Chapter 1 - Chapter 1 — A Second Chance in a Sticky Situation

The fluorescent light in the office had the personality of a tax form: sterile, relentless, and vaguely threatening. It buzzed over my cubicle like an exhausted wasp, illuminating a battlefield of coffee rings, Post-its, and the tiny plastic army that reminded me there was something called joy outside of monthly reports. I finished the last spreadsheet with a flourish I imagined was dramatic and nobody saw. My boss had already gone home; Karen from Accounting was on the phone with some charity about staplers. I shut my laptop and the small internal applause I gave myself was drowned by the hum of the fluorescent wasp. "Done," I said to no one. The word felt small and inadequate. My desk was the shrine of a tired otaku: three-tiered figure display, manga stacks that threatened to collapse, and a half-assembled model I'd never found the patience to finish. On top of the shelf sat the thing I'd been staring at all week in my browser while pretending to work: a limited-edition All Might figure, boxed and breathless with plastic. I'd been stalking it for months. Tonight, I had the money, and it would be mine. I grabbed my backpack and left the office. The night air smelled of rain and hot-concrete city—comfortable, if you were the sort who liked a city that smelled like someone's ramen. The convenience store on the corner knew my face by habit and my order by heart: two cheap tall beers (a necessity) and a flaky pastry that I claimed was for breakfast but would be my midnight consolation. The clerk waggled a finger at me. "Same combo, hero?" he said, which I took as either a compliment or a corporate scavenger-hunt joke. He rung up the All Might box behind the counter with a practiced, pitying shake of the head. I felt no shame. I climbed the rickety stairs to the building roof because that's what you did in bad movies and late-night anime; you went somewhere high, out of earshot of problems, and contemplated life like a melancholy protagonist. I popped the lid on a beer, cradled the boxed figure in my lap like an offering, and watched the city. Neon blinked. A stray dog barked like a critic. It had been a long week of code reviews and public forms—vital work that made civilization run but didn't provide a hero's theme song. I thought about heroes a lot. I liked their simplicity: you fight the monster, you save the person, you get the cheers. My actual day job paid the bills and taught me patience in Excel. Heroes had capes and dramatic music. I laughed into the beer at one of my old jokes—how, if reincarnation were a game, I'd ask for the coolest passive and a non-annoying main character arc. I'd post online and make a forum about optimizing hero builds. Hell, I'd even accept a weirdo starter quirk if it meant living in a world where kids learned to be brave for a living. "Wouldn't mind waking up in an isekai," I mumbled. "Even if I started as the weird, comedic type." A streak of light tore across the sky like somebody erased a line with a furious pencil. A meteor, or more likely the highway's light catching an airplane—romance, right? I tilted my head and made the kind of wish people make when they've burned dinner too often or been bored of sitcom reruns for months. "I wish," I said in a slurred prayer to the universe, "I could be somebody else. Even a side character. Even—" I chuckled, because humans are ridiculous—"even Mineta if it meant I got a quirk." The thought was half-sober, all sarcasm, and entirely human. The beer numbed some small corner of my brain where caution lived. I set the boxed figure next to me, watched the lights of the city scatter, and let the sky swallow the sound of my voice. The world tilted. Not a cinematic tilt—no wind instrument and slow-motion—but a quiet, polite slide like furniture shifting in a house that's had enough. My grip slipped. The last thing I remember was the box of plastic All Might and the neighbor's squeaky balcony door. Then: light. Warm, clean, and too bright to call pleasant. My body felt wrong in the way you feel wrong when you borrow clothes two sizes too small—tight and oddly familiar. For a moment I thought I was in a hospital; then the smell hit me: tatami, detergent, and something sweet like fruit-flavored candy. My ears popped with the silence of a small room. I opened my eyes and discovered that the ceiling was wallpapered with a giant superhero poster. Someone had stapled stars to it like an earnest kid trying to make the sky nicer. I sat up and—this is where horror meets comedy—found that my limbs were shorter. I swung my legs out of bed and my feet dangled with the gracelessness of a puppet. My hands were small and sticky from sleeping, which cantankerously implied I had slept badly and needed more sleep. There was a mirror over a chest of drawers. I walked over like someone approaching a surprise party you hadn't wanted. Purple hair. Big, round-ish eyes. A mop of a head that looked like someone had taken a wishy-washy purple cap and stapled it to my skull. I touched my face and my voice met me like a stranger and a comedian at once: "Oi." The voice sounded small, thin, annoyingly high-pitched. That sentence should have struck me as panic. Instead, an odd clarity spread through my thoughts. It was like someone had wiped dust from the inside of my head and turned up the contrast. I could feel the air filling my lungs in a way I hadn't noticed since gym class. My stomach made soft rumblings that were suddenly amusing. I snagged for old memories—the monthly rent, the late-night forum debates, the cardboard universe of office politics—and they were all there. But overlayed on top of them were toddler memories I shouldn't have had: a soft hand tugging my sleeve, the smell of milk, a lullaby with a line about grapes. Two timelines sitting on the same bench, nodding at each other like awkward roommates. Then the TV clicked on in the corner of the room like a clock starting up. "—and in other news, local pro hero Steelstride assisted in clearing a collapsed walkway in Minato District, rescuing eight civilians—" a cheerful newscaster intoned. Steelstride. The man on the screen was everything my brain wanted a street-level hero to be—lean, with a silver suit that glinted, and a pair of gleaming platforms that moved beneath his boots like they were parts of the city itself. He moved with easy confidence, issuing orders like someone who politely told the weather to behave. People clapped, grinned, and fought the urge to smear hero stickers on their cars. The newsroll showed a man in the background being helped up and thanking Steelstride, who offered a polite thumbs up and a wink. It's the little touches that told me everything was real: the anchor's tie was crooked; the news crawler spelled a name wrong at the end of the broadcast. Real life, even in a world with capes, carried on its small human errors. I ran to the window like an idiot and yanked the curtains wide. Down the street, a man moved like poetry across rooftops. He wasn't clumsy or bull-like; he glided, folding platform into platform with the grace of someone who'd practiced his whole life. He looked like the sort of hero who solved problems by being quietly competent and unfailingly punctual. Steelstride, right outside my nonexistent front door. If you'd told me last week that I'd watch a pro hero patrol at street level and feel like a tourist in my own life, I'd have laughed. I felt a laugh bubble up from an unexpected source in my mind and then falter. The truth lodged itself in my throat like a curious stone: Minoru Mineta. I was inside that body. The grape-headed kid the internet mocked and the anime ignored, the punchline in every clip. A tiny, infuriating part of me—the part that had spent nights drooling over well-timed animation and debating who would win if All Might had coffee—was delighted. Another part braced. Being an otaku had taught me the structure of stories; real life had consequences. The "comic relief" character often existed to be a foil, to stumble into trouble, and occasionally to teach a plot point. I had mortal baggage from my previous life; Mineta had a reputation. Two things I did not want: to be a punchline, and to waste this chance. I sat down on the floor and breathed. Air in, air out. The clarity in my head made little sense, but it was steady. It wasn't some flashy second quirk—no light shows, no voice from the void. It was subtler: the edges of the world felt sharper. I could feel the tiny pulse under my wrist. The little flexing of muscles when I imagined a movement. It annoyed me with its precision. I decided to test the basics because that's what everyone says heroes do in the first episode, and because I had to know how physically wrong I really was. Push-ups, for example, are a humbling experience when your arms are as short as mine. I dropped into a form I can only describe as "optimistic." The first push-up felt noble, the second felt quaint, and by the fourth my arms declared a mutiny. I wheezed. I laughed into the carpet because panic doesn't fit a small body with ball-shaped hair. I moved to squats like a man changing tactics in a game. Ten squats felt like an eternity. My lungs shouted. My small shoulders burned. It was the sort of physical failure you get when your body and will argue about what's possible. Then, because I was cursed/impressed/filled with weird determination, I tried the thing Mineta's most famous for: Pop-Off. The logic of it is embarrassingly simple—stick out whatever and pop out sticky spheres. I furrowed my brow and concentrated the way you focus on remembering someone's name at a party. There was a weird sensation behind my scalp, a tingle like static in a storm. A small purple sphere appeared, wobbling into existence on top of my head. Of course it was sticky. Of course, because of course, it clung to my bangs like an over-enthusiastic sticker. I reached up and tugged it free, which required a degree of gentle peeling that felt more intimate than I liked. The ball left a streak of purple in my hair that I had to peel off with the delicacy of someone removing gum from clothes. That first laugh burst out of me like a reflex. I tried to throw it because what else do you do when a sticky ball forms on your head? You don't sit there with it like a crown of embarrassment. I swung my arm, or at least attempted to. The ball detached and flew with something resembling good intent but poor aim. It hit the far wall with a wet smack and slid down like a droplet. It stuck to the paint for half a second and then flopped off like it had lost interest. The engineering problem of sticky, spherical projectiles is that inertia is still a thing and a poorly thrown object is an object in denial. I tried again. And again. Each attempt left me more breathless, more sore, and more aware that labelling a quirk "not very practical" might be the kindest classification. By the twelfth attempt I had invented a new variation of frustration: sticky hair, sticky fingertips, sticky pants. I discovered, through trial and some tears, that sticky spheres had opinions about where they wanted to attach. I discovered that it takes more energy to produce two spheres quickly than I had assumed. I discovered that when you stand in a small room in a child's body and bombard the walls with purple blobs, you will attract the attention of at least one passing neighbor who peeks in to see if you're redecorating. My small chest heaved and I collapsed onto the tatami like a deflated balloon. My legs felt like rubber. The room swam in a nice, warm blur. I lay on my back and watched the superhero poster above me, the plastic All Might smiling in its box neglectfully from the floor. That's when the weird thing happened—the clarity in my head, which had been a background hum since I woke up, got louder but not in sound; it became a kind of internal vision. If my brain had been a map, something inside it peeled back a layer. I could feel the tiny pulsing origins of the Pop-Off quirk—like a cluster of warm static behind my scalp. I could feel cadence in my breathing, the slow stretch of my hamstrings, the quickening of my pulse. It wasn't some mystical second quirk granting me X-Ray vision of other people. It was me, turned inward. I could sense my muscles the way you sense your fingers when you wiggle them. I could watch muscle fibers flex in a sequence in my mind's eye—a ridiculous level of detail. It felt like having a dimmed tutorial overlay turned on. "Okay," I said to the room because apparently I'm the sort of person who has to talk to inanimate objects. "That's new." It hit me with the soft certainty of a future obligation: this clarity was probably the result of whatever had happened when the meteor crossed the sky. Me, or whatever smashed into me, had left more than a bruised ego. Two sets of memories had blended. Two lives had put their hands on the same steering wheel. Somewhere in that merge, my mental bandwidth had gone up. Not to god-mode, not to the point of see-through walls, but to something practical. Useful. Dangerous in a good way. I rolled onto my side and laughed softly, the ridiculousness of it all settling into my ribs like a warm coin. "So I get stuck in a kid's body, become a meme, and—bonus—get a brain upgrade. Great DLC." The humorous negation was a lie. Inside, there was a tightening—a plan beginning to form like a small seed unfurling into a root. If I was stuck in this body, I could do the things I'd always loved: analyze, build, tweak. If I had mental clarity that let me feel the machinery of my body, maybe I could push it. Maybe I could teach the machinery new tricks. Maybe I could stop being a joke. The night outside dimmed. From the window I could still see Steelstride vanish into the city's silhouette, a dot of silver that managed dignity even at distance. It was comforting and infuriating in equal measure. I set my jaw. I'd been an office worker who gave up his weekends, who had more lore memorized than practical experience. That life had ended on a rooftop with a boxed figure in my lap and a ridiculous wish. This life—Mineta's life—began with tatami and sticky hair and a hero poster that looked like it had judged me already. I was tired, sticky, and oddly optimistic. Tomorrow I would walk outside. I would figure out where this neighborhood even was. I would meet the other kids, maybe the future UA world would be kinder than the comment sections of fandom forums.. I would learn to throw those purple orbs with intention. I would learn what this mental clarity could and could not do. But tonight, I had to start small. I sat up, padded to the little sink, and washed the purple streaks out of my hair with the care of someone performing a ritual. I tied the hair back the way Mineta's character sheet showed and practiced a heroic stare in the mirror that looked less like heroism and more like a kid trying to look dramatic for a school photo. "You can do it," I told my reflection. It sounded absurd, but the reflection's round eyes seemed to nod back. I climbed into bed and listened to the thin sounds of the house—the ticking clock, a radio in the next room, the muffled clatter of dishes. I allowed the weird overlay of lives to make one small promise: I'd be better. I'd be smart about this. I'd be careful with lives. And right before sleep smeared my mind to soft edges, I thought a selfish, human thought that was entirely the right size for somebody given a second chance: I hoped to someday unbox that All Might figure properly, not as a metaphor, but as a small victory I could hold in my hands and say, "See? I made it." Then the lights went out and I dreamt, briefly and oddly, of purple spheres bouncing like planets.