The Emperor's Dragon II

Long Suffering Civilians

Karou Andaru still wasn't sure if he liked his job. It was monotonous, repetitive and pretty much the same every day. He sat and took reports from underground heroes, verifying their missions and noting down any intel they had before passing it up the line.

A few years ago though, someone had twigged that he heard a lot of classified information. Sure, most underground heroes stopped muggings and other low-level crime, but there were those who went after the truly dangerous villains as well, and Karou took their reports too. And despite the fact that most underground heroes went after low level crime, they heard a lot, so Karou heard a lot about what was going on in the underworld.

The result of that someone twigging was that Karou had been moved to another role for a month or two, before he was shuffled back to his regular gig.

With a pay rise.

And an increase in his security clearance.

It had been enough to keep him here, even though dealing with the idiosyncrasies of the underground heroes was... ugh... just ugh... At least the Trinities had retired. Trinity Yellow got pregnant or something and the others decided to take up a new vocation. But the heroes who replaced them...

Karou sighed. He swore they were getting worse! One day he'd find out that there was a little competition to see which of the underground heroes could get him to write the most of their reports. It sounded like something they'd do.

And then there were the annoyances such as the one that had just barged in now. He couldn't see her. No one could but he could see enough clothes moving towards him. Karou raised one finger to pause Waterwave's report. The underground hero saw the clothes as well and took a step back.

With the pay rise, someone had also decided that he should hear from the Hero Public Safety Commission's spies. Some of them anyway. Karou didn't know much about the spies. They ranged in age and experience. There wasn't any passcode or anything for them to identify themselves with. Karou knew it was a bit of a misnomer to call the people he heard from spies. They were more... casual informants. The real spies dealt with real handlers, and he had nothing to do with them. These guys came to see him at the HPSC public office. And they were painful to deal with because they always thought whatever little bit of information they had was of vital importance, and Karou had to drop everything to deal with them.

He didn't mind dealing with the underground heroes, especially with the new pay rate. The heroes knew they had to report, and usually thought about the information so that he got the important bits first. The informants... They didn't have that training.

This one was young. He'd heard she'd been flunked out of UA and was doing some sort of side job for the HPSC in order to prove she was hero material. He could see it but he could also see problems. The girl was invisible. All light passed through her or maybe wrapped around her. He wasn't sure. That was a fantastic ability for an underground hero. She could observe things without others knowing she was there. The problem, as Karou saw it, was that as far as he knew, she couldn't make anything else invisible, not even her clothes.

So... when she was working, she was naked. That didn't seem very safe, sanitary or... a lot of things. And because of that, there was no way she could carry the little support items many underground heroes swore by. Things like a camera, handcuffs, rope, a grappling hook, tracking devices... Each underground hero had their own preferences for what was essential, but she couldn't carry anything.

Karou could see the potential for her quirk and the potential remained all the way up until you began to think about practicality and then it disappeared. But the call to train her to be a hero was above his pay grade.