Chapter Text
Flame Princess Knight Akari Hashimoto's plot breaks down into
The call to heroism/ Her wake up call to try to stop being an "extra" and put her all into heroics moved by either the A or B track in which she personally witnesses Bakugou and Midoriya's class conflict and then personally witnesses the events of the Slime/Goo Villain OR she witnesses it live on TV too far away to do anything.
I'm considering both valid story choices, but I've grown attached to the way the latter narrative builds in her the need to seek speed and provides her with a form of helplessness....
So I want the plot to go:
She witnesses the argument in her Aldera classroom and is rocked by the notion of her own extraneousness and lack of determination and gumption. She thinks maybe I *AM* an extra if I give up so easily. I can aim higher, do better.
She sees the news, freaks as written, (starts running to get there?)
Bakugo is saved as in canon.
Akari begins training becomes better at a bunch of hero stuff, learns a lot about fighting, rescue, her quirk, agility. Studies for the exam with the aid of a tutor. Does a lot of practice tests. Sees a quirk counselor and a nutritionist and a physical trainer??? idk.
Practices knife fights maybe. practices dodging and "rainy day protocol"?????? probably not shown will come up in flashback. jogging on rainy days thinking about stuff...
Give her weapons and tools because I want to.... Ropes... staffs...charcoal fuel.... but that kind of flexibility is not consistent with her knight in shining armor character drawing..... altho she can smoothly enter and exit her costume as she'd like.... like a bit of misdirection..... maybe I should not give her all this and give this to a different character.... I have my other OC and my general quirkless girl oc to think of too...
The day of UA testing comes around (maybe I write this sooner and the rest can be flashbacks so it feels less cumbersome getting to it)
She completes her academic testing and qualifies to partake in the physical exam (people who don't meet standards are not allowed to compete in the physical exam because they will not be accepted and reducing the physical competitors reduces strain on resources and UA liability for health and safety of competitors)
She lines up for the exam.
Her focus on agility serves her well. She's quick and decisive at the start line. She runs to create distance between herself and her peers and becomes semi-airborne quickly using blasts to launch herself above the building line surveying the streets as quickly as possible. She's encumbered by the practicality of not burning through her own clothes and also the practicality of not turning her entire body into fire lest someone make the mistake of putting her out, but the robots are no challenge for her. They're easy to find--easy to dodge (it's not hard to sidestep a laser blast with slow load time and it's even less hard when she can be flexible about which portions of her body are transformed), and easy to take down (melting the circuitry or the wires or the mechanical joints is not hard but it does take energy and it wears at her stamina. She tries to be efficient about it, aiming for the circuitry when she learns where to find it frying with the least energy, and trying to take back what she gave out to the universe (entropy is a bitch, and reclaiming her energy is a bitch, but flash fried flash frozen circuits are circuits that don't work)
It's easiest in the open just her and the robots but space is limited and she finds the next cluster of robot targets amid general chaos. She does not dare transform her torso or her head in a crowd like this where a nearby unknown quirk could go wild and kill her. A frog girl is using her terrifying powerful tongue to rapidly leap about and to smash robots. She notes her as a potential threat to her life but unlikely. Her quirk appears physical and suited to the aquatic but not generating torrential waters herself like some kind of Squirtle. She's wary of water quirks and wind quirks--anything really really well suited to putting out fires. She categorizes most of the 8 students in the vicinity quickly (roughly a fifth of the competitors in this arena), but she eyes the girl whose quirk she can't immediately place, before dismissing her as a concern. The girl is fighting with a weapon and agility, using a 15 foot long pole and two smaller batons (excuse my imperial metrics I don't know the metric equivalence without doing conversion). She sees the girl vault up, swing around, seat herself behind the robot's head, and go to town with a hammer and tools. She turns away quickly.
There's no time to spectate in heroics.
She jumps to action, smoothly punching through the face of a robot charging a laser beam attack headed for a tripped competitor grabbing hold of the kinetic energy with her own and redirecting it with her momentum back into the robots brain, circuits, melting it and not even losing energy on it. It was easy, not least because the energy beam was not even that impressive. She did not have the exact numbers for the joules and the radiative losses but it did not feel lethal even for those who were not in some way resistant or immune to burns.
The competitor glowered at her. "I had that!" he glared, waving his projectile external finger bones. She shrugged. "Okay" she said, turning away because it was not her business to worry about that.
She saw him fire several off into another robot from her peripheral as she took another down, but the robot did not take significant damage beyond some cracked glass. The frog girl took another robot down before she could get to it, the joints on these things apparently quite weak and frog girl may have found some kind of off switch.
The girl with the tools took down a significant number as well, quickly switching between sliding and vaulting with her staff to demolishing with a hammer largely abandoning the batons to her utility belt.
As the last one goes down, Akari clears space and ascends once again to find another cluster of robots. The girl-with-the-pole's eyes dart quickly, calculating and she's ascending too, pole vaulting up and ascending a fire escape. It'll take her much longer to reach the top Akari thinks, but frog girl jumps up even faster than Akari rockets. She has an intrusive thought about frog hunting behavior and projectile tongues and an unnecessary portion of her exterior flares defensively for a second, but frog girl does not notice. She's already hopping from the rooftop and beyond seeking targets with agility.
Akari decides to go looking in a different different direction. She glances behind her as the pole vaulter ascends to the top, and charges off the edge of the building springing up into the air and launching herself from building to building. Girl has stamina, she'll give her that. She loses track of her for a while as their surveying takes them in different directions (no reason to compete for the same points on purpose), before the girl shows up again just when she's found a slew of robots and few competitors, dropping down from above directly onto a robot.
A move I want int the story specifically because of the way that I saw a video showing real life people descend great drops by sliding down along poles that they held in hand---clearly using the extended moment of impact to reduce forces on the body. The girl, then rips into the robot with some tool, the hammer again or shears...
At which point I've shown Akari rescuing someone and acquiring villain points and so whether or not there's more fighting is probably not important and so the scene can be wrapped up with the arrival of the giant 0 pointer robot---unless I want to like build themes or foils or start to tease the backstory of my mysterious quirkless girl.
Writing quirkless girl I had the intention that she was actually a quirkless girl BUT ALSO, she is host to a third character who I have not mentioned here because I was keeping her secret / considering writing her own story for her.
This third character is a sentient quirk, whose ability is transfer, reconnaissance and possession (intended to compare and contrast with both Tokoyami and Hitoshi)--that is she can transfer out of her given host body into another host body and sort of just hang out in the background spying for extended periods of time, but for limited lengths of time she can take over the host and control them. She's gone through a lot of different mental versions and origin stories though the latest is also the least original. She originally was meant to have just been a sort of random eventuality in quirks originating from a combination of quirks that I have written down somewhere in my notes and who recently lost her origin-host due to All For One, and thus is involved in a vigilante quest. I suppose there was also the version where she never lost her origin-host at all. But eventually it occurred to me that she's basically just a transfer quirk variation as in the same Shigaraki All For One Family of quirks and so it would make just as much or more sense to have her related to that family --ie. she is still on a mission to find her origin-host but her origin-host was All For One's estranged/long lost Sister and is dead unlike her who is conditionally immortal and struggles with limited memory and thus identity issues (she can transfer memories to her hosts but she can't retain more than 3 weeks worth).
Alternatively is, do I write in another character to be this woman's host instead of my quirkless girl so she can be quirkless girl proper and compare and contrast with Izuku Midoriya.
Then there's fourth girl which I did not think fit in this fic but I recently read someone else's fic and yearned to include their character in this story to interact with Akari and i can't do that (at least not without negotiation and consent) BUT I was thinking "damn if I can imagine fanfic crossovers then why can't I include my oc from another fic" i.e. I have a character named Hitomi who is a BNHA Naruto crossover character in the literal sense of she is going through life experiencing both the Naruto universe and the BNHA universe switching between them day by day--so she's a child in both worlds trying to make sense of the disparities and conflicts of these two disparate conflicting systems rather than say a reincarnation character who has a whole lifetime of experience with which to approach childhood and new circumstances.
But her, I want her to have limited usage of chakra because her main quirk is just switching between universes nightly and the chakra she uses up in BNHA is exhaustion/used up for when she might need it in Naruto so best to be preserved for the more dangerous world, so I was thinking that the only manifestation she'd use in BNHA is the ability to stick to walls and surfaces. Also, everything she *learns*. I'm actually really excited about her but i don't know if she fits in Akari's story. (there really seems to be a trade off where I can only be excited about one fic at a time and then I lose interest in the previous thing and so maybe putting them together would actually help me balance them but Hitomi's story deserves to be separate---like there can be crossovers but I don't want to try to shoehorn her story inside this story. Like I'm already doing that with Sentient Quirk lady.
I may just attempt to write scenes that I'd be interested in having play out...
Tho I think that Hitomi and quirk lady have themes and conflicts in a way that Akari does not, technically Akari does too.
Akari is meant to be a story about choosing to leave a self defeating attitude and to take inspiration from others to be your best self while also having cool fire powers and struggling with the inherent weakness and strengths that implies, and being a masculine girl that's also a feminine girl who likes boy things and competing with boys, and learning to also aim to be the best???? While also being a great firefighter and throwing a wrench into the plot... Also dealing with having formerly been bystander to bullying/ passive participant in bullying. Also just throwing a wrench into the plot.
She can turn into fire so how does she deal with explosions?
She can turn into fire so is she afraid of losing limbs?
She can turn into fire so could she have saved Bakugo?
She has ice and fire abilities in some sense so whose special now Shoto Todoroki?
She also went to Aldera so her acceptance into UA makes Bakugo and Midoriya even less special according to the logic of Bakugou's pre-slime villain attack self. (I tbh think that Bakugou would have realized that his origin story could no longer focus on his unique background from Aldera because his media narrative would always be about the slime villain attack---tho, that credits an awareness that he perhaps lacked--plus taking that further it might follow that his origin would always be tied up with Midoriya---at which point you'd think that Midoriya going on to be a hero would be a good pr choice for him because it's one thing to be rescued by a hero it's another to be rescued by a quirkless civilian child, which does not appear to factor into his thoughts at all...
So yeah. As far as I can remember it the Akari stuff is really just shallow and self indulgent, whereas Hitomi and the sentient quirk woman have actual stakes and conflict. No wonder they're more exciting...
-----
pre-edit:
The latter is what I wrote and felt confident with in part I think because I did not have to decide how she would act in person where there was an option for her to attempt to interfere herself even though it's technically illegal. I think that I'd want to make her try at the very least because I want to give her the heart of a hero and not the heart of a bystander or person who would make excuses. It could also be a fun opportunity to have her be frustrated with the poor collaboration or creativity of the on-site heroes to try to rescue Bakugou and take down the Villain. It's very action plot oriented. I think I want to explore both possibly.
Then is the process of the training montage which changes based on what she values and thinks is important which is informed by the previous events in the call to heroism and inspiration. And further changes how she acts when tested.
But I want to get to it in terms of how she manages those challenges and how she in turn challenges the other characters around her...