The Exchange Hero

Episode 5

The next day of school started surprisingly normally. After a forgettable homeroom period, we had English class. The teacher, Present Mic, was loud, annoying, and decided to use me as a human audio file. He repeatedly asked me to read the textbook examples aloud in my 'Proper American Accent'. Honestly, I was beginning to think the school had brought me over just to save money on ESL recordings. Lunch was lunch. Why they needed a pro hero as chef I had no idea. They say no one had ever seen his face. It made me wonder if he might be a robot, and I got excited about lunch again. Then came the afternoon session with our introduction to Hero Basic Training, taught by All Might himself.

All Might was Japan's "Number One Hero", a title my father held in the US. I had even heard All Might described in the American news once as Japan's equivalent of Captain Armstrong, a comparison that likely made neither man happy. I was expecting the Symbol of Peace to share a lot of personality traits with dear old Dad, and his over-the-top entrance into the classroom fed those fears. The rest of the class ate it up like Pooh eats honey from a beehive, sickly sweet and more than a little painful.

"We'll get right to it ... combat training!" When I heard those words, I slumped in my seat. From what I had seen yesterday, there were some pretty powerful teens in this class. Throwing them in a room and telling them to beat something or someone up was a recipe for disaster.

"And to go with these are ... your costumes!" Shelves containing our costumes slid out of the classroom wall. These outfits had been crafted by the school's tech department, based on our powers and on designs we had submitted with our applications.

When I had first been asked for a costume design, well before I came to Japan, I'd hatched a plot to keep my identity secret and to completely separate my new identity from my family. To do that I had to hide my powers through careful misdirection. Rather than presenting myself as the super strong Kid Armstrong, the name my father has planned for me, I decided to limit the level of strength I'd demonstrate. Instead, I would distract people by showcasing a "useless" talent that my mother's brother had introduced me to – juggling.

When I was young and still trying to learn to control my strength, my Uncle Mattie had started me juggling tennis balls. Of course, I crushed them or threw them so hard they flattened against the roof. So, we moved to steel balls and an open field. Pretty soon I wasn't mangling the metal each time I caught the balls. And I got to the point where I wasn't launching them into orbit with each toss. After a few months of practice, slowly moving from steel, to hard rubber, to baseballs, finally we returned to tennis balls. Then he started showing me how to juggle with two people.

Luckily, he had the power to absorb and redirect kinetic energy because I must have beaned him a thousand times. But he just absorbed the impacts; making himself stronger, faster, and tougher. He kept working with me until we could keep a cascade of balls going for several minutes. Finally, he had me practice using a wall as the second person, tossing the balls to bounce off the wall and catching them. Once I could do that he showed me how to adjust the angle of the bounce to hit different targets. Basically, he was training me to use our shared energy absorption/redirection power.

I designed my costume to capitalize on that aspect of my powers, as well as my interest in robotics. It was a modernized jester's motley of dark greens, reds, and greys with a fool's cap, a domino mask, and a belt and bandoliers with two dozen balls embedded. The balls were made of either steel or a special synthetic rubber that I could juggle and throw.

The steel balls were for non-living targets, while the rubber ones were designed to stun or knock out people rather than harming them. The three bells on my fool's cap were actually small, detachable robotic drones that I had designed and built. They could move on their own, either rolling on the ground or flying in the air, and were remote controlled by electronics in my gloves. They also transmitted sound and images to a receiver in my hood. I called it the robo-juggler outfit, but knew well enough not to use that particular moniker out loud.