Chapter 1 - The Beginning
Blackout
The Paranoid Dragon
Chapter 1
Age: 19
Death was a funny thing.
I’d thought about it a couple of times, idle musings on how I wanted to go. Sleeping away at the end of a successful life, or failing that, something quick and painless. No time for regrets.
I didn’t get my wish.
It wasn’t any kind of cool death, either. A training accident. Landmine clearing with a bangalore torpedo, one of the basic tricks in a Combat Engineer’s playbook. Push a plastic tube filled with explosives into a minefield, and detonate to clear a path for the infantry. We’d done it dozens of times before, in this very spot even.
Something went wrong. I… I don’t actually know what it was. A stray explosive? We searched the area beforehand, but the Rovajärvi firing range has been in continuous use since World War II, we could’ve missed something buried among the snow and dirt. That’s kind of irrelevant now, though.
All I know is that I took cover well outside the safe distance, but for whatever reason the explosion was so much bigger than planned. It was like god had punched me in the face and the chest and the nuts all at the same time. There was a bright flash of light, but I can’t remember any sound. I think my ears must have been blown out by the shockwave.
I only wish it had ended there.
A bright light, and then nothing.
It didn’t. I came to, must’ve been only seconds later, lying down on my back, when I was slapped on the face.
There were people crouching over me, talking to me. I recognized my squadmates, I saw their lips moving, but there was no sound. Or maybe there was and I just can’t remember.
I remember… being so confused. Looking back on it, they were performing the basic emergency medical check up we’d done a million times, both on the giving and receiving end. But I just wanted to get up and get back to work. I remember trying to stand up, and being pushed down.
One of my squadmates was sitting on my, his knee driving into my thigh as he was fiddling with something. I remember yelling at him. He pulled off, and I saw what he’d been doing. A black emergency tourniquet had been wrapped around my leg, but it was barely doing anything to stop the blood. My left leg was a red mess, my pant leg soaked with blood and torn by shrapnel.
Then the pain came, and I started to scream.
I don’t know how long that lasted, but everything eventually started to blur.
-------
Dark.
Wet.
Warm.
Floating?
Everything feels wrong.
Limbs won’t move.
Can’t even scream.
Muffled voices.
Kick.
Kick. Kick. Kick.
Tired.
-------
Can’t really measure time.
Wake up, kick until tired, go to sleep again.
Measure the kicks. Little bit more every time.
Head feels heavy. Feels like it’s full of fog.
Sometimes there’s movement. Sometimes it gets less dark, sometimes less warm.
Can finally move arms again. Started moving around.
Found something attached to my belly. Some sort of tub- Oh.
Oh no.
Nonononono-
-------
I was dead, and had been reborn. Will be reborn, I guess.
That was that.
Maybe it was just that I still had trouble focusing my thoughts, but after a brief panic, I just kind of.. Had to accept it, really, there wasn’t much that I could do.
How?
Why?
Why me?
Was I the only one this had happened to?
If so, why had nobody ever brought it up?
Would I ever meet my old family?
What would my new one be like?
Is it a betrayal of Mom and Dad if I call my new parents that?
How was I thinking so much with the brain of a baby?
I felt like they should’ve been profound questions, but they mostly just drifted into my head like passing curiosities and then right back out again, unanswered,
I kept on kicking, just to measure time, but my heart wasn’t in it. While I couldn’t call myself an expert on babies, I guessed that as well-developed as I was actual birth couldn’t be all that far off.
I could hold longer trains of thought and stay awake for longer periods now, but I did my best to stay in place with my eyes shut and not think too hard on where exactly I was, because ew.
There would be occasional bouts of activity which I’d now come to realize was mom walking around, or exercising, and I’d occasionally suddenly get drowsy, anxious, excited or alert for no reason at all, which I guessed was hormones crossing over.
I started noticing more and more things, like shifts in the temperature and light. One time I even heard what must’ve been music, which was nice. I couldn’t really make sense of it but the rhythmic sounds were soothing.
I rewarded mom for that with no kicking for an entire sleep cycle, which I guess she appreciated since it became a regular occurence.
What else...
Oh, yeah, there was that one thing. An absence of a specific kind.
I’m not really sure about the developmental process of a baby’s anatomy, but..
I might be in for some rough time.
-------
My first thought after being born was I wish I could bleach that from my memory forever.
But I was finally out. And it was almost as horrible as being inside. Everything was so bright and cold, and I could feel my umbilical cord flopping against my chest and my head was so heavy and everything hurt.
A pair of strong hands quickly lifted me up and wrapped me into a warm blanket, which helped a little but I still gave voice my displeasure with a kick.
There was an explosion of noise, and- was that japanese?
I think so. I must be a long way from home, unless my new family were expatriates or immigrants. Not easy to get further away from Finland than Japan.
I was handed to another pair of hands, and I was brought face to face with Mom. New Mom. My vision was blurry, but so close I could see well enough. She was an asian woman with pale skin and white hair- an albino? She had a pleasant smile on her face, exhausted but full of emotion. Love.
And that was… Here she was expecting a normal baby, and she got me. An almost-20 year old who had died and come back. Who already had memories of a loving family, who no doubt missed him.
I wasn’t sure if I could fully return that love, as she deserved.
For all that I may have been an adult I was now in the body of a newborn, and the dam burst. I sucked in a choking breath and started crying my lungs out.
-------
Age: 2
So I was a girl now.
I mean, at this point being a baby was the bigger shock, but going through puberty again is not going to be fun. Again there was that kind… acceptance. There was nothing I could do about it, and I guess being a baby again helped just absorb it and move on.
And then there were the horns.
Yeah, horns.
They’d begun to develop almost as soon as I was out, one pushing out from my forehead between my eyebrows, and a second, shorter one behind it. The extra weight was pretty unsettling, but whatever was responsible for this had clearly thought things out rather than haphazardly slap on extra parts. A normal baby probably would’ve snapped their neck from the imbalance because human babies are useless for anything other than crying and eating, but I could at least support my own head.
Thank god for small mercies.
And that wasn’t the only thing. The few teeth that already decorated my mouth were pointed and triangular, and I kept accidentally making drawing blood from my lip because those things are sharp.
So there I was, a tiny, useless baby. White hair and red eyes like Mom, tiny nose and puffy cheeks, the works. For the longest while I couldn’t even move beyond waving my arms a little and kicking and I still I couldn’t understand anything anyone said and I couldn’t even try communicating with anyone, not without giving myself away. So all I could do was watch with my beady little baby eyes.
And what I saw was fucking weird.
For all that I’d freaked out about my own little mutations, they were among the less exotic things I’d seen in my new life. Other people with horns, animal parts, scissor hands, machinery parts sticking out of their skin… Sure, most people looked normal, but something like every fifth person was like something out of a cartoon.
At first I was sure I was tripping on something, and in a way my little baby brain always is, but eventually I had to believe it. My first thought was that I was reborn in the future where genetic and cybernetic modification is commonplace, but all the technology I saw with my beady little baby eyes looked mostly modern.
Honestly there wasn’t a lot I could do to find out until I’d managed to actually learn the language of the land. I’ve always been absolutely terrible at learning new languages, and it was an upwards struggle. Still, at least I could look forward to acing english at school, and having two whole languages to myself that essentially nobody would be able to understand.
It’s been so long since my little brother was a baby that I can’t actually remember when babies are supposed to start understanding speech, but I still hadn’t picked up more than a couple of words, like “yes” and “no”.
And names, of course.
Mine was “Ryuuzaki Tatsuma”, based on the amount of times the adults liked to chant it in my general vicinity. I’m also pretty sure that confirms that I’m in Japan now, or at least my parents are japanese.
“Ryutsuki Tatsuma” was Mom. Like I said, she looked much like me, without the horns. Pale skin, white hair, red eyes. The same pointed teeth as I had, and she also had these slit pupils, like a cat. She had a pleasant smile and was always kind, but I could tell she was the disciplinarian of the household. When she put her foot down, everyone stopped what they were doing and listened. Despite that, she was apparently an artist of some description, from what little I could understand.
“Kenshin Tatsuma” was the name of my new Dad. I’d burst out crying when I was first placed in his arms because holy shit this guy has the head of a rhino. Yeah, it wasn’t all too hard to imagine where I got the horns from. He was absolutely massive, with grey, thick skin covering even the human parts of his body. Despite his appearance he seemed to be a mellow guy, letting Mom take the lead in most situations. I hadn’t yet figured out his profession, but there was one time he took me to some kind of rally-slash-protest thing with lots of the aforementioned people with weird body parts, like him. Like me, I suppose.
Together the two of them seemed to hover over my shoulder every waking moment. I suppose it’s only normal that they wouldn’t leave a baby alone except to sleep, but it was just so frustrating to have lost all of my independence in one fell swoop. Anything small enough for me to swallow was scooped away from my reach, every piece of furniture was lined with those rubber corner guards that softened the sharp edges and corners, the floor was covered with a green mushy carpet, and I was penned into the living room by a pair of gates with the latches too high for me to reach. It was as baby proofed as you could get.
And it was boring as hell.
Don’t get me wrong, I tried. I was still physically just past my second birthday, and at that age you’re basically constantly doped on endorphins. Every new thing is the best and awesomest thing to ever happen.
Even so, it wasn’t the same as being an actual mental two-year old, and it showed. I just couldn’t quite muster that same enthusiasm and glee for every single little thing, not when I’d seen and experienced it all before. Mom and Dad carted me off to a doctor after doctor, and even if I couldn’t quite follow what they said, I could see the worried creases on their brows. That made me feel guilty and try to be the child they deserved, to forget about my past.
But it was hard to fake every waking moment of my life. There was a whole different world out there that I wanted to know everything about, but I couldn’t talk and so I couldn’t ask.
Still, if there was one spot of light in this new world, it was named Ryuko Tatsuma.
-------
“...Yes, but he is so big and ugly, said the spiteful duck and therefore he must be turned out...”
Ryuko kept her eyes on her little sister as she read the story, the two-year old’s eyes flicking across the coloured storybook with rapt attention. She knew Ryuuzaki didn’t care much for the story, she’d long since lost count of how many times she’d read this book to her.
But Ryuuzaki liked listening to her sister read it to her. The two-year old struggled with speech, even now constrained to a handful of words. There was a strange kind of cycle to her efforts: she’d try as hard as she could, become frustrated at her slow progress, give up, then become frustrated at her inability to communicate and pick up where she left.
There was no question to the fact that Ryuuzaki was a strange child. In the last two years, the Tatsumas had been shuffled from doctor to doctor, always repeating the same things.
Lethargic temperament. Slow development of linguistic skills. Quiet. Doesn’t play with toys. Disinterested in exploring new things.
Many labels had been thrown around. Autistic. Developmental disorder. One of Ryuko’s friends who’d been over had used simple. They weren’t friends anymore.
Ryuko knew it bothered Mom and Dad. She may only have been twelve, but she could pick up on the way the two of them would exchange glances, the tension in the air each time they returned from a doctor, the muffled sounds of arguments after they thought she was asleep.
But it didn’t bother Ryuko. So what if Ryuuzaki didn’t learn to speak as fast as other kids or bother playing with toys? Nobody could deny that her sister was smart, smarter than others her age. There was an alertness in her eyes, and if anything Ryuko could tell that the little stuffed animals and toy cars only bored her. Ryuuzaki didn’t refuse to do things because she didn’t understand them, but because they didn’t interest her.
She couldn’t wait introduce Ryuuzaki to her lego collection, but Mom had strictly forbidden it for a few years more, even though her sister had never shown the propensity to try to swallow small things that weren’t food.
“...Then he flew to the water, and swam towards the beautiful swans...”
-------
Age 3
“-And each and every Quirk is unique to their user, though it is often a combination of the parents. Most people- 80% of the population possess a Quirk, and that number is steadily increasing.”
I looked up at my Dad, eyes filled with wonder. I’d pestered my parents for an explanation about all of the...weirdness as soon as I had learned the words to do so, and apparently they’d decided today was the day. But when they’d plopped me down on the sofa opposite from the two of them, this was not what I’d been expecting.
Honest to god superheroes and villains?
I brought a hand to my horns, which had continued to grow. The front one was almost as long as my head, curving upwards while the second one was about two thirds it’s length and pointing straight up. They were sharp enough that I had to be careful pulling on shirts, though thankfully their position didn’t make it impossible either. Something like ram horns would’ve been hell to deal with.
“...Ar’ these my…?”
“No, honey,” Mom took over from Dad, smiling at me. “It’s… sometimes when people have mutant Quirks they can pass parts of those on, even if that’s not the child’s quirk. You remember the boy with bird’s head?”
I scrunched up my nose. “He was borin’.”
“Don’t be rude, Ryuuzaki.” Mom tried to sound stern, but her heart wasn’t in it. I’d said the same of every playdate mate they’d tried to get me to be friends with.
“The doctors think your horns are a leftover from Dad’s mutation. It would be very unusual for a child to receive a lesser version of their parent’s Quirk.”
Oh. That’s… good? Bad? I didn’t really know what to think. Even now I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t just misunderstood what they were trying to get across. I hadn’t quite gotten every word of the explanation, but I had enough to understand the rest from the context.
“An’ these?” I opened my mouth, running a finger over my sharpened teeth. They made chewing a bit of a difficult proposition, but at least they looked pretty cool.
Mom handed me a framed picture, showing a stern-looking man dressed in a suit, glaring at the camera. His entire body was covered in red scales, with a ridge running across his head and spine before ending in a spiked tail, a pair of powerful wings sprouting from his shoulders, as well as clawed hands and feet. “This is your great-great-great-grandfather, Ryoto Tatsuma. He was one of the first pro-heroes, the Dragon Hero Ryuichi.”
“'Kay.” A thousand questions swam across my mind. But one of them rose to the forefront, pushing all the others aside with it's weight.
“Coul’… could I be a hero, too?”
“Ah, that’s-”
“I knew it!” Ryuko shouted as she interrupted Mom, jumping up from her seat and running over to me, her hands on my shoulders. “Can I train with ‘Zaki? Can I-”
“Settle down, Ryuko.” Mom said with a laugh. “Of course you can be a hero, Ryuuzaki, if that’s what you want. You can be whatever you choose to put your heart into. It will be a difficult journey, but your father and I will help you along the way. And I know somebody else who would be more than happy to help.”
“I’m going to be a hero, ‘Zaki.” Ryuko whirled back towards me, a fire burning in her eyes as she pumped her fist into the air. “The Dragon Hero: Ryukyu! The ninth of the Tatsuma Heroes! And you can be the tenth!”
My parents exchanged a glance at each other as I looked to them in askance at Ryuko’s outburst. They’d never really talked about their families, and the only relatives I’d ever seen were the occasional visitors from Dad’s side, which was also how I learned he took Mom’s name when they married.
Whatever their internal communique, it seemed that Mom prevailed as she looked back at me. “The Tatsuma line includes many of the great pro-heroes in the history of Japan. I have no doubt you could continue that tradition.”
She leaned forward, taking my hand into hers. “But always remember, whatever choice you make, we will be here to support you in any way we can. Do not ever feel that you should become something to meet expectations, rather than because it’s what you want. There’s no need to make any decisions yet. Three years old is far too young to say ‘I will become a hero’.”
“‘Kay.” I nodded, my hands clasped together on my lap. It was a lot to take in, but it explained so much about this new world that had previously felt incomplete. The next logical question was, then… “So what’s your Quirks?”
“Quirk: Dragon!” Before Mom or Dad had gotten in a word edgewise, Ryuko had pumped her fist in the air, a crackling field of energy enveloping her.
“Not inside-” Mom yelled, but it was too late.
Ryuko’s body warped and expanded until she filled the entire living room, her back pressed against the ceiling. A pair of massive wings extended from wall to wall, and our house was by no means small. A glittering coat of scales covered her, though her casual t-shirt had somehow been transformed to fit her new size, looking quite out of place. Her tail had knocked over one of the sofas and her huge talons were digging into the stone flooring.
I could hear mom and dad yelling at her, but as I beheld the massive dragon before me, I could only muster an awed, gap-toothed smile.
-------
After Ryuko had transformed back and received approximately thirty minutes of lecturing from Mom, I managed to get back to questioning them about their quirks.
As demonstrated, Ryuko’s quirk was called Dragon, and it allowed her to shapeshift into a honest-to-god dragon the size of a garbage truck, and she wasn’t done growing yet.
Honestly, it was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life.
Mom’s Quirk was almost the same. Her dragon form was, from the pictures she showed me, somewhat smaller and slimmer and it didn’t have hair or transform clothing like Ryuko’s, but there was a spiked ridge running along her spine and a more prominent head.
Dad’s was, obviously, that he was a rhino-man. An African Black Rhino, specifically. He was on the bigger side of seven feet, and with the way his head made him hunch over he packed even more mass into that height. He was strong and tough, and when he gets a proper run up those horns can shred steel plating. Mostly he just used his size to move furniture around, and wrangle animals in his day-to-day job as a veterinarian.
My quirk would, in all likelihood, be some sort of mixture between the two. There was always the possibility of developing something completely unrelated, called a first generation quirk, or to be quirkless.
Honestly that last one seemed like an incomprehensibly cruel fate to me. It was one thing to live in a society without superpowers, or even one where those bearing them were in the minority, but to be powerless when 80% of all people had one? To be the muggle born of mages?
The thought made my skin crawl. Thankfully the odds of such a thing were astronomically tiny.
-------
To my eternal relief, my quirk did not take long to manifest itself.
One day, I was sitting on the sofa while my parents were at work and Ryuko at school, engrossed in my newfound ability to understand the TV and the running coverage of local and national pro-heroes. Not the text, but the narration was enough to follow the general gist of things.
Quirks, and heroes in particular, had rapidly become a fixation of mine. Naturally so, given that they were the only thing that was actually new to me. Everything else seemed so dull and boring in comparison to the bizarre world of heroes and villains, and I think Mom and Dad were a touch shocked by the intensity with which I latched onto the concept. Shocked, but a little bit glad that I had found something that could hold my interest, given the apathy I had displayed toward most of everything else.
There was a news story regarding a live battle between a man decked out in samurai armor who could create shockwaves from his huge katana versus a woman who seemed to be able to spawn some sort of monsters by cutting off bits of her hair and letting them grow into shaggy, tangled creatures. I wasn’t actually sure which, if either, was supposed to be the hero but I was so fixated upon the fight itself that I didn’t notice Dad coming home until he laid a hand on my shoulder.
I fell out of my seat in surprise, and when I caught myself, it wasn’t with human hands.
Several things happened at once. Dad yelled out in surprise. I did the same, except it was more like a distorted screech as I tried pull myself to my feet only to find out I now had four of them and trip again, my newfound tail pitching a night lamp over.
“Stop.”
I froze at Dad’s commanding tone, something he rarely made use of. He knelt down to on knee, lifting me up into his hands. Everything felt wrong and weird, and my head was starting to spin from the vertigo. For a moment I felt like I was in that darkness again, my whole body warped and wrong-
“Calm down. Just breathe. Relax.”
I drew a shuddering breath. The air made an odd whistling sound as it went past my newly-enlarged teeth.
“That’s it. Good.”
He walked out into the back yard, a large area of grass lawn that extended several hundred meters before meeting the forest edge. Dad set me down on the grass with care, before looking down at me.
“Can you turn back?”
I wasn’t sure how I’d changed in the first place, so I had no idea how to reverse it. Just thinking about it really hard didn’t seem to help.
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t form the words with my strange new mouth. Too many teeth and no cheeks and too long and narrow and...
“Breathe.”
After a few failures at wheezing out a verbal answer, I settled for shaking my head.
“That’s alright. I’m going to go inside and get a mirror and some towels. I want you to stay here and just breathe. Don’t try to walk yet, just breathe.”
I nodded again, laying flat on the ground, soaking in the pleasant feeling of the grass against my body, though it felt muffled. It was a late summer day, the sky was bright and clear with a cold breeze running through the air. A whole wealth of new sensations bombarded me- the smell of newly-cut grass, somebody somewhere grilling meat. The wind whistled in the treetops, insects crawled across the grass and buzzed through the air.
Moments later, dad returned, setting down something heavy in front of me. I cracked open my eyes, and was treated to the sight of myself.
I’d estimate that I was maybe the size of a german shepherd, with the classic western dragon anatomy of four legs and two wings. White scales covered my entire body, shiny and glimmering along my back and tapering off to become more dull and almost gray along my belly. My head was comparatively massive, with the beginnings of powerful, dinosaur-like jaws, tiny fangs peeking out like a crocodile. A pair of familiar horns emerged from my forehead, and smaller hornlets lined my cheeks and brows, reaching all the way to the frill-like ears. My new tail was thick and flat, akin to a crocodile’s, and I had four limbs with four toes each ending in a claw, with the fourth one being able to rotate around to become a thumb.
Dad knelt by me again, wrapping his hands around me and I nuzzled into the comforting warmth of his body.
“That’s my girl. I called your mother and she’ll be here soon. She can help you get accustomed to your quirk, until you figure out how to change back.”
I shifted around in agitation, and Dad must’ve figured out the source of my distress because he immediately went on to reassure me.
“Don’t worry about it, okay?” He shifted my position on his lap, so that I was looking into his eyes. “Ryuko took two whole months before she could turn back. You should’ve seen her, tripping over her own limbs, trying to pry open a cookie jar...”
Soon enough I felt my eyelids become heavy, and I slipped into the darkness.
Age: 19
Death was a funny thing.
I’d thought about it a couple of times, idle musings on how I wanted to go. Sleeping away at the end of a successful life, or failing that, something quick and painless. No time for regrets.
I didn’t get my wish.
It wasn’t any kind of cool death, either. A training accident. Landmine clearing with a bangalore torpedo, one of the basic tricks in a Combat Engineer’s playbook. Push a plastic tube filled with explosives into a minefield, and detonate to clear a path for the infantry. We’d done it dozens of times before, in this very spot even.
Something went wrong. I… I don’t actually know what it was. A stray explosive? We searched the area beforehand, but the Rovajärvi firing range has been in continuous use since World War II, we could’ve missed something buried among the snow and dirt. That’s kind of irrelevant now, though.
All I know is that I took cover well outside the safe distance, but for whatever reason the explosion was so much bigger than planned. It was like god had punched me in the face and the chest and the nuts all at the same time. There was a bright flash of light, but I can’t remember any sound. I think my ears must have been blown out by the shockwave.
I only wish it had ended there.
A bright light, and then nothing.
It didn’t. I came to, must’ve been only seconds later, lying down on my back, when I was slapped on the face.
There were people crouching over me, talking to me. I recognized my squadmates, I saw their lips moving, but there was no sound. Or maybe there was and I just can’t remember.
I remember… being so confused. Looking back on it, they were performing the basic emergency medical check up we’d done a million times, both on the giving and receiving end. But I just wanted to get up and get back to work. I remember trying to stand up, and being pushed down.
One of my squadmates was sitting on my, his knee driving into my thigh as he was fiddling with something. I remember yelling at him. He pulled off, and I saw what he’d been doing. A black emergency tourniquet had been wrapped around my leg, but it was barely doing anything to stop the blood. My left leg was a red mess, my pant leg soaked with blood and torn by shrapnel.
Then the pain came, and I started to scream.
I don’t know how long that lasted, but everything eventually started to blur.
-------
Dark.
Wet.
Warm.
Floating?
Everything feels wrong.
Limbs won’t move.
Can’t even scream.
Muffled voices.
Kick.
Kick. Kick. Kick.
Tired.
-------
Can’t really measure time.
Wake up, kick until tired, go to sleep again.
Measure the kicks. Little bit more every time.
Head feels heavy. Feels like it’s full of fog.
Sometimes there’s movement. Sometimes it gets less dark, sometimes less warm.
Can finally move arms again. Started moving around.
Found something attached to my belly. Some sort of tub- Oh.
Oh no.
Nonononono-
-------
I was dead, and had been reborn. Will be reborn, I guess.
That was that.
Maybe it was just that I still had trouble focusing my thoughts, but after a brief panic, I just kind of.. Had to accept it, really, there wasn’t much that I could do.
How?
Why?
Why me?
Was I the only one this had happened to?
If so, why had nobody ever brought it up?
Would I ever meet my old family?
What would my new one be like?
Is it a betrayal of Mom and Dad if I call my new parents that?
How was I thinking so much with the brain of a baby?
I felt like they should’ve been profound questions, but they mostly just drifted into my head like passing curiosities and then right back out again, unanswered,
I kept on kicking, just to measure time, but my heart wasn’t in it. While I couldn’t call myself an expert on babies, I guessed that as well-developed as I was actual birth couldn’t be all that far off.
I could hold longer trains of thought and stay awake for longer periods now, but I did my best to stay in place with my eyes shut and not think too hard on where exactly I was, because ew.
There would be occasional bouts of activity which I’d now come to realize was mom walking around, or exercising, and I’d occasionally suddenly get drowsy, anxious, excited or alert for no reason at all, which I guessed was hormones crossing over.
I started noticing more and more things, like shifts in the temperature and light. One time I even heard what must’ve been music, which was nice. I couldn’t really make sense of it but the rhythmic sounds were soothing.
I rewarded mom for that with no kicking for an entire sleep cycle, which I guess she appreciated since it became a regular occurence.
What else...
Oh, yeah, there was that one thing. An absence of a specific kind.
I’m not really sure about the developmental process of a baby’s anatomy, but..
I might be in for some rough time.
-------
My first thought after being born was I wish I could bleach that from my memory forever.
But I was finally out. And it was almost as horrible as being inside. Everything was so bright and cold, and I could feel my umbilical cord flopping against my chest and my head was so heavy and everything hurt.
A pair of strong hands quickly lifted me up and wrapped me into a warm blanket, which helped a little but I still gave voice my displeasure with a kick.
There was an explosion of noise, and- was that japanese?
I think so. I must be a long way from home, unless my new family were expatriates or immigrants. Not easy to get further away from Finland than Japan.
I was handed to another pair of hands, and I was brought face to face with Mom. New Mom. My vision was blurry, but so close I could see well enough. She was an asian woman with pale skin and white hair- an albino? She had a pleasant smile on her face, exhausted but full of emotion. Love.
And that was… Here she was expecting a normal baby, and she got me. An almost-20 year old who had died and come back. Who already had memories of a loving family, who no doubt missed him.
I wasn’t sure if I could fully return that love, as she deserved.
For all that I may have been an adult I was now in the body of a newborn, and the dam burst. I sucked in a choking breath and started crying my lungs out.
-------
Age: 2
So I was a girl now.
I mean, at this point being a baby was the bigger shock, but going through puberty again is not going to be fun. Again there was that kind… acceptance. There was nothing I could do about it, and I guess being a baby again helped just absorb it and move on.
And then there were the horns.
Yeah, horns.
They’d begun to develop almost as soon as I was out, one pushing out from my forehead between my eyebrows, and a second, shorter one behind it. The extra weight was pretty unsettling, but whatever was responsible for this had clearly thought things out rather than haphazardly slap on extra parts. A normal baby probably would’ve snapped their neck from the imbalance because human babies are useless for anything other than crying and eating, but I could at least support my own head.
Thank god for small mercies.
And that wasn’t the only thing. The few teeth that already decorated my mouth were pointed and triangular, and I kept accidentally making drawing blood from my lip because those things are sharp.
So there I was, a tiny, useless baby. White hair and red eyes like Mom, tiny nose and puffy cheeks, the works. For the longest while I couldn’t even move beyond waving my arms a little and kicking and I still I couldn’t understand anything anyone said and I couldn’t even try communicating with anyone, not without giving myself away. So all I could do was watch with my beady little baby eyes.
And what I saw was fucking weird.
For all that I’d freaked out about my own little mutations, they were among the less exotic things I’d seen in my new life. Other people with horns, animal parts, scissor hands, machinery parts sticking out of their skin… Sure, most people looked normal, but something like every fifth person was like something out of a cartoon.
At first I was sure I was tripping on something, and in a way my little baby brain always is, but eventually I had to believe it. My first thought was that I was reborn in the future where genetic and cybernetic modification is commonplace, but all the technology I saw with my beady little baby eyes looked mostly modern.
Honestly there wasn’t a lot I could do to find out until I’d managed to actually learn the language of the land. I’ve always been absolutely terrible at learning new languages, and it was an upwards struggle. Still, at least I could look forward to acing english at school, and having two whole languages to myself that essentially nobody would be able to understand.
It’s been so long since my little brother was a baby that I can’t actually remember when babies are supposed to start understanding speech, but I still hadn’t picked up more than a couple of words, like “yes” and “no”.
And names, of course.
Mine was “Ryuuzaki Tatsuma”, based on the amount of times the adults liked to chant it in my general vicinity. I’m also pretty sure that confirms that I’m in Japan now, or at least my parents are japanese.
“Ryutsuki Tatsuma” was Mom. Like I said, she looked much like me, without the horns. Pale skin, white hair, red eyes. The same pointed teeth as I had, and she also had these slit pupils, like a cat. She had a pleasant smile and was always kind, but I could tell she was the disciplinarian of the household. When she put her foot down, everyone stopped what they were doing and listened. Despite that, she was apparently an artist of some description, from what little I could understand.
“Kenshin Tatsuma” was the name of my new Dad. I’d burst out crying when I was first placed in his arms because holy shit this guy has the head of a rhino. Yeah, it wasn’t all too hard to imagine where I got the horns from. He was absolutely massive, with grey, thick skin covering even the human parts of his body. Despite his appearance he seemed to be a mellow guy, letting Mom take the lead in most situations. I hadn’t yet figured out his profession, but there was one time he took me to some kind of rally-slash-protest thing with lots of the aforementioned people with weird body parts, like him. Like me, I suppose.
Together the two of them seemed to hover over my shoulder every waking moment. I suppose it’s only normal that they wouldn’t leave a baby alone except to sleep, but it was just so frustrating to have lost all of my independence in one fell swoop. Anything small enough for me to swallow was scooped away from my reach, every piece of furniture was lined with those rubber corner guards that softened the sharp edges and corners, the floor was covered with a green mushy carpet, and I was penned into the living room by a pair of gates with the latches too high for me to reach. It was as baby proofed as you could get.
And it was boring as hell.
Don’t get me wrong, I tried. I was still physically just past my second birthday, and at that age you’re basically constantly doped on endorphins. Every new thing is the best and awesomest thing to ever happen.
Even so, it wasn’t the same as being an actual mental two-year old, and it showed. I just couldn’t quite muster that same enthusiasm and glee for every single little thing, not when I’d seen and experienced it all before. Mom and Dad carted me off to a doctor after doctor, and even if I couldn’t quite follow what they said, I could see the worried creases on their brows. That made me feel guilty and try to be the child they deserved, to forget about my past.
But it was hard to fake every waking moment of my life. There was a whole different world out there that I wanted to know everything about, but I couldn’t talk and so I couldn’t ask.
Still, if there was one spot of light in this new world, it was named Ryuko Tatsuma.
-------
“...Yes, but he is so big and ugly, said the spiteful duck and therefore he must be turned out...”
Ryuko kept her eyes on her little sister as she read the story, the two-year old’s eyes flicking across the coloured storybook with rapt attention. She knew Ryuuzaki didn’t care much for the story, she’d long since lost count of how many times she’d read this book to her.
But Ryuuzaki liked listening to her sister read it to her. The two-year old struggled with speech, even now constrained to a handful of words. There was a strange kind of cycle to her efforts: she’d try as hard as she could, become frustrated at her slow progress, give up, then become frustrated at her inability to communicate and pick up where she left.
There was no question to the fact that Ryuuzaki was a strange child. In the last two years, the Tatsumas had been shuffled from doctor to doctor, always repeating the same things.
Lethargic temperament. Slow development of linguistic skills. Quiet. Doesn’t play with toys. Disinterested in exploring new things.
Many labels had been thrown around. Autistic. Developmental disorder. One of Ryuko’s friends who’d been over had used simple. They weren’t friends anymore.
Ryuko knew it bothered Mom and Dad. She may only have been twelve, but she could pick up on the way the two of them would exchange glances, the tension in the air each time they returned from a doctor, the muffled sounds of arguments after they thought she was asleep.
But it didn’t bother Ryuko. So what if Ryuuzaki didn’t learn to speak as fast as other kids or bother playing with toys? Nobody could deny that her sister was smart, smarter than others her age. There was an alertness in her eyes, and if anything Ryuko could tell that the little stuffed animals and toy cars only bored her. Ryuuzaki didn’t refuse to do things because she didn’t understand them, but because they didn’t interest her.
She couldn’t wait introduce Ryuuzaki to her lego collection, but Mom had strictly forbidden it for a few years more, even though her sister had never shown the propensity to try to swallow small things that weren’t food.
“...Then he flew to the water, and swam towards the beautiful swans...”
-------
Age 3
“-And each and every Quirk is unique to their user, though it is often a combination of the parents. Most people- 80% of the population possess a Quirk, and that number is steadily increasing.”
I looked up at my Dad, eyes filled with wonder. I’d pestered my parents for an explanation about all of the...weirdness as soon as I had learned the words to do so, and apparently they’d decided today was the day. But when they’d plopped me down on the sofa opposite from the two of them, this was not what I’d been expecting.
Honest to god superheroes and villains?
I brought a hand to my horns, which had continued to grow. The front one was almost as long as my head, curving upwards while the second one was about two thirds it’s length and pointing straight up. They were sharp enough that I had to be careful pulling on shirts, though thankfully their position didn’t make it impossible either. Something like ram horns would’ve been hell to deal with.
“...Ar’ these my…?”
“No, honey,” Mom took over from Dad, smiling at me. “It’s… sometimes when people have mutant Quirks they can pass parts of those on, even if that’s not the child’s quirk. You remember the boy with bird’s head?”
I scrunched up my nose. “He was borin’.”
“Don’t be rude, Ryuuzaki.” Mom tried to sound stern, but her heart wasn’t in it. I’d said the same of every playdate mate they’d tried to get me to be friends with.
“The doctors think your horns are a leftover from Dad’s mutation. It would be very unusual for a child to receive a lesser version of their parent’s Quirk.”
Oh. That’s… good? Bad? I didn’t really know what to think. Even now I wasn’t sure if I hadn’t just misunderstood what they were trying to get across. I hadn’t quite gotten every word of the explanation, but I had enough to understand the rest from the context.
“An’ these?” I opened my mouth, running a finger over my sharpened teeth. They made chewing a bit of a difficult proposition, but at least they looked pretty cool.
Mom handed me a framed picture, showing a stern-looking man dressed in a suit, glaring at the camera. His entire body was covered in red scales, with a ridge running across his head and spine before ending in a spiked tail, a pair of powerful wings sprouting from his shoulders, as well as clawed hands and feet. “This is your great-great-great-grandfather, Ryoto Tatsuma. He was one of the first pro-heroes, the Dragon Hero Ryuichi.”
“'Kay.” A thousand questions swam across my mind. But one of them rose to the forefront, pushing all the others aside with it's weight.
“Coul’… could I be a hero, too?”
“Ah, that’s-”
“I knew it!” Ryuko shouted as she interrupted Mom, jumping up from her seat and running over to me, her hands on my shoulders. “Can I train with ‘Zaki? Can I-”
“Settle down, Ryuko.” Mom said with a laugh. “Of course you can be a hero, Ryuuzaki, if that’s what you want. You can be whatever you choose to put your heart into. It will be a difficult journey, but your father and I will help you along the way. And I know somebody else who would be more than happy to help.”
“I’m going to be a hero, ‘Zaki.” Ryuko whirled back towards me, a fire burning in her eyes as she pumped her fist into the air. “The Dragon Hero: Ryukyu! The ninth of the Tatsuma Heroes! And you can be the tenth!”
My parents exchanged a glance at each other as I looked to them in askance at Ryuko’s outburst. They’d never really talked about their families, and the only relatives I’d ever seen were the occasional visitors from Dad’s side, which was also how I learned he took Mom’s name when they married.
Whatever their internal communique, it seemed that Mom prevailed as she looked back at me. “The Tatsuma line includes many of the great pro-heroes in the history of Japan. I have no doubt you could continue that tradition.”
She leaned forward, taking my hand into hers. “But always remember, whatever choice you make, we will be here to support you in any way we can. Do not ever feel that you should become something to meet expectations, rather than because it’s what you want. There’s no need to make any decisions yet. Three years old is far too young to say ‘I will become a hero’.”
“‘Kay.” I nodded, my hands clasped together on my lap. It was a lot to take in, but it explained so much about this new world that had previously felt incomplete. The next logical question was, then… “So what’s your Quirks?”
“Quirk: Dragon!” Before Mom or Dad had gotten in a word edgewise, Ryuko had pumped her fist in the air, a crackling field of energy enveloping her.
“Not inside-” Mom yelled, but it was too late.
Ryuko’s body warped and expanded until she filled the entire living room, her back pressed against the ceiling. A pair of massive wings extended from wall to wall, and our house was by no means small. A glittering coat of scales covered her, though her casual t-shirt had somehow been transformed to fit her new size, looking quite out of place. Her tail had knocked over one of the sofas and her huge talons were digging into the stone flooring.
I could hear mom and dad yelling at her, but as I beheld the massive dragon before me, I could only muster an awed, gap-toothed smile.
-------
After Ryuko had transformed back and received approximately thirty minutes of lecturing from Mom, I managed to get back to questioning them about their quirks.
As demonstrated, Ryuko’s quirk was called Dragon, and it allowed her to shapeshift into a honest-to-god dragon the size of a garbage truck, and she wasn’t done growing yet.
Honestly, it was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life.
Mom’s Quirk was almost the same. Her dragon form was, from the pictures she showed me, somewhat smaller and slimmer and it didn’t have hair or transform clothing like Ryuko’s, but there was a spiked ridge running along her spine and a more prominent head.
Dad’s was, obviously, that he was a rhino-man. An African Black Rhino, specifically. He was on the bigger side of seven feet, and with the way his head made him hunch over he packed even more mass into that height. He was strong and tough, and when he gets a proper run up those horns can shred steel plating. Mostly he just used his size to move furniture around, and wrangle animals in his day-to-day job as a veterinarian.
My quirk would, in all likelihood, be some sort of mixture between the two. There was always the possibility of developing something completely unrelated, called a first generation quirk, or to be quirkless.
Honestly that last one seemed like an incomprehensibly cruel fate to me. It was one thing to live in a society without superpowers, or even one where those bearing them were in the minority, but to be powerless when 80% of all people had one? To be the muggle born of mages?
The thought made my skin crawl. Thankfully the odds of such a thing were astronomically tiny.
-------
To my eternal relief, my quirk did not take long to manifest itself.
One day, I was sitting on the sofa while my parents were at work and Ryuko at school, engrossed in my newfound ability to understand the TV and the running coverage of local and national pro-heroes. Not the text, but the narration was enough to follow the general gist of things.
Quirks, and heroes in particular, had rapidly become a fixation of mine. Naturally so, given that they were the only thing that was actually new to me. Everything else seemed so dull and boring in comparison to the bizarre world of heroes and villains, and I think Mom and Dad were a touch shocked by the intensity with which I latched onto the concept. Shocked, but a little bit glad that I had found something that could hold my interest, given the apathy I had displayed toward most of everything else.
There was a news story regarding a live battle between a man decked out in samurai armor who could create shockwaves from his huge katana versus a woman who seemed to be able to spawn some sort of monsters by cutting off bits of her hair and letting them grow into shaggy, tangled creatures. I wasn’t actually sure which, if either, was supposed to be the hero but I was so fixated upon the fight itself that I didn’t notice Dad coming home until he laid a hand on my shoulder.
I fell out of my seat in surprise, and when I caught myself, it wasn’t with human hands.
Several things happened at once. Dad yelled out in surprise. I did the same, except it was more like a distorted screech as I tried pull myself to my feet only to find out I now had four of them and trip again, my newfound tail pitching a night lamp over.
“Stop.”
I froze at Dad’s commanding tone, something he rarely made use of. He knelt down to on knee, lifting me up into his hands. Everything felt wrong and weird, and my head was starting to spin from the vertigo. For a moment I felt like I was in that darkness again, my whole body warped and wrong-
“Calm down. Just breathe. Relax.”
I drew a shuddering breath. The air made an odd whistling sound as it went past my newly-enlarged teeth.
“That’s it. Good.”
He walked out into the back yard, a large area of grass lawn that extended several hundred meters before meeting the forest edge. Dad set me down on the grass with care, before looking down at me.
“Can you turn back?”
I wasn’t sure how I’d changed in the first place, so I had no idea how to reverse it. Just thinking about it really hard didn’t seem to help.
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t form the words with my strange new mouth. Too many teeth and no cheeks and too long and narrow and...
“Breathe.”
After a few failures at wheezing out a verbal answer, I settled for shaking my head.
“That’s alright. I’m going to go inside and get a mirror and some towels. I want you to stay here and just breathe. Don’t try to walk yet, just breathe.”
I nodded again, laying flat on the ground, soaking in the pleasant feeling of the grass against my body, though it felt muffled. It was a late summer day, the sky was bright and clear with a cold breeze running through the air. A whole wealth of new sensations bombarded me- the smell of newly-cut grass, somebody somewhere grilling meat. The wind whistled in the treetops, insects crawled across the grass and buzzed through the air.
Moments later, dad returned, setting down something heavy in front of me. I cracked open my eyes, and was treated to the sight of myself.
I’d estimate that I was maybe the size of a german shepherd, with the classic western dragon anatomy of four legs and two wings. White scales covered my entire body, shiny and glimmering along my back and tapering off to become more dull and almost gray along my belly. My head was comparatively massive, with the beginnings of powerful, dinosaur-like jaws, tiny fangs peeking out like a crocodile. A pair of familiar horns emerged from my forehead, and smaller hornlets lined my cheeks and brows, reaching all the way to the frill-like ears. My new tail was thick and flat, akin to a crocodile’s, and I had four limbs with four toes each ending in a claw, with the fourth one being able to rotate around to become a thumb.
Dad knelt by me again, wrapping his hands around me and I nuzzled into the comforting warmth of his body.
“That’s my girl. I called your mother and she’ll be here soon. She can help you get accustomed to your quirk, until you figure out how to change back.”
I shifted around in agitation, and Dad must’ve figured out the source of my distress because he immediately went on to reassure me.
“Don’t worry about it, okay?” He shifted my position on his lap, so that I was looking into his eyes. “Ryuko took two whole months before she could turn back. You should’ve seen her, tripping over her own limbs, trying to pry open a cookie jar...”
Soon enough I felt my eyelids become heavy, and I slipped into the darkness.
So Yeah. Got an idea lodged in my brain and it wouldn't leave.
Appreciate pointing out any errors, and I guess if somebody wants to proofread/beta future chapters I'd appreciate that even more.
Appreciate pointing out any errors, and I guess if somebody wants to proofread/beta future chapters I'd appreciate that even more.
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