SSD: Eri

3. Fix-It

For those reading chronologically with Controlee, this chapter comes after 83, before 84.

Silver Runt. Hero name: AG.

She had to avoid any specific discussions on what work she did as a hero because there would be no proof of any of it. She existed only in the minds of the few teachers at UA (who needed to believe she existed so that she could take Otsuka Emiko on as a work studies student) and a few of the heroes on the Eight Precepts raid (whose 'familiarity' with her was the only reason she'd be involved).

She needed to be unnoticeable. She needed to be a figure in the background nobody spared a second glance to. That carried consequences.

She had to pretend she had some sort of quirk. Quirklessness mixed with her skills would stand out too much, far too much.

She had to pretend she was older. Sixteen-year-olds didn't get to be fully-licensed pros with work studies students tagging along.

She couldn't bring up her past (a past which never existed here, because she'd never been born and her great-great-she-lost-count-of-how-many-greats-grandmother had married another man so her daughter had never built the organisation that raised Silver). She couldn't talk about her family. She couldn't say she was from an alternate dimension.

She couldn't save Eri early.

She'd argued against that little rule for a long while. It was futile. Silver wasn't in a position to argue. Nu had all of the power. Silver supposed being the child of some kind of god-like, immortal being sort of gave Nu the power in all things. Suffice it to say, there were no fights Silver would win against Nu.

While Silver was stuck in this dimension, she had a to-do list of three jobs.

The most important: save Eri. Nu hadn't been specific about it, but this world's timeline hadn't gone as it should... whatever that meant. Silver had decided, for the sake of her sanity, she wouldn't think too hard or ask questions about, she didn't need the existential crises that came with the concept of fate. The key bit was that Eri's raid was going to go wrong because the timeline hadn't been properly 'maintained and protected'. That wrongness was where Silver stepped in, with Otsuka's help too.

Job two: keep Mirio from getting shot with a quirk-erasing bullet. Silver wasn't massively up on the details of how the Eight Precepts raid had gone, but she knew Mirio and Midoriya had been the ones to rescue Eri. In her dimension, Mirio had lost his quirk to that bullet, and was currently hoping Eri would someday be able to use her quirk to reverse the effects. It was difficult though, getting Eri to trust in her quirk and her ability to control it when she'd been raised to believe it was a curse was a work in progress— especially as that 'curse' had taken a birth family she barely remembered from her. 

In this world, Mirio wasn't meant to get shot at all. How exactly Silver was meant to stay close enough to him to keep him from getting shot when the boy could walk through walls, Silver wasn't sure. Nu had yet to give her any suggestions beyond a cryptic version of 'don't worry about it yet'.

And finally: find whichever victim of Exile had ended up in this dimension. This victim was most likely the reason why the timeline was so off the rails. Silver needed to find them and remove them from the timeline to prevent further damage. Then Nu would be able to take them home, along with Silver.

It all sounded so simple laid out like that. But this was Silver's life. It was never going to be simple.

"And I'm faking being a hero and taking on a work studies student for what reason exactly?"

"She'll be helpful," Nu said, which really gave Silver so much useful information. "Trust me."

Silver took a deep breath. "Right."