Intro to Rescue Operations [Class 1-C]

And yet again, U.A. didn’t fail to be surprising with its unconventional ways of doing classes. When all Naoru could find in the classroom was a message from the teacher, he was slowly preparing for the worst. In all honesty, he would have been fine with sitting in the classroom – although away from others would have been better – but it seemed like his homeroom teacher already had a better idea. Whatever they were about to do, the fact they needed to switch to their gym clothes already meant either physical education class, or something more specific... And he was afraid of all the possibilities.

He went to switch uniforms as instructed. Before he would put on his short-sleeved gym sweater, he would pull on a full-arm glove cut above the wrist, on his left arm to hide his skin – or the lack of it, actually, – under a black fabric. His normal white gloves followed quickly to avoid any unnecessary skin-to-skin contact with other people. It was... certainly a weird set of accessories to have, but people would stare more at that dark colored arm he had than the gloves he chose to wear.

Once ready, he headed for the designated place, and awaited the doom that would come at them all in the form of instructions. As the teacher talked, he shrunk smaller and smaller under the weight of the expectations from something that seemed like a quick exam for him. He was not at all prepared for a demonstration, especially not in front of so many people. But he knew himself, and unless he got it over quickly, he would get anxious enough by the end to even throw up. So he was ready to offer to be the first to go, but a fiery red-head was faster, and definitely much more eager than him. He leaned to the side automatically as her uniform’s top flew past beside him, and he averted his eyes just in time to see another of his classmates, a blonde boy catch the piece of cloth. He tried his best to look at anywhere but the exposed skin of the girl, and he automatically covered his right lower arm with his left, the only body part that was not hidden under fabric right now. He could feel his stomach doing slow flips while she was inside the house, and when she returned with the mannequin, he would open his mouth to be the one to go next. No such luck. The blond boy from before was louder and more determined this time, so Naoru failed to enter the building even as second. He closed his eyes and pulled his arms closer to his body.

Waiting for the inevitable and the unknown was much worse than actually doing something, and even nausea was nearing him while the second student was going through the course. The blonde got out, and Naoru was desperate to go, enough to step forward and proclaim shakily: “I-I’ll go!” His voice was nothing more than speech-level in volume, but it still felt like he was shouting, from the way he moved forward with his whole body. His fingers were shaking, but it was just the anxiety and stage fright more than anything. He just wanted to be done with this all. He just wanted it all to be over before he threw his breakfast up on the bleachers.

As soon as he was allowed to, he moved around the side of the house in hurried steps, paying attention to the windows and searching for the best spot for entering. His eyes were blown wide, and his steps were shaky from the various pairs of eyes that were surely boring onto his back and watch him fail. It was almost like he was escaping from the prying eyes rather than searching for a way to enter, but he was quick to find an unguarded window that he could open with little to no force, and jump into the third bedroom.

Once inside, his demeanor almost visibly changed. With one deep breath his heartbeat slowed to a normal pace, and he could watch the motion detector in front of him with a neutral expression. As he stood there, watching the unmoving villain, he took a few moments to call out his Aura. Throughout his arms and upper body, his quirk manifested into an ivory cloak, covering his shoulders, arms and chest like a thin bolero. Even as it was in the process of manifesting, Naoru decided not to waste time, and walked up to the single villain standing in front of him in the room. It wasn’t facing him, and hence, wasn’t activated. But to head out through that door, he will have to get in line of the detector. He eyed the cardboard on the floor, and let it pop up, just so he could punch it back town with his left, now slightly clawed Aura arm.

He placed one palm on the door, and without opening it yet, he let a few, small threads form from his Aura and moved them through under the door and into the hallway. It was all his quirk, his mutation, the extension of his own body. Those threads he commanded like snakes were able to feel whatever it touched outside. Since Naoru did see what an unpropped cardboard cutout and a motion detector looked like, he could more or less “feel” and search them out even through a closed door. Of course his range and precision had a limit, but as far as his Aura could tell, there was no villain out in the hallway. So he pushed the door open, and exited to the foyer.

He tried the exact same feat on the second bedroom, on the second bathroom, and on the laundry. He checked through under every closed door if there would be a villain behind them, and if he felt nothing, he would open the door to investigate further. He did open the second bedroom’s door once he assumed there would be villains inside for the sole reason to check if his Aura triggered the motion detectors or not. He found that only one of the two were propped up, which told him that if he could keep his Aura’s movement incredibly low, have it only slither through the floor’s surface like a very flat snake, it could avoid the detector’s range. He raised a hand to his chin and filed the knowledge for later, to make sure his investigation would be careful. He punched the activated cardboard cut-out with his clawed hand, and left the other one there, as it posed no threat.

The bathroom was opened and the place was glanced through barely. First, he would like to map the area as best as he could before doing a throughout search, as he might find more information in other rooms. The teacher did say that there were three keys needed to be found, but he mentioned nothing about their whereabouts. As they only had fifteen minutes to clear the mission and free the hostage, he could only assume there would be hints somewhere, or one of the keys would be at a really obvious place. He just needed to find that starting point and then peel the whole mystery up and solve it like a riddle, like a devil’s lock. His focus was already so on the problem at hand, that he almost forgot there were people waiting outside. Oh, how lucky it was they didn’t see him right now. He must have looked like a completely different person from the anxious ball that almost threw up in front of the house. All he needed was a purpose, a riddle to solve, and he turned into a determined search dog, a researcher that wanted answers, first and foremost.

He needed the answers, or he would go crazy.

Through the closed door of the laundry, his Aura’s threads could feel something he suspected as a villain, still laying low. He left the door, and decided he would get back to it if he needed to later. In the family room, he did not need to reach out with his Aura to see exactly where the villains were, the one turned to the TV was no threat yet again, as it was turned away from Naoru, and hence was not about to be activated. The one in the kitchen was even less of a problem, and so he turned toward the closed door of the master bedroom instead. He let his Aura carefully, slowly slither through under it in threads, as flat as possible so not to alarm any motion detectors, if he could help it. As he felt through the room’s floor, he leaned his forehead against the wooden surface of the door and closed his eyes to help his focus. There were a few of the villains inside. Actually, he could feel way too many of the detectors, if he was right about what he assumed was inside the room, but the weirdest was that one of them were already alarmed. He frowned, wondering if his Aura was actually detected even though he was trying to be extremely careful with its movements. But his mind was screaming at him for the many irregularities that were on the other side of the door, and it also told him that this might be the starting point he was searching for.

He opened his eyes, and took a step away from the door. He disliked confrontations, but if his conclusion was correct, this room was the core of the mission, or at least an important part of it. He saw no other way to enter except from through the door he was standing in front of, so with his claws ready, he stepped in, and faced the popped up villains that reacted to his movement.

After defeating them all, he could get the first key from the villain in the middle, and also found the clues that lead him to the two others he missed during his search. The villain in front of the TV had to be neutralized before he could get the key hidden behind the device, but that was something necessary. The other, the one in the bathroom, was one that he missed when he decided to go and investigate further instead of searching the room he already deemed safe. That was... a miss on his part. With the hints gathered from the master bedroom, he could get all the key needed for him to progress and go up to the second floor, and to the mannequin held as a hostage there.

But the keys were the things he wanted to find. He didn’t think about the hostage at all.

As he was standing in front of the mannequin, he wondered if that was the whole point. For some reason, the keys seemed more important all along. He raised his left hand to give it the form of a dull blade and cut through the ropes holding the hostage stranded, careful not to damage it. He swung the doll over his shoulder and headed down to exit through the foyer, through the front door.

Looking through the glass of the still closed door, he had to realize that he wasn’t alone, and other students were waiting outside for their turn through the house. That was more than enough to bring him back to his shivering, wide-eyed self and be overly self-conscious of the form his body took during the investigation. Pain shot through his left arm, in reminiscence of his past injury, and his Aura disappeared back under his skin, leaving only the arm there, though carefully covered by the arm-glove from the curious eyes. When he exited the house with the undamaged doll, he had the most sheepish, most fearful expression possible, avoiding any and all eye contact as he placed the mannequin down as a sign he finished the course, maybe even in time. He was as pale as when he started the whole rescue operation, but people could have assumed he was shaken from whatever happened inside the house. In actuality, it was quite the opposite: he was getting nauseous from the eyes that would possibly see his Aura Wraith in its full, ugly glory; from the eyes that would look at him.