The Emerald Prince

Chapter 3: Catching Rainbows

Izuku awoke and stretched in the morning light, hastily checking stats for electric skin to make sure the whole thing wasn't a dream. He'd had a lot of similar ones, his mind was cruel like that.

He rose, grimacing at the sudden sharp pain in his pelvis, before checking the time, to find it was 6 am. Crawling to his feet he smiled. His hips ached, but he wondered if the novelty of waking up without fresh cuts and sharp pains would ever wear off.

Once he'd begun cooking, he allowed his analytical mind to get back to work.

With an ability like his, he had to keep it secret...at least for now. It was easily the most powerful quirk he could think of, and if it was made public... it didn't bear thinking about.

But that wouldn't stop him going to UA of course. He flipped the pancakes absently before piling them up and grabbing the golden syrup. He usually ate more healthily but this was a celebration... he'd no one he trusted enough to share the news with, but he planned to eat so much sugary food he'd soon forget that.

He continued setting out his plans as he brought his plate to the table and tucked in.
He just had to find a few good quirks and use fusion to make himself a unique and relatively powerful quirk that could allow him to do well there anyway.

He washed up, watched the news while a fresh lot of painkillers kicked in, then when his stomach had settled, headed out on his morning jog, smiling.

———

With a much more satisfying goal, life returned to Izuku's eyes over the next few weeks.
He was more energetic and talkative. His combat instructors were awed by his new energy and focus, as he quickly rose to the top of the beginners class, and over the months, the more advanced classes too.

He also got more enthusiastic in work. Life that taught him many things, but the value of a quirks was one of them, and every person that came into the service rooms to pay for him, not only paid with money, but with their most valued and important trait - at least in this society.

His club friends were confused by how many clients he took, he had one almost every night.
They could only come to the conclusion that he was desperate for money for some reason or that he enjoyed it... It was a slightly worrying thought either way, but the guy himself seemed so happy, they more or less let it go.

Izuku couldn't care less. He was wary about being drunk on his new power, but couldn't see in what situation stockpiling copied quirks was a bad idea, so he gathered all he could.

———

The perfect quirk combination for UA was presented to Izuku not half a year before he was due to take their entrance exam. Though he'd slept with a lot of clients, he was sure to be selective with which quirks he copied. Choosing only useful quirks to keep, avoiding clutter.

He would have felt guilty if a single one of the clients had bothered to ask about his quirk. If they were going to be that trusting, he really couldn't feel ashamed of taking advantage of them. Besides, they were creepy perverts... at least he didn't take their quirks, though he was desperate to find out what he could do with them, and what upgrading them actually meant.
But he'd been quirkless his whole life, and he had no intention of inflicting that one someone else... or at least hadn't wanted to yet.

Electric skin had always appealed to Izuku for hero work.
Along with his self defence training which he'd soon completed and gone on to multidisciplinary combat training, and his dance that gave him flexibility and agility, being able to fight close combat and incapacitate a villain with one touch sounded perfect. Though, he might have a little soft spot for the quirk since it was his first.
He just wished he could better control the voltage.
He knew from his research that he'd been very lucky that night. The voltage would not have knocked out anyone larger and could have killed someone smaller.