murmurs. "Y'r really great, y'know?"

"I just...  Try to do the right thing.  What compassion demands.  With consideration, but without hesitation."

"Sable's like that too. Always tries to do the loving thing, whenever she can, whoever it is." She sighs fondly. "I'm... the harshness she couldn't bear. I get angry where the world makes her sad. For all that I've got my separate history, that's the need that carved me out separate."

"...If my arms were untied and it was actually a good idea, I think I would be hugging you now."

Hailey chuckles softly, smirking. "I appreciate the thought. I like being me, though. Sable keeps me from burning myself up on the anger, and I keep her from wringing herself dry for people who're too hell-bent on harm to save yet."

"...Huh.  I've never known myself to have known anybody - besides, well, Kiyuko and the vestiges - who was like you, but that's...  That you work together that way is really - interesting?  I don't want to say it that way, you're not some science experiment, but...  Huh.  It's definitely...  Something that seems worth thinking about, for some reason."

"Plurality has its advantages, for sure. It's bloody weird, and it makes life complicated, but we wouldn't give it up. All five of us are made of stories as much anything else, and we all love each other, and fill gaps for each other, Sable just came to her stories after the fact, rather than having the narrative inform the reality from the start like the rest of us."

"...You know, considering that we're in a multiverse where the stories that you came from are probably all also real - where I, for you, came from a story -

"...I do have to wonder if that's ever going to become relevant."

"Oh good question. Predicting would depend on knowing whether there are any like... attractors guiding the portal picks, but that's not sommat we can see from here, not with the powers we got for now."

"That's not precisely what I was thinking about, but it does seem rather unlikely that this will become any clearer until we start doing things."

"Yeah, and we do have shite to do to get this island set up — hygiene tech and practicing and so on."

She leans up and shyly presses a little kiss to Momo's cheek.

"Should probably untie you."

"Probably, yes."

"Scooping again," she warns, before scooping Momo into her arms and standing up, then setting her on her feet and waiting for her to be steady. "Don't wanna risk having you on top of me when I untie you just in case this didn't nail everything."

"That's probably a good idea, yeah."

...Is it odd that she almost doesn't want to be untied yet?  Probably not, considering that she's seen the amount of stress that not-that caused Hailey originally - but Hailey knows herself much better than she could possibly, and she's not showing any signs of impending regret.  And it will be useful to have her hands available for assembling.

Hailey's expression is thoughtful as she carefully unties Momo. When she gets to the wrist cuffs, she pauses for a moment, taking a breath, and then unties those too. 

She tenses at the contact... then relaxes.

"No cramp," she breathes. "Probably surprises aren't safe yet, but this... worked."

"Yay!"

"As much as I feel like this ought to be cause for celebration, we do probably want to get everything we'll need set up sooner rather than later."

"Yep. And probably change out of our costumes, now that you've made all this excellent casualwear. Oh, and we never answered your question about ordering the beads."

She quickly sorts them into Hailey-Maya-Sable-Neo-Ruby order. "There."

And she produces the rest of the bracelet!  The identity beads are carefully fitted onto an elastic band, with little spacer beads in between; once that's set, she makes a silver bracelet that could probably stand on its own if it weren't for the way the aglets she's set on the end of the elastic are clearly meant to hook on to it.

"I think that should do it!  Try it on...?"

Hailey takes the bracelet, grinning at how she doesn't have to be careful of accidental touches, and looks it over. "Fuckin' gorgeous, Momo. You spoil us." Then she slips it onto her wrist. It fits perfectly, and she flips her bead emerald up. "Thank you."

"Anytime!"

"...Let's see, what do we still need to set up..."

"Camp shower, maybe hang it from the tree. Some kinda camp toilet that can dump off the edge. Shower curtain and changing area are up to you, damned near all our body modesty was dysphoria, though Ruby does have some. Toilet should probably have a stall. If you figure out some kinda minifridge we can run off solar, or some other way to keep things cool, we can preserve extra fruits for the portal days, give you a bigger calorie buffer for that."

"Some training tools for you to practice your web-shooting with.  Pots, if we want to see if we can make a bonsai of our magic fruit trees."

She sets herself to making things, checking off the items on Hailey's list - including the changing area and shower curtain - before she contemplates achieving her own stretch goals.  She has a limited calorie budget!

"I can definitely make us solar panels, though if I do it like I'm thinking might be better and floating them off the sides so we have more ground space, it might be trouble for your swinging around.  And I have plans for a good chest freezer."

"Oh huh."

Hailey's been setting things up as Momo makes them, and once she got the changing area up she changed out of her costume into some casual clothes: a midriff-bearing black t-shirt with an abstract, pointy pattern on the chest, the low-rise, hip-hugging pants, and the chunky but comfy black boots. The costume and the other clothes get folded up by the tree.

"I think... as long as you put some drainage, you could float a panel or two in the pond? You're right that panels off the edge would obstruct web-swinging practice, but obstructions might be good training."

"I could also float them upwards, come to think..."

"...I'm less concerned about you smacking into the panels, as much as I am you missing a recovery by hitting one."

"Spider-sense is meant to cover that, but prevention's worth a pound of cure. How're you figuring on maintaining the buoyancy? Topping up the helium if it gets low, or d'you have a plan for preventing leaks?"

"Oh, I don't need helium; I can make hollow shapes, which means I can make solid - most likely metallic - objects full of hard vacuum.  The rest is just buoyancy math."

"Oh fuckin' brill. That's clever. How big a metal balloon d'you need to hold up a whole solar panel?"

"More than I'd like, but less than you'd think, because I can integrate a lot of the structure into the 'balloon' if I'm being clever enough.  The question is whether I have enough surface area to do it all in one extrusion or if I'm going to need to stick things together after I make them."

"Well.  It ought to be feasible, so long as I use more of my overall surface area than my costume's having pants permits me.  If you have body modesty over other people, you're probably going to want to turn around for this."

She blushes and grins. "Body modesty, no. Thirsty gay heart that's developing a bloody huge crush on you, yes. Up to you."

"...Maybe we should flip a coin?  I'm not sure what I want my answer to be."  Or, for that matter, if the Company meddled with it.  This hasn't exactly come up before!

"If you're unsure, better I be cautious. My gay heart will cope somehow. Maybe I'll do some target practice."

She turns to face the tree.

And she makes the panel.

Hailey spends the time snapping lines of webbing off at the tree rapid-fire, accuracy rapidly improving as she figures out how to listen to their body's instincts and refines her skill. She gives it a moment or so after the distinctive sound of Momo's quirk stops, long enough to straighten her clothes back out, and then turns around when she hears that stop too.

There is now a rectangular prism about 4/5ths of a Momo tall and half of a Momo wide, but longer than the island, with most of one of the flat sides covered in solar cells.  It's floating in midair.  It has been augmented with a set of propellers, to allow it to rotate towards the sun.

Momo has eaten another fruit, and is now extruding an insulated cable to connect the panel to a battery bank.

"I'm pretty sure this is more power than we're going to need for the island - but since we're probably going to need lots of power for whatever our missions are, better to over-provision than under-deliver."

Hailey grins. "Impressive and sensible. I'd offer webbing to help with anchoring it to the island, but they decay after a few hours. I can stretch that to a day, or maybe a week, but not permanent, I don't think."

"It should be fine, and the cable's pretty strong; if it isn't fine I can always make another one anyway."

"Yeah, that'll work. And I can certainly help with hauling it down if it tries to escape."

"Honestly I'm more worried about it bowling over the island than about it blowing away from the island.  It might not be all that heavy, but neither is all of our stuff.  ...If you can get down to the sandstone, and handle tools while you're down there, I could make some posts to fence it off."

"Y'thinking we anchor it to the end of the posts, a decent ways off from the edge, that way it can't swing close enough to knock over our stuff?"

"I'm thinking we run the cable to the panel between the posts, so the posts stop it from blowing over the island.  And if there's enough raw force being flung around that they're insufficient, then we have bigger problems - probably problems like needing typhoon-rated shelter."

"Ohhh. Yeah, that'll work. We've got six months 'fore we'll need that kind of durability. Sandstone's pretty soft, so maybe long anchor-bolts that stick a long way in and then expand at the end? A few of them up the length?"

"That will likely suffice, yes."

And with that decided upon, and the plan clear, she starts making everything that whoever's doing the work will need.

While Momo makes parts, Hailey sticks a web-line to the tree. "Probably can't trust the dirt wall to support my weight, so I'll rappel to the sandstone. Oh huh, I wonder if these'll be able to support my weight. Could be good acrobatics practice, jumping from post to post."

"I think they ought to hold up, though you should be careful to not use too much force when you're jumping."

"Yeah, I can do that." She picks up the first few posts and hits them with a burst of sticky webbing to hold them together, and then a loop of web-line to hang them from her shoulder. The bolts and tools go into the cargo pockets on her jeans. Then she unties and steps out of her boots. "How far apart d'you want 'em?" she asks as she walks to the edge, anchor-line in hand.

"I'm making eight posts, so every three meters?"

Hailey nods, and then drops backwards off the side of the Skyblock with a grin.

She laughs wildly, and the line abruptly goes taut.

Then she sticks her hands and feet to the sandstone surface and starts crawling sideways along it. Once she reaches the edge, she moves back two meters in, and then lets go with her hands, swinging "upright" relative to the wall — horizontal relative to the empty sky below — with her bare feet flat on the sandstone.

"Oh this is fun," she laughs, peeling one post off the set and holding it up one-handed, leaving the rest to hang down from her neck and shoulders. "Come see!"

Oh, wow.  That's impressively athletic.

Hailey smirks up at Momo and blows a kiss, then crouches "down" to the sandstone to hold the pole to the rock face one-handed. Her other hand pulls out the first anchor-bolt and runs it through the matching hole in the post, and then she switches to holding both post and bolt in place with that hand, while her left grabs the hammer, driving the bolt ten centimeters deep into the stone with just three heavy swings, before triggering the anchor mechanism and driving those parts sideways with another hit.

Then she scoots down the post and repeats the process, anchoring it at each point.

Only her hair and the remaining posts hanging from her shoulders betray that she's standing on a wall rather than a stone floor.

Yaoyorozu_Momo.exe has encountered an error (code 0x0069 LESBIAN OVERFLOW) and needs to be rebooted.

Hailey laughs happily.

Making your crush's brain reboot is great.

And then, with that post secured, she'll stand back "up" and walk cheerfully three meters over before crouching back to the sandstone surface and doing it again.

She'll just be up here.  Watching.  She's got all the posts done, right?  She's pretty sure.

Hailey grins confidently as she walks along and installs fencepost after fencepost. Fun fact: Ignoring gravity like this takes a lot of core strength, all through her abs and obliques — muscles shown off marvelously well by the midriff-bearing shirt Momo made her.

She is aware!

She gets halfway across the side of the Skyblock before she has to come back for more, walking up to the edge of the sandstone and then leaping up toward the top and pulling on her web-line to land gracefully next to Momo.

"Hi," she greets her with a smirk.

"Oh.  Uh.  Hi there!  Ah.  There's the other poles?"

Hailey grins, nods, and collects the remaining fenceposts and anchor bolts, then steps cheerfully off the side of the island again.

One post at a time, she finishes the job. When she makes her way back up to the surface finally, they've got eight evenly-spaced and aligned poles to protect against wayward floating panels.

"You, um, did.  Good!  At that!"

"Thank you," Hailey replies, leaning in to kiss one blushing cheek. "Anything else I can help install? Waste pipe? Shower?"

"They won't be anywhere nearly so dramatic, I think, but yes, let's get those handled too."

It doesn't take long to make the toilet - if anything, making and installing the stall door is going to be the longest part of the process since someone has to screw that in once she's made it - and she's been making camp showers in job lots, lately.  She even adds a sink to the toilet, plumbed so that it feeds into the flush tank.

...Okay, actually, she's going to make some more poles, so that the bathroom stall isn't liable to get blown over, but beyond that and a shower curtain, there's nothing else left to do for essentials.

Hailey handles all the heavy lifting and installing, especially of the additional set of poles.

Soon enough they're all done. Hailey flops back onto the grass with a grin.

"Lookit us go. Gettin' our island all improved."

"Yeah.  Whew."

She doesn't do anything so dramatic as flop into the grass, but she feels like sitting down too.

Yeah, well, the only non-dramatic Pirate is Maya.

Really she's just elegant about it, but she's still kinda dramatic.

"A good day's work. Wha'cha wanna do with the rest of the afternoon? Tell stories, maybe?"

She lifts a hand up from the ground and webs one of the blue peaches, whipping it off the branch into her grasp.

"Sure, that's something to do.  I can also make board games or a deck of cards.  ...We should probably plant the seeds from those - I don't know what to call those, actually.  They taste kind of peachy?  But we should plant them."

She takes a bite from hers, humming. "S'like it's kinda... buttery. Peachy, but blue. Can't call 'em bleaches, that's awful. Peach-like... persine?"

"...I don't really have any better ideas; is that from something?"

"Not sure. Just sorta... makin' shite up. Sounds almost like it could be related to peaches, but it's some fungicidal shite in avocados. And these things have a consistency kind of like a peach had a baby with an avocado."

"Huh.  I suppose they do, at that.  Sure, that works."

"Board games are good, storytelling is good, card games are good, we're easy. I mighta been frontin' too long though, so if you've got any burning questions ask 'em now."

"I suppose I'm curious about where you came from, but given how badly it treated you, I don't think I have any right to ask."

She huffs out a bit and looks up at the sky.

"Hogwarts. Really only my relatives were bloody awful. My aunt and uncle. Cousin too. The war wasn't so bad."

"...Did you live in the same period of time as The Author Who Must Not Be Named?  You have my condolences!

"...Assuming that the details are the same.  And that what data yet remains after the Second Dark Age was at all accurate for me to connect the two dots.  Most of it was fanfiction."

Hailey bursts out laughing. "All those years and the cunt still gets 'Must Not Be Named'? Oh that's beautiful. Yeah, when we came from she's busily being a rancid twat supporting every transphobic cause she can. Honestly some of the fanfiction's better than canon. I know my timeline was better than canon, and not just because it had the other Pirates there with me."

She splutters out a laugh at the laugh, before she recovers the power of speech to say, "I think we legitimately don't know it."

"Love it. The bitch's version is just completely lost, only fanfiction survives. Probably a quarter of it trans, if I'm lucky, just to piss her off enough that you could get clean energy from her rolling in her grave."

She just smiles softly.  "I hope so.  I barely knew the name of the castle."

"Heh." She grins softly at Momo. "So the peak weird shite with us is that none of us is from 'canon', we're all from bloody alternate timelines that had all five of us present, and all five of us remember fragmentary snippets of our lives there. That's weird even by plural standards."

"...Huh, is it?  I don't know how that normally works to begin with."

"Well headmates being fictives — built out of some 'fictional' character — is common enough among systems, as is that source being an AU or sommat, but it's pretty rare to have multiple distinct sets of source memories, or everyone all have memories of all those places. Even the girl who's supposedly from the mundane world we were living in."

She shrugs, smiling. "So we're bloody weird."

"Doesn't seem that weird to me; you were all there, even if that's by construction - why wouldn't you all remember it?"

"The weird is all of us being there."

"Oh.  Well.  Huh.  I guess?  I certainly don't know."

She shrugs and smiles. "Yeah. We barely know, and we live it. But I like being me. I like knowing these four girls have had my back through wars and apocalypses and being street rats. I like the ways we've been sideways of human. I had wings in one life."

She stares up at the clouds.

"Wings do seem pretty neat!"

"Flying's amazing. Broom, wings, or jet, it's always brill."

"I'll have to get you something for that, then!  You've got your webs, but that's not quite flight yet.  Actually, speaking of equipment - is there anything you'd like to have, that you don't have already?"

"I don't off-hand, but I know who does." Hailey smirks. "Wanna meet another Pirate?"

"By all means!"

She smiles softly, blowing out a slow breath and leaning back away from the body into mindspace—

Their head tilts quickly but very minutely to the side, mouth falls open, they take a deep breath in—

And then Ruby sits up sharply, grinning wide and open! She turns to face Momo, bouncing a bit. "Hi! I'm Ruby Rose! Nice to meet you, Momo!" she greets her, flipping the beads over.

"Hi!  Nice to meet you!"  ...Where has she heard that name before...?  What does Hatsume Mei have to do with it?

"I have so many ideas. You don't know how mechashift works, do you?"

...Oh that's -

"...I think Hatsume Mei definitely tried to figure it out, if I recall correctly - she was trying to make a 'Crescent Rose' all through third year, and I didn't hear anything about it exploding, so I'm guessing it didn't go horribly wrong.  But I think that was a group project, and that it needed to be, because - well, she asked me if I could make her some custom parts, and a lot of the blueprints I saw were talking about spatial folding, and we don't have a non-Quirk way to do that as far as I know?  So whatever I might have, I don't think we can do.  Yet."

"Mei tried to make Crescent Rose!? I mean if anyone could recreate my baby it'd probably be Mei but yeah folds are a core piece of mechashift you can't do it without folds and even if Mei derived the fold math that wouldn't be enough without either a set of precision fold manipulators and fresh Gravity Dust crystals in 'em or a Quirk that could replicate the effect so I'm not surprised she needed help 'cause y'all don't have Dust."

She takes a big breath.

"Wow."

...Kami preserve her, Ruby's cute.

"Yeah, she did.  And I don't have the blueprints she was using - those are 'proprietary Hatsume Industries material, not for distribution' - but I do have the structural alloys recorded, at least."

"You have Huntress-grade alloys oh gods you're amazing. I have to relearn all the stuff I knew from scratch so I can make use of it I've got so much to do yes!"

"I mean, I don't want to get your hopes up erroneously - I don't know if the alloys are actually Huntress-grade - but they are heroics-grade."

"That's better than I've had until now."

"Then I hope they serve you well!  ...If the universe disappoints you like this I will never forgive it."

"I've already had a pair of gods I grew up looking up to turn out to be disappointments, so I'd cope. We've got access to the whole multiverse now, given time, so we'll find everything I need sooner or later."

She scoots closer. "Can I hug you?"

"...Yes, you can, and yes, you may."  (...She just can't make Ruby sad.  She has known Ruby for five minutes and she can already tell that Sad Ruby is a horrible tragedy.)

She blushes a bit and smiles and sits down next to Momo, pulling her into a tight, close hug. "We like you a lot," she whispers. "Hailey's the pickiest. Sable's the easiest. Maya follows them, Neo's playful and quick but takes time to really attach, and I guess I'm just... I get making things better than people, but I can tell I like you."

"O-oh, gosh...!  I, well, I already said that if the Company wanted me to uncomplicatedly like you all, it should have just stayed out of the way of my doing that naturally - and everything I've seen of you so far has convinced me more and more that that's true; that I do like all of you that I've met, and will probably like those of you that I haven't met, and that that's not the Company's doing."

"That's really good. I'm really glad we're getting to know you."

She squeezes Momo again, then leans back bouncily. "I definitely have gear ideas, though: web grenades, if we can figure out how to shoot the raw fluid without spinning it first so we can study it and fill them, or a wingsuit like you said, attached to our costume such that it folds out of the way when we're not using it, or maybe a longer term goal of some kinda HUD glasses and a version that integrates into our mask, such that it forms a shared tacnet with yours, or what about tranquilizers for non-lethal takedowns in gloves or in darts we could throw, or do you have anything for stealth?"

She takes a few big breaths.

"...A number of these ideas are viable; the shared tacnet is actually something my agency planned for.  Do you think your web-fluid is reactive with air?  And how do you spin it?  Is it an undifferentiated fluid that receives some kind of stimulus, or multiple precursors depending on the type?  As for tranquilizers...  Non-Quirk-dependent tranquilizers are very fiddly, because dose-dependent means dose-dependent, and overdoses kill people, which is, I assume, the exact opposite of why you would want to have tranquilizers - but I could make something.  You'd have to be very good with them before I think it would be a good idea to arm you with them in the field, though.  And I have quite a few things for stealth."

"Well it's multiple precursors, because that's how we can vary the properties for sticky versus not and all that. And I think it doesn't become reactive with the air until one precursor is mixed in? and the spinnerets in our wrists do some shaping and some mixing, so probably if we're really careful we can get the different precursors individually, but that'll require some practice. And yeah, mundane tranquilizers are really finicky, that'd be tricky. We do have options for just tying people up, which is pretty reliably nonlethal, so that one can wait. And stealth is because we can do things like stick to the ceiling, so if our costume could also do camo then we'd be safe even from the very few people who trained to look up."

"There's some options I have that are powered, and some that are not power-dependent, but that are consequently much more fiddly."

Ruby looks up at the enormous solar panel Momo made.

Then back down at Momo. "Powered is fine, I bet."

"...Fair enough.  I'm used to not always having time to prepare things like that, and for that matter, I should note that you might not be the only person on the ceiling, so you'll need something for that too."

"Other than webbing their mouth shut, punching them, and webbing their arms to their sides?" Ruby asks with an innocent smile.

"I meant if you were carrying a friendly!"

"Ohhhhh." She nods. "Yeah friendlies are important. That's harder."

"I suppose I could just make another cloak."

"Yeah. Not urgent, though."

She rests her head on Momo's shoulder while she thinks. "What if the wingsuit bits were on elastics to retract them into little storage slits along our arms and sides and legs, and they could be pulled down and then hooked to little hooks at our wrists and ankles to deploy 'em?"

"Probably, certainly in a mechanical sense - the question is, how quickly could you do that in a hurry?  I don't think it's quite field-viable."

She frowns thoughtfully for a moment, then practices a motion of dragging both hands from her opposite armpits to her wrists a few times, then gets up. "I think pretty quick? But maybe not quick enough? Let's see."

She does a quick standing leap above Momo's head, tumbling in a front flip while she does. By the time she lands in a crouch, she's repeated the motion with her arms, and then a similar one from her crotch to her ankles.

"Decent with a bit of hang-time but not instant."

"What if it was..."

She sketches out a different series of motions; brushing hands to ankles and ankles to themselves as she winds up for a jump, "and your strength can get over any of the potentially unfortunate aerodynamics anyway..."

"Oooooh. That'd work, for sure!"

She practices it a few times with leaps of different heights; the taller ones easily clear the top of the tree.

Design success!

...Also, Ruby's acrobatics really grabbed her attention.  Goodness.

Now what else was she thinking of...

"...Goodness, I've quite lost my train of thought."

Ruby sits back down and cuddles close. "Maybe about other costume upgrades? Or the tacnet? I know our current costume doesn't have any electronics in it, but the material's pretty good. Dunno if your world had better materials. Oh! I don't know if this is possible, but some heroes in cartoons have masks with oversized expressive eyes that try to mirror the wearer's expression?"

"At this rate, I should probably consider the project 'make you all a new costume'.  I don't think retrofitting everything into the existing version makes sense."

"I think I recognize the material yours is made of, anyway, and if I'm right, it's one I do know how to make.  And...Hm.  I might be able to make something work, as far as the eyes; I do have eye-tracking software.  And it would help with image..."

"Not opposed to upgrades, honestly. Gwen's costume is great, but it's not really us, y'know? Although maybe not showing her punk side in her costume was deliberate? Not sure."

"I certainly don't know.  But it's not as if you have a secret identity to conceal hints of, I suppose."

She laughs and nods. "Need to be in a world longer than a day for that to matter."

"That you do."

"What sorta interfaces d'you have for visor or mask computers?"

"Eye-tracking and subvocalization, and I can also include contacts somewhere - probably between the fourth and fifth finger, or maybe in the toes - as a backup."

"Oooh. Definitely need to practice subvocalization then."

She leans closer with a smile, putting her head back on Momo's shoulder. "Would you mind sparring with us sometime? This body came with a bunch of instincts but we don't have experience using 'em."

"I'd be glad to."

"Got any fun stories from your world?"

"Hmm..."

"It's hard to find interesting stories that would actually be reliably new to you, assuming that Kiyuko was the main character of what you saw.  She's a bit of a trouble magnet.

"But did whatever you saw of that world that was - a little off and to the left of ours - ever mention the Hero Students' Union?  Kiyuko signed on, everyone in our class did, but it was Kyoka and Ochako who took the lead on it, after our first internships."

She gasps. "You unionized? No! That didn't show up in the media on our old world at all!"

"They, our alternate selves, however that works - didn't?  There were so many horrible internship experiences!"

Ruby shakes her head. "Nope, your alts didn't unionize. Woulda been smart, if stuff like what Uwabami did is common at all, but never came up."

"Goodness, I can't imagine letting her get away with that.  Though I suppose I did need to be talked around to it, at first..."

"...Honestly, though, with Ochako-chan and Kyoka deciding that this fight needed to be picked when Pony actually said our internship was, I quote, 'shit'...  It was inevitable."

"Wait, Pony was on the internship with you? I thought Kendo was."

"Kendo was also there."

"Huh! I wonder what changed to make Pony accept an internship from Uwabami. We didn't get as good a look at her decision-making process about that, being in 1-B and all."

"Huh.  Our Pony was in class A."

"Well that's different. I wonder who's missing."

She rattles off a list of the students in 1A and 1B.  Notably absent from it is a certain grape-haired groper.

"Oh. Mineta. Had kind of a harassment problem about all the girls in the official version. Hopefully he got some therapy, wherever he wound up instead of 1A."

"I think I'm quite glad that I have no idea who you're talking about, if that's what he was like.  And I will join you in hoping."

"Yeah, you're better off. He didn't add much."

She sighs and shakes her head. 

"Anyway! So it was Kyoka and Ochaco who drove the unionization push?"

"Yeah, it was.  Ochako knew a lot about unions from her family's line of work, she was the one who brought it up, and Kyoka..."

She drifts off for a moment.

"She gave a speech."

"It wasn't only the speech, she helped get the word out to other schools as much as our teachers did - but the speech was where Ochako's 'maybe we should unionize' turned from an idle thought to a plan to take real action.  I think she's the one who convinced Shouto to use Endeavor's credit card for the website."

"Wow. Gosh, I wish I could've seen it. Kyoka always seemed so cool. Bet she gave a great speech."

She was really cool!  And the speech was great!

"It, really was, yeah...  I wish you could have.  I remember all the words, but I couldn't do them justice if I tried to recount them now."

Ruby blushes a bit and leans in conspiratorially, whispering, "D'you have a crush on her?"

"I!  Maybe!"

She giggles warmly. "Cuuuute."

And then talk of crushes reminds her of Yang. She sighs softly and nuzzles in closer. "We miss some people too. From our memories."