Inko did the food, pretending everything was fine. The fish was well prepared and salted, the way she had done it a thousand times before. Nothing out of the ordinary, exactly the way she had always done it.
They sat down to eat as they had always done. She and Izuku.
In the background, the TV was on, as the Alien was watching an old movie from the MCU from the days before all of the universe's characters went into the public domain.
She tried mightily hard to pretend he wasn't there, and it was just her and her baby in the room.
That was hard to do when Izuku wouldn't stop talking about him.
"So, unlike actual quirks, my powers aren't going to grow stronger over time the more I use them. They're set at the level I'm currently at."
"So… you can't grow stronger?"
"Well… Not in strength no. I'll… I'll have to grow stronger through mastery of what I have. I Mean… I'm. So strong I don't actually Need more power."
She just nodded her head as he described how strong he was now, what he had done during the exam.
Izuku had accepted the idea of having bonded to the alien… Frighteningly fast. Almost unnaturally so.
She desperately wanted a third opinion on this. To gauge whether she was crazy being so worried about it.
That wasn't gonna happen though. The only person in her life she would ever trust with this kind of information was across the seas, and it would be a while yet before she got to see him again.
The Alien was right about that utterly and completely. She would NEVER tell other people about it. The risks to her son dwarfed anything else on the topic. The problem then, was that she wasn't sure this other road wasn't just as risky.
The Alien had been very candid and seemingly honest about what it was, where it came from, and the good and bad aspects of the bond it had with Izuku.
There was the power of course. Great power, even by the world of quirks. Even if Izuku hadn't been quirkless, the increase in strength was flat out monstrous.
On the other hand, there was the bad stuff. Oh, the bad stuff.
The Alien had made the claim that Izuku would live a long and very healthy life, probably up to late 80's early nineties. He would be in top condition for the rest of his days, free of disease, capable of healing from almost any injury if given enough time to recover.
However, there was a price. As Izuku reached his final year, he would face a massive and rapid decline as all the years of his life would all catch up to him at once.
It wasn't the worst deal in the world, but It had terrified Inko to even consider it, and it had terrified her even more that Izuku had been so accepting of it. He had accepted it as a reasonable price for the power.
It had made Inko wonder if she just wasn't capable of understanding her son's viewpoint, or worse, the Alien was affecting him mentally.
The worst part about that was that if it did, she had absolutely no way of knowing. At all. There was simply no way she could find out.
The thing though, that had absolutely clenched it for her that she could not trust this being, had been when she asked it if it cared about becoming a hero like Izuku did.
It's response had been honest.
"WE don't care if he wants to be a Hero or Villain, king or soldier, conqueror or upholder of the status quo. So long as he isn't planning on living a boring ass life, we will stand by him to the end.
There was a threat there. "So long as he isn't planning on living a boring ass life". What it meant, was that the support it offered would not be there if Izuku ever decided to retire.
It was unreasonable to ask a 15-year-old to think about his retirement, especially when the hero business was infamous for it's participants staying in work for their entire life(one way or another.) but it still scared her that her baby would probably never get to retire, even if he wanted to.
She understood what the Alien was doing of course. She knew humans far too well not to recognize the strategy. Venom was employing a "Warts and All" tactic, to seem more trustworthy than it was.
Whether or not it was honest didn't really matter for this tactic. The point was that it was impossible to present oneself as completely clean, so one brought out bad facts willingly and unprompted to make oneself seem, if not good, at least honest, and thus someone you could trust.
Which made it hard to try and figure out what was the truth, and what wasn't.
Maybe Venomwas telling the truth all the way, maybe he was mostly lying, or just lying about one single detail. For example, what if he was flat out lying about the bond being permanent? Without knowing for certain one way or another, it was something Inko could never act upon.
Then there were all the mental images he had shown her. Was any of it real?
The fact was she didn't know, and she didn't trust Venom as an unbiased source.
And the most galling thing of all was that she couldn't do anything either way. She couldn't break the bond, she couldn't seek help from the outside, she couldn't deny Izuku becoming a hero(Which she would never have done anyway).
She was, in every way, in a no-win scenario.
...
The admiration their host had for the warrior called All Might was something that bordered on religious devotion. In the early days, Venom had assumed that the enormous blonde man with the ridiculous upwards hair, was actually the God-king of this society.
Why not? Their host had a private room that was in many ways a mixture between a sleeping quarter and what for all intents and purposes was a shrine dedicated to this man.
Paper tapestries on the wall, small figurines that showcased the man in his more Iconic poses, even things such as the clock on the wall was themed after him.
So was on a lot of Izuku's clothing as well, and his bedsheets.
Other than the contraption of vehicle tires in one corner of the room, it all seemed like the standard, regular worship of a powered individual they had seen countless times before.
And the society was no different, selling charms, tapestries, and clothing based on the man.
Of course, Venom hadn't understood at first. That this society was actually so full of super-powered individuals that not having any was actually rare, regarded as a throwback to an earlier stage of evolution.
Once they had realized that, everything fell into place. The man called All Might was simply the highest-ranking member of the warrior caste of this planet, simply called Hero.
One day, he would die, and he would be replaced by someone else, who would become the next number one Hero.
Adoration of the strong was simply the natural way of things for this society, and All Might was STRONG even by the measure of all the many super-powered individual's Venom had seen across space.
Still, even with that context in mind, his host's adoration was a bit insane.
"If this is how you react to a message from him personally, we don't wish to see your reaction to him in the flesh."
"I will cherish this recording until I die…!" Fuck, Izuku had actual tears of joy in his eyes.
"...Right… Not creepy at all."
They had gotten a late-night delivery, with a small holographic device that had a recording of All Might pop up, and inform them that yes, they did indeed make it into. Yuei.
Hah, as if that were in any doubt! Other than the girl with the powers of gravity and lightning, none there had compared to their might and power.
"Anyway, you wanted to continue documenting our powers right?"
Izuku clutched the device to his chest as if it was made of pure gold, but he did answer.
"Yesss…" He sounded like he had just gotten a present from above, not a small recording device informing him he made it into school.
As if him fawning over that sadist Present Mic. wasn't bad enough.
"Are you seriously going to react like this every time we meet a pro Hero?"
...
AN :
I usually don't spoil anything for you guys from the get-go, but I feel a lot of readers will be pissed reading this chapter if I don't explain it.
Anyhow, the reason why Uraraka is so damned much stronger than canon Izuku was at this point in time, has the simple and mundane explanation that she started training at a much earlier point than Izuku did, and as such inherited one for all much earlier and has grown relatively acclimated to it.
...
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