Mystery from Another World

Part 40: Offering a Deal

[OP: "Contract"--21 Pilots]

Wally wondered where Shine was going with this. Sure, she'd told him they should try to understand the villains better, but this was starting to sound like she was going to offer to help them.

They couldn't just help them defeat heroes--the villains were known for taking lives. They couldn't be on their side either.

Shine was pondering on how to proceed and praying silently.

Strangely, Shigaraki didn't seem in a hurry for her to start talking. He looked like he might be zoning out behind the weird disembodied hand.

"Ahem," Compress finally broke the silence. "Madame, did you have an offer?"

"I was a little surprised to get this far." Shine tugged her hair. "I have an idea, but I really don't know enough about you yet to know if it will work. My partner and I have a lot of training in taking down oppressors and control freaks, but, as I said, I'm not sure I like either side of this conflict. I'm open to hearing more about yours though. Every hero has warned us to avoid you."

"Not surprising," Spinner sniffed. "They all are closed minded. They don't care about anyone. They're at the top. Once a hero takes money for what they do, they aren't worthy of being a hero anymore."

This was his old Stain rhetoric.

"So none of you get money for this?" Shine looked around. "I can't help noticing how huge this hideout is. And the Paranormal Army, it can't really not be funded, can it?"

"That was a recent change," Spinner said, a little defensively.

"So it's okay for you to get funded to make a difference in society, but it's not for heroes to?" Shine said.

"There are a lot of other things wrong with heroes!" Spinner began to get angry. "You really think that they're not worse than us? At least we don't look down on people for having bad quirks."

"None of this has anything to do with if you two are useful," Shigaraki cut in. He didn't seem to care about anything that had been said. "So what is your offer?"

"It will be hard to know if we can help each other when we don't know each other's goals," Shine reasoned carefully. "Now, what I've heard from the heroes is that you all want to wipe them out. Bakugo also told me you told him you want to do as you please, and you offered to let him do so if he joined you. That's a very basic goal. But the Paranormal Liberation Army, before, it was about freeing people from any quirk control, right? I suppose those goals overlap. Then Stain, he wanted to purify heroes themselves. That's not an overlapping goal with the other two. Heroes can be regulated and still refined. So where is the connection?"

"I don't see why that matters." Shigaraki was many things as leader to the LOV, but he was not one who was good at making connections between opposing ideas.

In fact, the goal of the League was so poorly defined that Spinner had recently decided his work there was more about loyalty to them than his personal goals. [This was in the My Villain Academia arc in season 4.]

It fit with the meta-humans' goals though, so Shine's confusion didn't make any sense to them. Villains were not big on parcing their ideas into specific categories the way heroes did. They didn't need to distinguish themselves as unique among hundreds of competitors.

But Shigaraki didn't understand that that might be why Shine was confused.

"Doesn't it matter what you really want?" Wally said. "We heard you also kill anyone who gets in your way. Also, they said you took Overhaul's arms."