The orphanage got quiet in pockets, never all at once. Evenings, the television mumbled through the wall, the washing machine thudded like a sleepy heartbeat, and somewhere on the second floor a toddler laughed right before dissolving into tears. The study room was a narrow rectangle, its table scarred by pencil dents and compass stabs, the green desk lamp patched with clear tape. That was enough.
I laid out my things the way I wished my life would lay itself out: parchment sheets weighted flat with a chipped stapler, the leather folio I'd stitched last year from a thrift-store jacket, my Tome open to a blank page. My robe hung on the chairback like an obedient shadow. The satchel sat within reach out of habit.
The idea had been nagging me since the battle trial: when I pushed air with Gale in tiny, disciplined taps, I could feel how the space pushed back. If a shove could be this small and regular, I didn't have to guess at rooms anymore. I could ask them to answer, and then write down what they said.
Not just a trick, then. Models. One to make the taps. One to hear what came home. One to turn answers into lines.
I wrote three headings in the Tome, clean and plain:
EMITTER — Air PulseCAPTURE — Return FilterTRANSLATE — Ink Rules
The page looked like something a person could build.
EMITTER
The model for Gale had started life as a shove. This needed to become a fingertip. I limited the footprint and shortened the duration until the sensation in my palm felt more like an impatient tap than a push: half-strength, one-tenth the time, a pause between pips so echoes wouldn't pile on one another and lie. I imagined a lighthouse beam, not the sun: slow sweep left to right at a fixed height, then a gentle tilt up and down. Floors would lie to me if I didn't separate them.
I took the idea to school the next afternoon and waited until the last bell emptied the second-floor hallway. It was clean and long, the kind of corridor that thinks highly of itself. I stood by the trophy case and set the sweep.
Tap… tap… tap…
The dust at the far end of the hallway moved. It wasn't dramatic; it wasn't supposed to be. The air affirmed. When I pushed the cadence too fast, I got a burst of nothing useful—soft reflections smearing into one another. When I slowed, the feedback resolved into something like a heartbeat I could follow. A dangling poster three doors down shivered in sync. That poster was doing me a favor. I dialed the strength down a fraction more until it swayed without creasing.
EMITTER v0.7 went in the margin of the Tome with a note: Quiet. Repeatable. No gusts.
CAPTURE
Hearing chaos isn't the same as knowing a shape. I needed returns without the rest of the building's gossip. The cuff of my robe had a seam thick enough to hide what I wanted: a hair-fine mesh, something like a woven microphone but simpler and less proud. I stitched it into the inside of the sleeve in a spiral, a place for the air to whisper against that my body liked to translate. The sensation when it worked right wasn't sound and wasn't touch; it was pressure making a small decision against my skin.
Rules mattered or everything became noise. I defined a window a fraction after each tap: only accept what comes back here, not a breath later. The margin of error on the window was smaller than an eye blink; I wrote down that I was allowed to widen it in wind. I added two masks:
Vent/Buzz Mask: rhythmic, repetitive sensors (fans, vending machines, the washer at home) are liars. Discard repeats.
Motion Mask: echoes that move over consecutive taps are not walls. Mark them as dotted, not solid.
I trialed it in the orphanage corridor by the laundry closet because if I could make it work there it might work anywhere. The machine churned; the whole hallway thrummed. On my first attempt, the cuff sang to me about a wall where there was only a spin cycle. I tightened the vent mask—if a return Synced with a regular beat, it got thrown out.
The next attempt was better. A neighbor walked past and I felt the return slide along the cuff like a thought changing its mind: moving, so dotted. The door frame across from me answered firmly and stayed where it belonged: solid.
CAPTURE v0.5. I underlined the five like I meant it.
TRANSLATE
I could feel lines; I wanted to see them. The folio would be the mouthpiece—parchment taught to darken where the air refused me. I pressed the leather flat and cut a thin channel around the inner border for inscription—a ring keyed to my signature so no one else's messy mind could overprint the world for me. The parchment got a light wash of sizing to accept living ink.
Inside the TRANSLATE rules, I wrote the map's grammar the way I'd write human instructions:
Solid line = static obstacle (wall, pillar).
Dotted line = moving body (classmate, crowd).
Arrow chevrons at stair edges.
Refresh near me every three to five seconds; at the outer ring in ten to twelve.
Radius capped at one kilometer.
Privacy zones never render.
Local only. No broadcasts. This is a tool you look at with your hands.
The "privacy zones" line sat underlined without flourish. The map would never draw bedrooms, bathrooms, staff offices. I said it out loud even though no one was in the room. Boundaries matter, and they mattered more if I kept saying they mattered.
The first trial was an empty classroom, morning light touching the boards like it liked them. I set EMITTER to sweep an arc and let CAPTURE gather the windowed returns. TRANSLATE hesitated at the corners, leaving little arcs where I'd wanted crisp right angles. Corners are the kind of thing truth gets wrong if you let it. I adjusted TRANSLATE to require two consistent returns before it inked a sharp bend, a tiny bit of humility that turned jag into join.
Lines drew. The curtain rod over the blackboard registered as a shallow protrusion, the bookshelf as a neat rectangle, the door as an absence with rules. The folio wasn't proud; it just worked.
I wrote TRANSLATE v1.0 in as neat a hand as I could manage with my heart doing laps.
School was the backdrop, not a distraction. In homeroom, Aizawa's version of a pep talk fit in a thimble: "Fewer steps. Faster decisions. File your testing. Don't blow up the corridors." It could have been exasperation; it sounded like faith.
Class held an election like someone had announced a pop quiz on leadership. Midoriya looked like a man surprised by his own hand going up. Enough classmates pointed at him that he would have been elected even if the ballots had been silent. He went pale, and then calmer after a walk and a conversation that didn't need me in it. He demurred, Henry V to his own crown, and Iida took the role with a real piece of posture. Momo became vice almost by gravity. Systems had found the people who liked them.
Between lectures, I pared my chains the way Aizawa asked. Aegis for sixty seconds while Shoji lobbed soft foam balls at it in grim good humor. A two-second Bind window on a moving dummy, the exact amount of time it took me to make a decision without inventing one. Curtain callouts so I didn't blind friends again. Training wasn't an essay; it was a list of verbs.
At lunch, Midoriya found me under a window and watched the folio draw the hallway we were sitting in.
"It—draws stairs?" he asked, eyebrows climbing.
"If I tell it to," I said, and added small chevrons where the stairwell gaped at the end of the hall. The marks appeared with less fuss than I deserved.
"You could use different arrowheads for up and down," he blurted, then flushed. "Sorry. That's—obvious."
"It isn't," I said. "Let's do it."
We assigned a tail to "up" and left "down" clean. Information is kindness when you do it right.
Support gave me the room and a checklist. In Power Loader's bay, I unspooled the satchel's node matrix across the bench like a net and added five micro-sleeves, offset so they wouldn't hum into one another. It wasn't a question of making room; it was spacing. A voice retrieval tree got pruned and shaped. "Aegis, front" now skipped the polite hesitation and landed in my hand like a dog that finally understood which human it belonged to.
"Twenty-five," Power Loader said, looking at the numbers on the thermal scan. He had the look of a person who liked good work and suspected more good work could be done. "Within tolerances."
Hatsume hovered and didn't touch anything like she'd been promised cookies for good behavior. "You really are a unique-maker," she murmured, almost to herself. She meant it the way artists mean "you draw different." I had the odd impulse to make tea.
At home, the robe enchant took a half-hour of circling lines along the hem and collar, a trickle-source bound to the place under my sternum where magic sat when I didn't ask it to do anything. The first time I let it run, the robe floated at the shoulders like it had aspirations of becoming a kite. I dialed it down until the Feather felt less like a suggestion and more like the steadiness of remembering where your feet are. It settled into a background hum I could barely feel, the drain like holding a thought and not quite losing it. I nodded off over the folio an hour later; the robe went slack. Good. Auto-idle worked.
Healing had been a blunt instrument I used like a scalpel. It felt wrong in my hands. Splitting it into three models made it honest.
Mend-S—small—was sting-stop and surface knit, the thing for paper cuts and shallow scrapes, the kind of hurt that mostly needed attention. It cost almost nothing; a scroll took me ten minutes to craft if I wasn't performing.Mend-M—medium—closed deeper tissue and talked swelling into behaving. It asked for focus and paid it back. A scroll took half an hour to forty minutes depending on how polite the ink decided to be.Mend-H—high—went far and then further, laying down a deep knit with a pain gate to keep a body from roaring while it mended. It was costly. A scroll demanded hours and payment now rather than later. I wouldn't carry more than one of those at a time. I wrote for emergencies only next to it in a hand that would not tolerate being smudged.
Recovery Girl's earlier warning sat at the top of the page: Stabilize, then hand off. I'd copied the sentence so I could carry it when my judgment went looking for shortcuts. I did not, would not try to be better than a doctor; I would try to make her life easier.
The next day at school, the hallway taught a different lesson. The alarm sounded wrong. It wasn't the howl that meant fire; it was the one that meant people had come where they were not supposed to go. The rumor landed before the facts: the press, the gate, the cameras like eyes that believed they were mouths.
The corridor tightened, students bunched without quite deciding to; shoulders knocked, a backpack strap caught, someone yelped, another laughed in the brittle way people laugh when they don't like the joke. The air got animal. I moved to the side and stood on the bench where kids tied shoes on field day. From there, I could see the wave forming, the pinch point at the stairwell where bodies would try to become one body and fail.
I rested a hand on the folio, not to show it but to keep myself from showing it. This wasn't my moment. In emergencies, the difference between helping and adding another voice to the noise is not academic.
A flash of blue engines. Iida vaulted the railing like he'd been born on one, landed near the broadcast point, and—once he had the microphone—spoke with a clarity that pared fear from motion. "Everyone remain calm! Please proceed to the exits in an orderly fashion. Move away from the windows. Row leaders, take your lines!" It wasn't poetry. It was logistics, the relief of someone telling you which way was out.
The first row turned. The second saw them and remembered they had bodies they could move too. The knot loosened. People breathe when they're told it is fine to breathe. The alarm became a fact rather than a feeling. I let my hand fall from the folio and counted the beats until the hallway was just a hallway again. When I looked up, Aizawa was at the end of the corridor, face like a closed door. He said, "Don't panic next time." It sounded like he'd been satisfied with the practice run.
After classes ended, I walked the outer paths of campus with the folio open and put everything together. EMITTER tapped in time with my breath; CAPTURE filtered and hummed up my sleeve. TRANSLATE drew fences as lines that leaned slightly where ivy pulled, lampposts as dots with halos. Moving bodies—students, a security guard, a bike that refused to be quiet—became dotted lanes, the book deciding not to turn people into structures. The folio's radius plateaued at a kilometer; the edge got its refresh when it could, the center earned it faster. That felt fair.
On the walk back to the orphanage, I tested the arrow chevrons on the public stairs near the bus stop. They rendered up and down without fuss. A stroller clinked past and the map decided politely to ignore it as an obstacle. The pressure-mesh in my sleeve turned the night air's cool into a muted chord where glass interrupted; I learned that glass lies if you let it. I added a note to the TRANSLATE rules: require a second, secondary tap at oblique angle before trusting a clear panel as a wall. The door to the corner shop tried to trick me. It failed.
I could feel the point where the models weren't ideas anymore. They had lived in my head long enough to have opinions. I looked down at the folio and saw the orphanage stoop appear as a line where wet leaves clung, the fence as a simple bar drawn with the friendliness of a teacher's underline. It was enough.
The upgrades around the work settled like furniture. I retested the satchel's capacity—twenty-five scrolls riding quiet, retrieval calls shorter and surer. The robe's Feather-Lite hum proved its manners on stairs that creaked if you disrespected them; it didn't make me float, it merely reminded me how to be light. In the satchel, the healing ladder slotted with bright labels: S, M, H. I touched the H scroll with a finger and told it we would probably not meet for a while.
The day before the note about USJ showed up, I sat with the Tome and went over each model until the verbs were the only parts left. EMITTER: tap, sweep, pause. CAPTURE: listen, window, discard. TRANSLATE: draw, smooth, mark. I packed the folio, zipped the satchel, rolled the robe and let it settle around my shoulders the way a thought settles when you finally say it out loud and it doesn't sound foolish.
Morning, homeroom. Aizawa stood at the front like a person trying not to be late to his own indifference. "Rescue training," he said. "Off-campus. USJ. Suits on. Bus in five. Don't embarrass me."
The room thrummed in half a dozen keys. Ochako stumbled into my path on the way to the lockers. "Is that the map?" she asked, eyes too honest to be dangerous.
"It listens to the building and draws the parts that don't move," I said. Simple. True.
"Cool," she said, instantly, and sprinted to find her boots.
Bakugo snorted when he saw the folio. "Cheat paper," he said, as if paper cared.
"It cheats for everyone," I said, and didn't give him more time.
In the locker row, the satchel landed at my hip with the right amount of weight. Aegis counted six. Curtain counted seven. Mend-S twice, Mend-M once, Mend-H once. Bind three, Gale three. A single Burst for people who needed discouraging. Ignite because sometimes life needed a match.
I glanced once at Midoriya as he pulled his gloves tight. He nodded without a speech, both of us choosing to call this what it was: the day we learned something at a place built to make people better at it.
At the bus steps, the door hissed open with the kind of sound that pretends it is not dramatic but is. I put a foot on the first step. The folio lay under my hand without weight, a page ready to draw the shape of whatever we were about to be asked to do. I did not think anything grand. I checked the counting in my head one last time and climbed aboard.