Keigo "Hawks" Takami | Pro-Hero AU | 172732014

I'm Glad You're Here : The "Escape" Room

You turned around to spot the digital clock on the wall continuing to count down the minutes left to escape the room. Granted it was the first warning siren, which meant you only had a good hour left to find some clues and solve some riddles.

Whose bright idea was it to have a three-hour session?

"I think I may have found our culprit," called a voice from the other side of the room. You turned to spot Keigo Takami, the Winged Hero Hawks, pulling out what looked like a dismembered arm from the back of a decrepit armchair, waving it in the air.

You couldn't help but deadpan at the sight.

"What? We needed a hand," he reiterated with a smile.

"I don't think that's the kind of hand the clue was saying," you corrected while you walked up to him with a slip of paper in your hand. "It said something about a face too."

"Hm... maybe we have to piece parts together." You were met by that grin again while he waved an obviously fake arm around. You sighed before you noticed his lips crease the scar across his face. There have been many close calls with the Paranormal Liberation Front while Hawks kept you under his wing, but with the most recent events in his investigations, he paid the price.

It had been a few years since that break-in back at your drab office job. And throughout that time of espionage and intrigue, almost out of a suspenseful spy movie, you had been kept hidden. Hawks had been open with you enough to know that your former colleagues believed you transferred from the job. The break-in? Mere coincidence and that was the last straw for your transfer. That one person in accounts? Outed as a mole. Everything strung together under your nose, almost to the point that you found that the former agency you worked for had the Meta Liberation Army as a shadow client.

All of this within a span of a year. It made you question your abilities as a Hero, even from a local level, to keep an eye and ear out on the smallest suspicions. This business about potentials was still an issue, but one that Hawks kept close to his chest. You were under the Public Hero Commission's Witness Program, as per requested by Hawks due to this messy situation, and as such, you stayed under his protection. For the past few years, you had been living at his apartment, helping him as best as you could while learning more about his own personal missions, although never to great detail.

Hawks, meanwhile, had been nothing but hospitable during this time. After all, he had been sleeping on the couch in his own apartment. However, it wasn't long until the War began. You had read up on the players thanks to Hawks' internal knowledge of the plan; the Heroes, the Villains, the former U.A. students that were involved. Even going so far to give information about the time and place that all of this was planned to go down. Every minute detail he could give, you began to calculate the statistics and the probabilities of the events that may come; anything you could do to help, despite his own personal investigations himself.

You had warned Hawks of his own plan during the raid, of what his actions were and his intentions. That the probability was very grim.

He didn't listen.

You grabbed the mannequin arm from Hawks and placed it back on the armchair, looking back up to his cheeky grin still pulling at the scar on his face.

"I'm thinking less... morbid, and more cryptic," you commented. "I mean, what else has hands and a face, but isn't a living thing. Or used to be living..."

Hawks' grin turned into an inquisitive and thoughtful pout while he scanned the room. Out of all the escape rooms to choose, he ended up picking the horror-themed basement, complete with dismembered body parts, a bloody workbench, a dirty-looking bed with chains; it was your typical murderer's den. He continued to look around until he spotted something on the workbench hidden in plain sight. A small pocket watch sat on its lonesome amongst some tools, its face shut away in its case.