Mind Games - Chapter 29

“So, how is he...” Fuyumi paused, looking around the observation room, her eyes briefly landing on Hitoshi through the one-way mirror that took up a large portion of the wall opposite the door. A dozen scientists were taking an assortment of notes on paper, laptops, and a few reviewing footage of the room on a small television off to the side, muttering quietly amongst themselves.

“Ah, Hot Ice! Yes, come have a seat, we're just... thoroughly analyzing the data from young Shinso. It's all very... fascinating,” Dr. Tanzaki stated, his forehead-mounted third eye blinking as he turned to regard the young heroine.

Fuyumi cautiously took a few steps forward, glancing at the assorted laboratory personnel with a frown. Making her way to Tanzaki's side, she dipped her head slightly to speak in an undertone to the older and slightly hunched man. “Is there a problem?”

“Hmm... oh, no-no-no. Ah... your ward is just... offering us a very interesting challenge,” Tanzaki stated, waving towards the one-way mirror.

Hitoshi was seated cross-legged in the chair in that odd way he sometimes did when he thought no one was looking or wanted to get comfortable for a long work-period. It probably testified to exactly how deeply enmeshed in the current test he was undergoing. The mass of electrodes and sensors was still attached to various spots on his head, his fingers occasionally twitching towards them as he visibly fought off the urge to scratch. His eyes, though...

...were locked on the stack of cards in front of him.

“Ace of spades.”

The boy's dull monotone crackled through the lab's speakers from the other side of the divider and the attendant opposite Hitoshi obligingly leaned forward and flipped the card over.

It was, indeed, the ace of spades.

The sound of note-taking around her briefly intensified.

“I thought Hitoshi's quirk was centered on interaction between people and their minds in some way,” Fuyumi frowned.

“That was our initial hypothesis, yes, and that of his original guidance counselor,” Tanzaki hummed thoughtfully, looking mildly frustrated. “But this is why follow-up appointments are so vital in cases like the boy's.”

“So it's a more general psychic quirk, then? With an aspected development due to underuse?” Fuyumi probed curiously.

The doctor blinked, several of the other professionals around her sending the woman odd looks for a brief moment before Tanzaki chuckled. “Ah... I forget you have the background you do sometimes, Hot Ice. It always helps when someone high profile like you knows what to look for.”

Fuyumi scowled momentarily. “A few classes in developmental quirk education should be mandatory for heroes. It would drastically cut down on teenage villains falling into the system.”

Tanzaki sobered a bit and nodded, sighing. “It likely would, at that.”

There was a moment of quiet contemplation between the two before Fuyumi raised her hand towards Hitoshi. “So... aspected development?”

Tanzaki paused, humming thoughtfully. “That's one of the competing hypotheses currently being discussed, but not the one I'm leaning towards.”

“Oh?” The pro-hero asked.

“It's a bit too vague for my personal taste,” Tanzaki stated, shaking his head. “Redefining abilities in broad and vague terms should be a last resort for quirk classification and assessment. It's the easy way out.”

“I'm interested in seeing how you reconcile what looks like precognition with brainwashing, then,” Fuyumi asserted expectantly.

“Here, look at this. Tell me what you think,” Tanzaki said by way of reply, handing her a few sheets of notes.

Fuyumi narrowed her gaze at the printout, looking over what was obviously a series of tests designed to evaluate more esoteric psychic abilities. Things like pre-, peri-, and post-cognition, empathy, telekinetic probability manipulation, remote viewing, inducing trances...

“You did this test already,” Fuyumi noted. “But you did it in another room where he couldn't see the cards being shuffled. He was still a full standard deviation higher than the general population, but nothing like what we're seeing now.”

Tanzaki smiled, reaching up to stroke his lengthy goatee. “Indeed. I imagine if we arranged a third test with the proctor on the other side of Japan or in another country entirely, even that statistical anomaly would disappear.”

“So, he's... what? Subconsciously reading the minds of the people shuffling the cards?” Fuyumi asked, her own expression more thoughtful as she looked through the other tests.

“And proctoring the matching exercises, and setting up the models for the remote viewing practice, and... well, you get the gist of it,” he stated, an amused expression on his face.

“That would tend to reclassify him as a general psychic, though,” Fuyumi stated, flipping the report closed and turning to regard the doctor more closely.

“Not if it's entirely subconscious, as it appears to be,” Tanzaki noted, holding up a single finger to emphasize the point. “What the boy's quirk is doing... it isn't an active mind-reading quirk. It's entirely passive until and unless he can get within a certain range of another person. Sensory range, specifically.”

“I feel like you're splitting hairs as far as the classification goes,” Fuyumi stated bluntly, crossing her arms. “Whether the information gathering is conscious or unconscious, it doesn't really change the result.”

Tanzaki chuckled again instead of getting offended, taking the sting out of a few sour looks she got from the other – almost entirely male – academics many years her senior. “Ah, but while the distinction itself is largely, and do pardon the pun, academic in nature, it matters quite a bit when one looks at the legal side of quirk use.”

Fuyumi blinked, then closed her eyes and admirably refrained from smacking herself in the face. “If it's a subconscious and, therefore, uncontrollable, aspect of his quirk it can't be touched legally unless it presents an active danger to other people. Right.”

“Precisely!” Tanzaki crowed, adjusting his spectacles. “Thankfully, it seems like the data works in the boy's favor. Putting him on the other side of the divide would have made his life a lot more difficult.”

Fuyumi frowned and looked down at the folder in her hands again. It did seem to point to the general... awareness Hitoshi demonstrated being mostly subconscious, though that wasn't a definitive analysis by any means. Still...

If your quirk had a secondary effect that was 'always on,' for lack of a better term, that was generally regarded as a mutation rather than active quirk use. One might, for example, have a set of extra arms or extra hands that orbited your body and were impossible to actually dismiss. Even if the effect was materially identical to another individual using telekinesis to move objects by visualizing psychic grasping hands doing so...

Well.

They lived in an imperfect world, with imperfect laws.

The motivation of the government of Japan was to enforce a social order that pushed people to be as close to a baseline quirkless human as possible or, if they were unable to do so, then to at least attempt to act the part as much as possible. Deploying telekinetic power was, in almost all cases, active quirk use and therefore illegal under the law. Using natural appendages such as extra arms, tails, tentacles, etc... was not generally considered active quirk use. In fact, one could pursue civil legal action against an arrest or fine that infringed on the bodily autonomy of a heteromorphic body-type, though that was fairly rare in practice.

It was much the same with mental effects, and Fuyumi had two easy cases to compare and contrast at the forefront of her mind.

Shinso Niko's quirk presented a clear and present danger to public society in the way it was both uncontrollable and always active.

Shinso Hitoshi's quirk was frightening to many, but it was also controllable in its active applications. The fact that it apparently had a hidden dimension that wasn't controllable could seriously hinder his career if that secret were to get out.

“So how does it all fold together?” Fuyumi asked thoughtfully. “I was pretty sure there was a telepathic component given the interactive nature of the brainwashing aspect of his quirk, but this goes beyond that.”

“It does,” Tanzaki agreed with a nod. “The current majority opinion is that his quirk's actual function is something like 'Eidetic Mimicry.' It makes him able to project behaviors onto others, yes, but the more subtle and powerful manifestation is acting as something of a repository for knowledge, skills, and talents.”

“So it's a dual-type quirk?” Fuyumi asked, only half-surprised. Something hadn't added up with the boy and him having a rare kind of quirk answered most of those questions.

Two of her brothers had dual-type quirks, after all.

They were rare in comparison to the general population, of course, but her siblings were living proof that they weren't that rare.

Especially considering that Hitoshi had very obviously inherited his mother's quirk in its active application, which allowed him to brainwash people. It wasn't terribly surprising that he's gotten something from his father's side as well.

The mounting comparisons between her family and Hitoshi's were... unsettling.

Tanzaki hummed in agreement, drawing her out of her fugue. “That term's a little out of date. The scholarship is calling them two-phase quirks these days given the existence of higher-order multi-phase quirks. There was an article on a young girl who had a hydro/cryo/nepho-kinetic quirk that was put forth as the archetypal example of a tri-phasic quirk.”

“Ah... I haven't had time to keep up on the latest articles,” Fuyumi apologized with a dip of her head. “Active Emitter and Sub-type Mutant, then?”

“That seems to be the prevailing theory at the moment,” Tanzaki stated, pulling a clipboard from the table in front of them and beginning to mark a few things down. “Thankfully, it seems that the mutant-subtype includes the kind of processing power his mind needs to handle all of the additional information he's computing, even if it only manifests by instinct.”

“Oh?” Fuyumi frowned. “Not that it isn't good news, but how were you able to determine that?”

“The linguistic-acquisition aspect of his quirk,” Tanzaki replied distractedly. “In conjunction with a general IQ test. As far as the former goes, the sensors registered a limited inflammation in neural tissue when we had his learn Thai and Nepali only a few hours apart, along with a nosebleed. That isn't conclusive, mind you, but it suggests a soft ceiling for his processing capabilities well above the normal application of his quirk in everyday life.”

Fuyumi grimaced, but nodded. She wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea of inflicting tests on children that could injure them, no matter how mild. It was one of the reasons she hadn't gone any further with that side of her education and a larger part of why she'd ultimately chosen a hero career over an education one. “What about his IQ? Just from interacting with him, I can guess it's high.”

“Oh, he completely broke the scale,” Tanzaki waved her off, clearly occupied with watching Hitoshi move on to the next test. “The boy's easily at the point where assigning numbers to his mental acuity is essentially meaningless. At a guess, I'd put him somewhere in the top one thousand smartest people in the country at least, though it doesn't really matter when you're that smart beyond how you use it.”

Fuyumi swallowed, nodding at the implicit warning she'd need to pass on.

Being 'that smart' wasn't something a lot of people talked about, but it meant you went on a list. Thankfully, it wasn't necessarily a bad kind of list, but it did mean that you'd be considered a national resource for the rest of your life and have any significant movements monitored. Particularly if you left the country, your travel options would be restricted to an approved list of nations Japan had good relations with.

People with valuable quirks that chose the wrong vacation spot tended to have 'accidents' after all.

Or simply disappeared altogether.

“What about his sleeping adaptation? Is that hurting him?” Fuyumi asked, shaking off the feeling of unease.

Tanzaki shook his head. “As near as we can tell, he's sleeping better than ninety percent of the population. But keep in mind, that's from a statistically-insignificant sample size. We don't actually know what kind of effect using his quirk on himself is having in this specific area... at least, not without a much more in-depth study. Which I would urge you to get his father to advocate for, if at all possible.”

Fuyumi sighed. “Shinso made it particularly clear to me that he disliked the entire concept of a sleep study. Given how little I see him actually put his foot down, I'm hesitant to push him on it. Or get his father to, for that matter.”

“Well, seeing as he's, frankly, in an astonishing state of physical and mental fitness-”

“Astonishing?” Fuyumi asked, puzzled. “I knew he was in good shape-” Unwillingly, the memory of cut muscles and impossible combat moves flickered through her mind. “-but astonishing, really?”

Dr. Tanzaki finally turned to regard her fully, the third eye on his forehead focusing directly on her. “Shinso Hitoshi is, quite literally, the most physically fit young man in his age group I've ever even heard of. All his muscle groups are balanced, his flexibility is extremely high without showing undue wear and tear on his joints or muscles, his balance is on par with professional gymnasts, and his bloodwork is definitionally perfect. Honestly, if his quirk wasn't so obviously limited and his training regime so obviously well-documented on his streaming channel, I'd still be looking for some type of physical component to his quirk.”

The spar she'd watched Hitoshi and Himiko go through flashed into her mind again, though with admittedly less focus on the younger boy's muscles.

“Are you sure he doesn't have one?” She asked, her tone carefully neutral.

“As sure as we can be, and there's no real cause to suspect him of it,” Tanzaki muttered, turning back to Hitoshi. “It's readily apparent that his quirk allows him to essentially overwrite his own skills and abilities with those that he's drawing from other people. His fitness is just a byproduct of being proactive with that understanding. It certainly helps that he's still within the upper bounds of human limits for his age... if only barely.”

Fuyumi huffed a laugh. “Well, I suppose that sums it up then. He has a dua-er, two-phase quirk that takes information out of peoples' minds subconsciously on one side and actively inputs information into their minds on the other. Effectively meaning that he's brainwashing himself and others using his power.”

“But in a way which doesn't present an immediate threat to the general public,” Tanzaki cautioned. “With a quirk as potentially potent and flexible as Hitoshi's, that's an important point to stress.”

“Anything we should watch out for? Either in the agency or as points of concern that I can relay to his father?” Fuyumi asked, reaching up to rub at her chin.

“Beyond the possibility of his sleep cycle being unhealthy or dangerous in the long-term?” Tanzaki asked just a bit cuttingly, before shrugging. “Mostly the same dangers you run into with children that have hyper-intelligence and hyper-competency issues. Socialization, emotional stability, obsessive personality disorders. Given how his personality test went, I think we can nominally rule out the classic signs of antisocial or narcissistic personality disorders.”

“Nominally?” Fuyumi asked, fixating on the qualifier.

Tanzaki hummed, an unhappy sound. “The problem with diagnosing people as intelligent as Hitoshi is that they know all the answers they should give and see the stigma of a diagnosis as socially-inhibiting rather than the first step towards meaningful treatment and a healthier life.”

“Do you think that's the case here?” Fuyumi asked, concerned as she watched Hitoshi work his way through a puzzle they'd just set in front of him.

“I can't rule it out,” Tanzaki hedged. “But for what it's worth, no. I don't think that's the case. My opinion is that the boy just hasn't had anyone he can really relate to until recently. His streaming hobby is actually a very good outlet for social interaction considering his quirk and his abilities. I wouldn't normally say that, but putting significant physical distance between himself and his social circle means he can't use his quirk to bypass normal social cues. Still, I'd have to talk to his real-life friend group or his girlfriend to be able to give a more firm analysis of the situation.”

Fuyumi huffed a laugh. “I actually wanted to talk to you about scheduling an appointment for his girlfriend.”

Tanzaki blinked owlishly, all three eyes as he looked to the pro-hero again. “Really? Both of them?”

“She also has a high-functioning mimicry quirk, if you can believe it,” Fuyumi muttered, sighing. “Vampirism-based shapeshifting with a... questionable home life.”

“That's...” Tanzaki frowned, then shook his head. “I'll need parental consent, Todoroki-san. Will that be a problem?”

“Her parents were willing to sign over limited medical power of attorney if their daughter required any kind of treatment while on the job.” Fuyumi replied, her tone purposefully bland. “Given that I'm fairly sure they intentionally misfiled her quirk registration paperwork, I'm making the call that a secondary assessment is absolutely necessary for her induction into the agency.”

“Hmm... I see, it's that kind of situation,” Tanzaki muttered. “Well, in that case, I'll want to handle Hitoshi's exit-interview personally. I can slip some questions about the girl into the conversation and do the same for her in relation to him. That might give me a bit more insight into both of them and their relationship.”

…

I heaved an enormous sigh as I leaned back on the Apartment's sofa.

“Never again.”

“What's that?” Himiko asked, tilting her head back from above me.

“Twelve hours worth of exhaustive quirk testing,” I replied, my voice as dead as I felt.

“Hmm... didn't they have you take a nap in the middle, though?” Himiko pressed, her tone more honestly-curious than the kind of subtly biting I'd heard from some people.

“Yeah, but they had me covered in these little glue-on sensors all over my body. I can put myself to sleep using my quirk like that, but it messes with me subconsciously and makes it a lot less restful than it should be. Like trying to sleep on an airplane, ugh,” I groaned, trying not to make it a whine and mostly failing.

“Then it's a good thing I made dinner!” Himiko called cheerfully. “Lots of red meat and cheese, just like you asked for!”

I sighed in relief. “Oh, thank the gods. I don't hate Japanese food or anything, but it doesn't block nearly enough of my arteries to be proper comfort food.”

The tone of Himiko's laughter told me she didn't really get the joke, but I wasn't up to explaining it at the moment so I let it go. Instead, I heaved myself off the couch with a groan, feeling closer to forty than fifteen, and headed up to the kitchen and dining area. Slotting myself into a seat at the table, I sighed and looked over the mess of cheese-coated pasta mashed together with chunks of ground beef. Topping it all off was a plate full of garlic bread and a bottle of cold soda.

“Thank you for the meal,” I stated, bringing my hands together once as Himiko mimicked me.

Then we ate.

I groaned softly, biting off a piece of garlic bread loaded with hamburger pasta as the taste hit my tongue, Himiko doing the same. I think that had more to do with the heavy drizzle of red liquid on hers though.

“This is really good!” My girlfriend enthused, her eyes sparkling as the shoveled more into her mouth. “I thought it'd be way too heavy like a lot of American food is, but... Mmm! It makes me feel all warm inside.”

“That's your arteries clogging,” I muttered crudely around a mouthful. “That's why they call it comfort food. It feels like a hug from inside your body.”

Gold eyes blinked owlishly before a look of realization struck her. “Oh! That makes so much sense!”

For a long moment, neither of us spoke, preoccupied with eating as we were.

“Ah, I forgot to ask!” Himiko spoke up suddenly, taking a long drink from her water to swallow the large bite she'd taken. “Should we have sex now?”

“Let’s… talk about it after dinner, okay Babe?”  I asked with a sigh.

~~~

And we're back!

Mostly a chapter from outside of Hitoshi's POV to properly communicate the quirk-assessment's findings. So you get a lot of Hot Ice/Fuyumi and the doctor talking.

Poor Hitoshi, that testing took a lot out of him.

But at least it's settled.

In other news, it looks like The Hand We're Dealt won the high-tier vote, so you'll see another chapter of that time month. Beyond that, I think I'll try to get a chapter of Industrious out this weekend. It's been a while and I should get back on that horse.