They wake up lying on the ground.
Outdoors.
It's a bright, clear day.
Their body feels different.
Who's in front?
Warm, eager curiosity, with a side of playful smirk? Okay feels like it's Sable.
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."
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."
"...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."
"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."
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."
"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."
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."
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."
"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."
"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."
...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.."
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.
"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."
"...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?"
"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."
...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."
"...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'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 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.
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."
"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."
"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 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.
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."
"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.
"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?"
"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.
"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."
"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."
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?"
"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 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..."
"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 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.
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."
"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."
"...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."
"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."
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.
"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."
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."
"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."
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."
"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."
"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."
"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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"...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."
"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."
"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."
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.
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.
...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."
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."
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."
"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?"
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."
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..."
"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."
"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."
"The people I miss, though... they're not from the world we just came from. Same with the other Pirates. We'll probably miss Sable's dad and step-mom and sisters at some point, once it sets in that rarely became never, but most of the people we miss were like... my sister. Yang."
She's not sure if she should say anything about just how deeply she misses Yang. That's... Not everyone responds well to that. And they're actually making things work with Momo.
She smiles softly up at Momo. "Yeah, it does.
"Yang's... a protector. She got in trouble for punching kids who bullied me at our combat school, Signal. She practically raised me after Mom died, 'cause Uncle Qrow and Dad were both falling apart. She baked me cookies, she helped when I couldn't focus on my schoolwork, she could tell when I was sad and sit me down with cookies and ice cream. She made Dad sober up after Mom died so he could help raise us. She made Uncle Qrow ease off on the drink enough to train me to use a scythe. She was always cracking jokes, always cheering me up, and they were always so corny."
"JSMN, assuming that those are initials, being... Sable, Maya, Neo, and - Hailey under another name? And if the team that literally spells Ruby with its name wasn't yours I'll make a hat and eat it."
"...I don't know if I've ever heard of a polycule before... But from context it sounds like a type of relationship?"
"So... all of team RWBY was dating, all of team JSMN was dating, most of JSMN was dating most of RWBY, Pyrrha was dating me, Sable, Maya, and Weiss, Jaune was dating Pyrrha and Sable — and also trans, we were all happy for her when she figured that out — Penny was dating me, Sable, and maybe Weiss..."
She pats Ruby on the head gently. "...You were doing a reasonably decent job of maintaining your plausible deniability about that until you brought up the specific relationships you were in. And honestly, as long as nobody was getting hurt by what you were doing... My ability to care about things that aren't hurting anybody, just because people think they're icky, is, honestly, minimal."
"Eheh," she giggles sheepishly, leaning against Momo some more. "You're... taking that surprisingly well. 'm used to people being weirder about it. Yang definitely gave herself a lot of grief about it. But it really worked for us. And you'd be surprised how many people hear that and just assume me and Yang were each dating everyone else but not each other, when I list that off."
"I think it's partially that - well, I'm an only child, so the question isn't visceral - and partially that my scale of 'things that are actual problems' is calibrated to dealing with the sort of nonsense that crops up around Kiyuko. You kissing your sister, when everyone involved wants that to happen, doesn't even make a blip."
"...I don't want to ask. It already sounds bad enough. But - I don't know. Trying to figure out how we might try to deal with any of that is probably a useful theoretical exercise even if it doesn't come up. Similarly to trying to figure out how we might try to deal with someone like All for One or Shigaraki relatively by ourselves, likewise."
"Oh that's a good idea. My first guess for Shigaraki is to web his hands to his body. All I've got for All For One, though, is that our powers don't run on the same system as ones from your world, so there's a decent chance he can't take our powers. That obviously doesn't do a thing about the heaping pile of other powers he's got."
"Some of the best immortality we've seen in several universes, control of big monsters of darkness that're drawn to negative emotion and driven to destroy sapient life, ability to create more of them and design custom ones, and a devout goal to kill the gods — who, admittedly, suck even worse and actually originally created the Grimm and put her in the mess she's in. Also spent five minutes having an argument with each other by rezzing and killing her husband repeatedly."
"Well that's about as bad as All for One before you start factoring in the gods. Probably worse, given that Noumu were pretty significant investments for All for One and there are enough Grimm to be described as a tide. ...I hate to even think like this, but... What if you don't kill her? And instead aim to lastingly incapacitate?"
"Yeah, our theory is you have to do a mix of that and converting her. She doesn't actually want to destroy human- or faunus-kind, that's more wired directly into the Grimm themselves. And we know that because if she did we'd have lost already. She's got more than enough Grimm for it. A Grimm Tide is when you have continuous waves of Grimm hitting one spot for an extended period, like an hour or more."
She buries her head in her hands. "I have no idea. Something about thinking their creations weren't worth keeping around if we couldn't get united. Oh, and for extra horror, Salem's husband, the wizard who they kept killing and resurrecting after she talked one of them into doing it against their policy of Death being Important Somehow, after they made the Relics they resurrected him again, but in a terrible way where he bonds with the souls of like-minded people and then gradually merges with them until there's only one resulting person, and they told him to unite humanity and then unite the relics. And he still thinks they're the good guys. And his current incarnation is Headmaster Ozpin. I respect him a lot, he's really awesome in a lot of ways, but can he please get over believing in the gods being anything other than petty jerks?"
"Then let's check."
She pulls out the Company Smart Device, taps open the shopping app, then the Companions tab. Filters by MHA, searches for Kyoka, and then holds the phone out.
Kyoka Jiro, T4, 10 Credits. There's a Match Worlds dropdown on the infocard, currently set to "none."
Ruby taps it.
Momo appears as an option.
"Yeah. I've got mixed feelings about this. I'm not surprised, and I'm glad you get to have each other, but there was a tiny shred of hope that we were wrong and they wouldn't have anyone else from your world."
"We've always wanted to learn a sign language or two for Neo. Atlesian Sign Language didn't come through with the exomemories, so we don't have any, and it's so hard to learn one properly without a conversational partner. Speaking of, we really wanna learn Japanese too at some point. There are a few sets of exomemories where we spoke it and not knowing it feels weird."
"Kyoka? Yeah... You're a lot like her, really? She's a lot like you? You're both very punk, I think. And you and she both care a lot about caring. She likes pre-Heroics music, so you might have that in common... She plays pretty much anything with strings, and keyboard, and she has... Such a good singing voice. And she's been teaching Eri how to play guitar and bass, recently."
"Well, if I make neutrally buoyant targets, you can web them and pull them back in? And, hm, drones would be useful to have anyway... I could probably make a retrieval drone and stick some trackers in the targets, too, just in case. No good if you're planning to go target shooting, but we'll get to that once we've actually made Crescent Rose."
"That'd work! I wonder if our early-rising sleep trouble followed us. Probably the habit of it did, but not the biology? I think we'll have an easier time with the morning shift than the night, in either case. Probably we should think about scheduling in light of the portal, too. It opens at midnight every week."
"Yeah, no way to know just yet. The simplest model is just to move toward waking up early in general, and then make portal days extra long, waking even earlier and staying up late, and recover the day after? But I dunno how sustainable or good for us that is. I know some worlds are gonna be time-sensitive, so we probably do wanna be up at midnight to see where and when the other side is, but depending on what we get we might be able to get a little more sleep."
"...If there's someone like that, who's already in the catalogue, and who we don't have the means to render no longer a large-scale threat any other way...
"...We should figure out why the Company even wants duplicates, if we can. But if we can't find out anything about that either way, and we don't have any other way to render someone unable or unwilling to continue being a nation-scale or larger threat, then...
"We wouldn't have any better options, right now."
"...I can't believe I'm considering doing that at all, if I'm honest, but...
"Short of somehow completely rewriting his personality, our All for One wasn't going to be turned aside from his... Everything he was doing. And that last fight..."
"Kiyuko could have lost it.
"I can't say that, given the same choice during the cat-and-mouse games we were playing against him - to let the timeline continue in uncertainty or to add another All for One to someone's collection - that the math adds up to not Stamping and selling him."
"They would, without her control. It would be so much worse. Well. What we absolutely can't do is sell her. Just Stamping her doesn't take her off the board, though, it just makes her loyal.
"The worst thing is that we'd even get paid for it. I wonder if we can get an answer out of the Opposition about why they want more copies."
She pokes at the Smart Device, looking for a chat or help desk system. Okay, that one is the Company help desk, is there one for the Opposition?
They do not, strictly, *need* duplicate captures. However, having multiple versions of a person available to them both increases their overall throughput for their bulk copying, and introduces both new personality vectors and potentially new powers into the process they use to make "custom orders".
So unless a capture has a particularly unprecedented power expression or isn't in the catalog yet at all, it's not a significant advantage or change for them? I ask because there are rare cases — like All for One on MHA world variants — where there are not particularly better or safer or faster options than stamp-and-sell, because all the alternatives are going to get bunches of heroes killed or depopulate a city or something. And I really don't like the idea of participating in that, but it's sounding like the calculus might favor it in those rare cases.
Using the Stamp as a vector for targeted removals of near-'canonical' (insofar as a 'canon' exists) alternates will not generally have a significant impact on the Company's operations, no. Not at the scale at which the Company operates. Such removals *can,* however, have significant impact on the scale at which *you* operate.
We would, obviously, prefer a multiverse where this was not the case, but such strategies can end up producing positive utility.
However, we advise that you contact us to confirm that your targets do *not* have any novel abilities, or secret load-bearing functions, before you sell them. We have a better ability to determine this than you do.
"I mean, yeah, Kiyuko doesn't come in 'evil', that's just ridiculous. She's Kiyuko Midoriya, it's absurd to think of her being anything other than a cinnamon roll of determination on par with me. What's your worry about an evil All Might, though? That he might be hard to deal with, or that he might be unprecedented and change things for the Company somehow?"
Okay it is clearly Hugging Momo Hours now.
She'll type with her hands behind Momo's back while hugging her fiercely.
Can you confirm whether our Companion, Momo Yaoyorozu, corresponds to an actually-extant original Momo from an actually-extant MHAverse, or was reverse-constructed to match us?
...She's not sure that anyone has ever said that to her, before. Not in so many words. Or so few words? Idioms can be confusing. (...Not that all of class A - yes, including Bakugou, once he got his head screwed back on - wouldn't go to absurd lengths for eachother. It had just snuck up on them, rather than being something they openly said.)
Two of these seeds are going to go into the ground, as a normal tree would - spaced out next to the parent tree. She's also going to put a cutting from tree #1 into the ground, to see what happens. But the other two seeds (and a cutting), she is going to try to make into trees that are as small as possible - and this requires pots, and soil, and most likely some rather specialized pruning shears.
"That works! 'when they start doing something' is an easy time to wake you up for. Would have a hard time remembering to wake you up just for a shift change though, so I'm setting an alarm for midnight, and we can turn it off if they start doing stuff before that."
Poke poke the scroll. Does it have an alarm?
Yes.
Okay, alarm at 00:00.
Great.
"Aaaand set."
Oh well!
She spends the remaining hours making notes about shopping lists for different types of worlds, and for powers or upgrades they should prioritize: crop/herb/spice seeds anywhere (for culinary variety), aquaculture books in a modern world, fish once they have aquaculture figured out and maybe space for it, extra skyblocks when they're ready to prioritize separating housing from farming and need more space, architecture books in a modern world, design plans for pieces that a house can be assembled out of, media libraries in a really modern world, big dump of all the fandom.com wikis, Kyoka for the very first ten points they've got, Communication Talent at some point to cover languages other than English and Japanese and JSL, probably some of the Defenses, and Talent Sharing, but they'll have to talk with Momo about those. Definitely want to pick up some kind of crop-boosting artifacts or magic in some world or another, so they can make other kinds of food keep up with persine production rates and have more food variety.
Eventually, one of the times she looks up (just after 23:00), Ruby notices some flower buds on the tree. She snaps a picture with the scroll phone Smart Device, then goes to the tent.
Well the Ruby might be leaning a bit close as they walk, so she's certainly in easily pattable range.
"Oh fiiiine. But wake me up if they do something really interesting, okay? Also we made some notes about shopping lists and stuff, love your thoughts on 'em, don't have to be now though."
They walk out toward the tree and sit down together, and Ruby leans her head on Momo's shoulder.
Momo takes a cursory look at the list and checks off 'design plans for pieces that a house can be assembled out of', 'aquaculture manuals', and 'architecture books'. And then she has to think about Kyoka.
...She feels like she'd be unbearably selfish to agree on that earmarking of those first ten points that way.
She doesn't know if that's going to stop her.
When Ruby looks up and notices which item Momo's stopped on, she mumbles, "We're not budging on that. You miss her, we want you to be happy, and we don't have anything more urgent for those first points. If we had something really really urgent, we'd be open to maybe delaying, but prioritizing the happiness of people we care about is something important to all of us in different ways, and it is very deeply who Sable is, so convincing her not to give you Kyoka immediately would be hard."
"So I vaguely remember 'canon' depicting her have one of those stereotypical anime nosebleeds when you busted your costume at the USJ, but I dunno if I'm remembering right. What I'm sure of, though, is that there's one clear thing missing in fanfic that talks about you two maybe having a relationship. There are fics where you mutually confess, fics where one of you confesses first and the other says yes, fics where she confesses and you say no until you process some stuff and later say yes, fics where you say no, but we've never seen one where Kyoka says no. Haven't ever seen it happen at all."
She shrugs sleepily. "Dunno how much we're allowed to generalize that as meaning anything about the spread of likely worlds in the multiverse, but. I really don't think that's a possibility you have to worry about."
She pushes through what was probably some sort of Company conditioning to Not Touch That, or possibly just surprise, and takes it as she was offered.
Handler-san, do you have access to whatever information the Company has stored about people from my world? There is...
I am trying to determine if the Jirou Kyoka of my world would prefer that a copy of her exist with the copy of me that I am.
-- Yaoyorozu Momo
"...Huh. If the flowers keep going like that, I think the tree's going to have fruit on it precisely at midnight.
"...Wait, why did we stay up for this when we have a phone? Does it have a camera? ...I mean, I'm going to stay up with you now I'm here, this is honestly really nice, but I feel so silly for forgetting that we have at least one piece of functioning technology that I didn't have to make from scratch."
And a minute or so later, Ruby steps into the tent wearing the loose PJ pants and black camisole Momo made her. They fit very well.
She smiles softly and crawls into her sleeping bag. "Y'know, despite all the horror it started out with, we really enjoyed today with you. You make our lives brighter."
"I don't mind waiting for your train of thought to catch up with us," she teases with a gentle grin, "but I worry that the fond gazing I'll be doing in the meantime might further complicate the process of catching it."
She pops a persine slice into her mouth cheerfully. "Mmmm.~"
"I'll just have to avoid getting lost in your eyes, then!"
"But, no, I do think it's catching up to me...
"Making you your targets, first thing, and all their supporting infrastructure. Then, you do target practice for a bit while I work on your new costume - if you have specific elements you want me to work in, aesthetically speaking, let me know - and after I've made it, you and I should spar to make sure it's sufficient. We can also practice your disarming. And, hm... Rescue training. There's only so much we can do about that but we should do it. See if you can catch someone who's falling without going over internal-injury thresholds, perhaps."
Sable smiles warmly, a bit of a blush coloring her cheeks, and reaches out to take one of Momo's hands in her own.
"Those are very good ideas and I appreciate them so much. I also want us to fit things you want for yourself in to our days somewhere, though," she explains as she brings Momo's knuckles to her lips in a fit of reckless, daring whimsy, kissing the back of her hand.
Help, she's very gay and that kiss was very sweet. But! She has counterpoints to raise!
"Well, the thing is, right now? I want nothing more than to help you become the best hero you can be. ...That's not entirely true, I am a relatively high-functioning lesbian but I am a lesbian, but... Firstly, we have a mission in seven - six - days and you need to be ready for that much more than I want to do anything else. We have five days to meld your heroic heart and your body's instincts into a coherent whole and I am not going to waste that time. After that we can revisit leisure activities. Secondly, I am going to get so many things I want incidentally that I really already feel like I've a surfeit of life satisfaction right now. Thirdly, training you also helps me."
"My headmates are on board. Neo thinks you seem interesting, and she's looking forward to JSL and sparring. Hailey's got a crush from how you handled her yesterday mixed with what we already knew of you. Maya attaches easily as long as the rest of us are in, and adores your protective streak and your dedication. And Ruby honestly admires you and thinks you're absolutely great." Sable smiles hesitantly, blushing. "Picking you was our choice before we even woke up on the Skyblock. You're the one we're worried about. Don't want you to feel pressured."
Sable laughs sheepishly. "Aheh. Yeah, to be explicit about that question, Hailey and Maya's biggest priority is that us and ours be safe, and having the skills to handle whatever world we might face directly serves that. Neo wants us to get what we need to make all six of us comfortable, and to gradually pretty up the island eventually. Ruby and I want to help people."
"Though to dodge us getting caught in a loop of gayly admiring eachother for an hour I regret that I think I shouldn't get to talking about mine in so many words - but I think you've a good enough idea of Kiyuko's example to figure out the kind of hero I want to be, and the rest should follow naturally from there. Let me get started on your targets."
Sable kisses Momo's cheek, pops the last slice of persine into her mouth (she'd been munching a bit while they talked), and starts practicing different types of webbing at the tree while Momo makes targets. It turns out she can vary the stickiness along the length and ends, increase the elasticity, and also make a variant that wants to spread out and stick to everything. This last type seems to be good for captures or disarmament, so she practices switching between swing-lines and differently-sized capture webs back and forth as quick as she can, trying to get it reflexive.
"Do you think you can - hm, weave, different sorts of - what am I saying, yes you can, you've done that. You should practice doing that with the sticks-to-everything stuff, and then... The weblines you've been doing that are different elasticities? You're going to need - or at least very much want - that sort of ability, to safely decelerate a falling human who isn't Quirk-reinforced. There's a reason you wear a harness when you're attached to a climbing rope, it distributes the force - and gradually bringing the elasticity down would then allow you to spread out the decelerative force over time while still exerting maximal safe deceleration, I believe - though I haven't worked out the physics. ...Sudden sharp stops are bad, I'm assuming you know that."
Sable hums and nods. "Yeah. I'm calling the sprawling sticky stuff capture webbing, or maybe spread-webs. When it's a big net meant to snag a whole person I think I'll call it a capture-web. But yeah, I think hit my falling target with a capture-web to get a good wide grip, spread it out over their whole body, with a really elastic web-line following right after, trying to maybe get them upright so that the deceleration forces are along the spine rather than across it, and gradually increase the number of support lines and decrease the elasticity?"
"...Right. I need to figure out how to make a reuseable training dummy for all this. Probably more than one, because gravity is not going to be so considerate as to limit itself to making only one person plummet to the ground at a time. And of different sizes and weights..."
At this rate, she is going to figure out how to do Support Engineering. Kami preserve her.
"...Oh! Samples of your webbing in its precursor state. I have some thoughts on how to do that. Though that's not actually relevant now. I don't have the lab equipment to do anything with them quite yet, and making it is not high priority. But once we do know how it's made - assuming it's not a Quirk-influenced material, or the non-Quirk equivalent of such a thing - that gives me a useful tool I wouldn't otherwise have."
...maybe if she puts some sort of clearing mechanism somewhere webbing already should not be applied because of the forces being absolutely horrible... The neck. It will have to be the neck. She wants to make at least semi-realistic arms and legs, but she can't quite figure how to weight them adjustably, and really, there's no time for her to make this a perfect simulation, so that gets thrown on the pile of 'things to noodle at when there's free time'.
That at least does simplify the design, somewhat.
"Are there things that you know would break your webbing? Repeatedly and reliably, ideally without needing constant maintenance or a lot of raw power? I'm trying to figure out how to make sure these dummies don't fall into the void and become inaccessible for being weighted, and that requires that I be able to secure an 'escape hatch' for those weights."
"I'm less surprised by that than I think you thought I would be; we have someone who can speak to animals in our class, and he's quite competent as a hero. The ability to directly control even something so seemingly harmless as bugs... Well, leaving aside the venomous spiders!
"Depending on the details, it would be positively easy to take over a city."
"Yeah. She's kind of terrifying to fight. The fun thing, though, is that she only took over the city to fix it after a kaiju wrecked it. Try to like... hedge out the gang of actual Neo-Nazis and stuff, and get basic services going again. She's actually trying to do right by her city, and she'll cooperate with people who don't fuck up her efforts to do so. Honestly, I'm not really worried about running into Taylor. This is the kind of 'villain' who, when she finds out her boss used a job she did as a distraction to kidnap a preteen precog and make himself even more untouchable by combining his power with hers, runs a successful months-long plot to get close enough to him to end him and free the girl."
"...As much as there is a part of me that just wants to stay in this hug for the rest of forever - you give very good hugs - we can't afford that. I have the targets done, and we need to test this knife, to see if I have the treatment right, before I can move onto the ones for catching."
Then she can get to making the falling dummies!
Honestly, half the trouble is adjusting for the bit where there doesn't seem to be a measurable decrease or increase of air pressure based on height. Thankfully, she has software for triangulating from radio beacons. ...That increases the amount of circuitry she has to bother with, but considering that she needs to record g-forces anyway, and that'll need to be electrified for reusability's sake... Not to mention that she'll also need vector references to make animated target practice routines.
...It'll be fine. As long as they have power enough to spare - and the recovery function oughtn't trigger too often, if the training is working whatsoever. Still, she thinks they should test it before relying on it.
"I think I'm ready to test one of these, if you're ready to catch it if it tries to escape into the abyss, by which I mean, if it gets more than twenty meters from my lovely new reference points without activating its recovery mechanisms."
She bounces happily and very readily reciprocates the hug!
...She may even, from sheer overflowing glee at her success, kiss Sable! On the cheek, they're not at the point where more - aggressive - kissing seems right yet, but something about this situation just seems to demand celebration, and kisses are celebratory! If Sable would like one!
The moment it's off the edge and tumbling, Sable lunges to the edge, bare feet and one hand sticking her to a stop just at the edge. Left hand hangs down, shoots a capture web directly at the falling dummy, a more-elastic swing-line trailing behind it. It hits the dummy solidly at center of mass, exploding outward in a spray of webbing that wraps the dummy's arms and legs, spilling high to support the head, almost a little too much covering the face but not quite.
In that moment Sable grabs the web-line tight, elastic stretching as the dummy decelerates to a stop.
!!!
Slap the web-line she's currently holding to the ground with a simultaneous burst of webbing to hold it in place, then lunge down to catch that one too! Capture-webbing spills out across the dummy, cocooning it quickly, and she yanks hard on the support line, hauling up as it decelerates.
Eep! Slap that webline to the ground and stick it! Shit shit shit and this one's smaller okay tighter on the capture-webbing she's got a smaller target here fuck.
She whips a capture-web down at the child-dummy, webbing snapping out to envelop it supportively, webline stretching out as it decelerates.
Fuck.
Hand over hand, haul the dummy up while checking to see if Momo has any more.
"Let me just pull up the graphs..."
"Yeah, it looks like you did just fine.
"We'll keep practicing, three does not a sufficient sample make to judge you competent instead of lucky, and I have other surprises waiting - but I do think that if something like this comes up, you're most likely going to be able to handle it well."
Sable grins and blushes as she sets the last dummy on the ground. "Yeah, that's all-over. So I'm absolutely going to want skintight. Also for the sake of making you blush, and generally looking hot, but mostly for the strategic value. That's also why we're not wearing boots around the skyblock, mostly."
She steps away from the edge and spreads her arms wide. "This do, or shall I strip the shirt and pants off first?"
"Alright, I'm going to need you to do some things..."
And Momo, despite the radiant blush and the mind that clearly wants to wander somewhere else, starts leading Sable through flexibility exercises and other poses like the ones she'll need for the wingsuit, and taking measurements accordingly.
Sable puts her clothes back on. "Well. I think there's something to be said for making the costume as punk and goth as we can while still keeping properly heroic vibes — don't wanna confuse people about whose side we're on, now — and then there's a question of color scheme. Each Pirate has our own favorite colors, though we do like each other's, too. So I'm honestly not very sure how to style it. We could use purple themes, 'cause I'm the host, but I don't feel like that's very fair to the others. Most Spideys have a big central spider emblem on the chest, usually pretty stylized, although every Spidey styles the emblem differently, and as you can see from our existing costume that Gwen doesn't have one at all, just the web trim. Could maybe do a bit of a drippy-ink look on ours? I dunno."
She shrugs helplessly, still grinning. "Suggestions welcome?"
"I can definitely make these work."
It will take a bit of doing to translate them through to the control program, but it's work well worth the doing.
Let her just sketch out a spider...
The design she ends up with evokes an almost calligraphic aesthetic; it is very much made of brushstrokes, sharp and sweeping, though she does add some details that would be more likened to dripping paint. It looks as though she intends to center the spider's abdomen in the center of the chest, with its head facing downwards, to accent the dramatic swooshiness of the back legs further and equally give the dripping-ink forelegs she has devised a better (flatter) canvas.
Once she's caught her breath from the hug, and her poor gay heart has stopped trying to pound its way out of her chest (for now), she can actually make the costume. It's a very complex craft, lots of fiddly details, from the computers to the fabric itself, but she can do it, so long as she keeps her focus.
"Smart."
She pulls her shirt off, setting it aside, then shimmies out of her pants, and then with a blushy grin and a wink at Momo, she pulls her bra over her head and sets that aside too, perky tits bouncing free, just barely obscured by the angle of her body.
Carefully, she steps into the sleek, graphite-black fabric of the costume, pulling it up over her hips, slipping into the sleeves, and zipping it up. Then she pulls on the mask, and turns to face Momo.
The calligraphed spider spills across her chest in faintly iridescent silver, her purple-violet heart dripping black ink in the center of the spider's abdomen. The trim at the wrists and palms, and inside the hood, is purple with silver webbing. Purple outlines highlight the expressive silver eyes on her mask. And every inch of it hugs her figure like a glove.
"Well, how do I look?"
Sable grins, and though Momo can't see her face, it shows in her masked eyes, sharp and bright. "Planning on it."
She webs a nearby target twice, just to prove neither wrist is blocked, then walks to the edge. "Every Spider-Man and Spider-Woman has this moment, staring at a yawning void, simultaneously giddy and terrified. And every time, they don't know for sure if they'll get it right. They've practiced and tested, but that last step is a leap of faith. And it's not one we thought we'd get to take."
Sable webs two targets into her grasp, then flings them hard. They sail off, well past the far edge of the Skyblock.
And then she vanishes again.
The moment she rises past the surface, she whips webs at three more in rapid sequence, dragging them even further into the sky than the previous two.
Then, as she soars higher, she webs the first two and yanks them across to the other side.
She twists in mid-air, upside-down, and blows a kiss at Momo.
And again she vanishes.
Oh shit.
One hand webs the bottom edge of the skyblock, yanking herself downward as hard and fast as she can. The other webs the dummy — not with a capture web, this time, just a lightly-elastic swing-line — and tugs the dummy rather more gently toward herself.
When she catches the dummy, she holds it tightly, her arms under the dummy's and its over her shoulders, and then webs the underside of the Skyblock and swings herself back up.
She keeps her speeds lower, this time, just fast enough to gently crest the surface and land, setting the dummy down softly.