Turn Out The Lights

Nothing to Something

People are not born equal. That's a hard truth I learned early on in life. I was born in the last summer of the '90s to my two hero parents. They were so excited that I was alive, because their two children before me weren't, and they were getting desperate. Their contracts stated they needed at least one successful offspring before they completed their payments, or their HRP would be voided. Since they weren't so young anymore and their last two attempts failed, they allowed their government contractors to step in and help out.

The American Quirk Bureau, as the name states, deals in everything quirk related, including quirk research and experiments. The AQB was formed in 1873, right after we decided that every human should be their own. Unless you wanted to use your quirk that is, and a few of my great grandparents did. But that wasn't too much of a problem until the government wanted to control who actually got to be heroes. At first, Rhode Island decided that less than .04% of their vigilantes could be heroes. They based theirs on popularity, and this didn't go the greatest, so other states went different routes.

Some states didn't know which route was best to take so they took multiple. My state has you in a contract that says they'll pay you to fight villains, but you must pay them back however much you destroy in infrastructure, or you can participate in their research and studies. My great grandparents opted for the latter and were paired up with each other since they had strong quirks, and my grandparents and parents went through the same thing. The only problem came along when the government decided that every hero should have to participate in studies and pay. Not so surprisingly, not everyone was happy with this, and the state adapted saying that the more studies you participated in the less you had to pay.

My parents were stingy bastards, so they had to have a baby for the government to study, and they were having trouble with that, so the government combined their genes and created a couple of viable zygotes. These were implanted in my mother to increase the chances of one surviving, which I did, but I wasn't one person to begin with. I'm what's called a chimera. Not the thing with three different animal heads or whatever, though I do have the wings. In the womb I was two fraternal twins, one died and the other absorbed its cells.

When I was born everything was fine and I was healthy with no significant deformities. When I was two, my brother was born and my bones were all fused the way they should be, showing I'd have a quirk. At four I was learning at an incredibly accelerated rate and emitting gas that changed peoples emotions depending on my own. Everyone told me I was just like my mother because I had inherited both of her quirks. Things suddenly started to change a year later when I started taking control of my brothers body while mine went limp. That's when everyone realized I didn't just have my moms quirks, I had my dad's also, making me the first documented human to have three (technically four) quirks; learnability and aura from my mom, and possession (and adaptability) from my dad.

Once my parents realized I had so many quirks, they turned to the AQB for help, allowing them to test me as they pleased. They started out pretty easily the first year, teaching me at an advanced pace, and testing my body's attributes. The next year wasn't as easy though. They turned up all of their regular testings and wanted to know if I had my father's other quirk, which allows him to adapt to his surroundings. Normally this helps my father feel less pain and run faster, but I'd already passed that. My body wasn't just taking harder blows, it was healing from them faster too, meaning my parents' quirks had mutated together and my body was learning to heal faster in response to being hurt.

After learning that I was healing faster than I should've been, AQB scientists decided to take a look at my DNA and realized that it wasn't the same as it was with previous blood samples they'd taken from me. It didn't line up with either set of DNA they had on file for me, which led them to believe it had mutated. They told me I had a genetic mutation disease, but there were too many mutations to pin it to one disease, and none of those diseases were showing any other symptoms. The only problem they ever found were benign masses, which usually showed up on my skin but sometimes got into nasty places like my stomach.