It took me a moment to wake up. I was feeling… well, like absolute shit. My mouth hurt, my chest hurt, my arms hurt, and my damn head hurt like hell.

“Ahhhh, fuck me,” I mumbled softly. That had… sucked. Like, my god that sucked. I slowly blinked my eyes, trying to fight past the pain.

“I’d rather not,” the voice drew my attention to my right, where Recovery Girl was frowning up at me. “And really, the younger generation is so filthy-mouthed.”

When I spoke to her, every word was kind of mushy. Were my teeth missing?

“An’t hel it,” I said with a chuckle before wincing in pain. When I spoke again it was slower “Ahhh. Sorry. God, this hurts.”

“I should think so,” Recovery Girl shook her head and walked over to me. “The shell on your chest and stomach was cracked. You lost most of your teeth. Torn ligaments and tendons in your left arm, likely a concussion, it looks like you swallowed a portion of your cheek, bruises all over you. If it wasn’t for your scales, you would likely look like a black and blue tapestry.”

Well… damn. I sighed. “Gaaah,” couldn't get much more out.

Then Recovery Girl kissed me on the cheek. I felt something like, I don’t know, a siphon? Almost like a pull on something I’d never been in touch with before? Then I felt my teeth grow back. My arms, chest, legs, and head, throbbing with pain, were back to normal so fast that it threw me.

Healing is a process after all, weeks or months. Sometimes you get so used to the pain that you don’t even notice when it leaves. ‘Oh hey, my arm doesn’t hurt anymore.’ So going from ‘Oh god, kill me,’ to fine levels of pain left me a bit shocked.

“My, my, you have quite a bit more stamina than I expected!” Recovery Girl said, her outstretched lips pulling back. “More than many of my pro hero patients.”

“I make sure to eat my veggies,” despite the joke, I couldn’t help a grateful smile. “Thank you, Recovery Girl. That really sucked.”

“Be more careful from now on,” she admonished. “I heard what you did, pulling that monster away from everyone. Brave. But it could have killed you if you hadn’t been careful. You’re lucky we have a room set aside for our larger students.”

Come to think of it, the room I was in did look more like a very clean storage room than a nurses office.

“I, uh… Didn’t have much choice,” I rubbed the back of my neck as I rose off the bed. “That guy. He was strong. Very strong. If I left him there, I think he could have done a lot of damage. I mean, I tried to be careful, but…”

“I know, dear,” she sighed, patting my knee. It was a funny image, this tiny elderly woman reaching up to pat my giant knee. “No one could really help it. We were all shocked when we got the message.”

“I’m glad Iida managed to get the teachers to us,” I said with a sigh. “All Might saved my ass.”

“It wasn’t Iida-kun,” Recovery Girl frowned. “Every teacher in the school got a message to our public email addresses… Oh, but that isn’t anything for you to worry about, Koopa-kun. I’m just happy we were able to help the students. Really, a small army of thugs,” she shook her head. “What is the world coming to?”

“Indeed,” a voice drew our attention to the door. Then a bit lower. The speaker was quite short after all.

“Principal Nezu?” I asked, surprised to see him.

“Good afternoon!” he walked over to join us. Like Recovery Girl, he was tiny, shorter than my knee. But unlike her, he was a bipedal mouse, with a scar on his right eye and a pair of ears wiggling cheerfully on his head. “It’s good to see you up and healthy. How are you feeling?”

“Good, considering I was run over by a truck in the shape of a beaked bodybuilder,” I said without much heat behind it.

“If you consider all of life by such a metric, you will likely go far in it,” Nezu chuckled.

“He’s healing well,” Recovery Girl said, patting my knee fondly. “Likely an effect of his more lizard-like DNA boosting his healing. I’ll have to wait and see what else I get from my tests.”

“...tests?”

I asked that because I was worried about what would happen if anyone, at all, looked into my body's makeup. What Nezu and Recovery Girl got out of it must have been more general worry about my health. They shared a look.

The mouse-like principal coughed into his hand. “...Bowser-kun. We have a record of your history. Or, the lack thereof. I spoke to Ranma.”

“My social worker?”

“Yes,” Nezu continued. “He told us that you had no memories or history beyond when you were found in the street. We had some idea about that, but when Ranma sent your medical file on hearing about your injuries, we discovered something about your body.”

“...I’m not human,” I mumbled. I was basically confirming what I already knew, but Nezu nodded.

“Indeed. You are, much like me, an intelligent being with only as much in common with human DNA as… well, as an animal.”

I stared at him. I mean… I knew that. I was a Koopa now, one of the more powerful ones like Bowser and his kids. But hearing it again, after I’d spent so much time working past my body image issues?

“Oh.”

Nezu smiled gently. “I would understand, child, if this is something you suspected.”

“...I never really had proof,” I mumbled. “Did Ranma know?”

“Not as far as I know,” Nezu said. “But I would ask him. Regardless, it may be that your origins are similar to my own. In addition, we may have discovered a new aspect of your quirk.”

“What do you mean?”

“Size changing,” he looked me over. “When you passed out, you were around 350 centimeters tall,” around 11 and half feet or so. “And now you are back to your original height of 244 centimeters I believe,” 8 feet.

“I grew?” I rose to my feet, eyes wide. “I can change my size?”

Yes! Bowser’s gigantification thing! I’d never figured out how to do it, to activate it on purpose like he seemed to!

“Indeed, you can,” Nezu stroked his chin. “Strange. Your dragon-turtle quirk has more aspects to it than I believed.”

I calmed down a bit. “...So, I mean… what happens now? I’m not human? Can I even still go to-”

The realization of what I was about to say hit me, and I stopped with some embarrassment. Nezu chuckled, clearly already understanding where I was going with that.

“You can still continue your schooling. If you couldn’t then as the non-human principal of the school, I would have some objections to you leaving for such arbitrary reasons.”

My inhumanity was arbitrary? Hail to the new age I guess.

“Regardless,” the super-intelligent teacher said. “I imagine you may want some rest. The day has been full of revelations for you, yes?” when I nodded slowly, he chuckled. “Go ahead and go home then. And if you need anything, please let the school know. We are always available to help, and Hound Dog has made himself available for those students needing assistance.”

“Dismissing students without my permission?” Recovery Girl asked.

“Ah!” Nezu waved his hands quickly. “My apologies-”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” she waved her hands back. “He’s perfectly healthy now. And I imagine his friends are waiting for him.”

“...Thank you,” I said after a bit. Then I stood up and walked out, keeping my thoughts to myself.

There were a lot. Felt like my head was going to explode with the implications. Not the whole ‘not human thing’, I’d long since gotten used to the obvious possibility. So having it confirmed was no big deal.

It was all the other stuff, really. The last event I could ever remember from My Hero Academia, one of the most fun anime I had ever watched, was over.

Where did I go from here?

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------

Nezu

After watching Bowser walk out and saying his goodbyes to Recovery Girl, Nezu let himself think. He kept his thoughts in order, nodding as he passed some of his students, humming cheerfully to himself.

There was a lot to do. He’d checked on his students personally, spoken to the police, looked in on the villains that had been captured, taken in the statements of his teachers on the events that had gone down/the villains that had escaped. Aizawa in particular had been a wealth of information, but Thirteen had given a better explanation of Kurogiri, the warping villain. Of them, he was the most worrying.

And then. The anonymous tip. One, sent as a text message to every public phone address the teachers of UA had, and another to their public emails. And then the one All Might and Nezu himself had received. Whoever had sent it knew.

All Might’s Quirk is inherited and can be passed down from person to person.

An anonymous tip about an attack, from someone who knew the truth about All Might’s quirk. At the least, whoever had sent it was an ally, or pretending to be, and was interested in hiding their identity.

The police had tracked the phone that sent the text messages to an alley in town. It was taped securely to the bottom of a dumpster. The phone itself had no fingerprints and was a burner phone that could be bought over the counter at any store. The email had apparently been made only recently, had no other accounts tied to it, and the IP address it had been sent by was masked by a program anyone could buy, likely a proxy service or the like. Very simple counter-espionage tactics.

Still. He had some thoughts on that.

Nezu worked slowly through his thoughts as he entered his office. He sat behind his desk and mentally checked boxes, made plans, and began thinking over the various profiles in his mind.

And as he did, he pulled a real file up on his computer. Bowser Koopa.

Nonhuman. Like himself.

“Now… what secrets are you hiding, young man?” Nezu asked quietly. He reached for a cup of tea resting on his desk, and prepared to get to work.

------

Bowser Koppa

I shouldn’t have been surprised that once I left the storage area masquerading as a nurse’s office when I turned a corner and a tiny blonde slammed into me.

“Bowser!” Pony said, arms wrapped around my neck and forcing me to hold her up. “What happened?! Everyone said you got attacked, and you got hurt, and Toru-chan was worried, and we couldn’t find you in the nurse's office, and-”

“Calm down, calm down!” I patted her on the back, laughing a bit as she spoke frantically. “I’m okay. Mostly.”

“Bowser,” Iida, Momo, and Kendo came over to us, Momo being the one who spoke. She looked relieved. “I’m glad you’re okay. We heard you were really beat up.”

“Only my ego and organs,” I joked lightly. Pony dropped down to look up at me, worried.

“Got a lot of the school talking about it,” Kendo said with a shake of her head. “I can’t believe a whole army of villains attacked you guys.”

“Not really us,” I corrected.

“All Might,” Iida adjusted his glasses. “How devious, attacking the USJ to attempt to kill the Symbol of Peace! Not to mention interrupting a very important lesson!”

“Iida…” Momo sounded aghast at his sense of priorities while Kendo, Pony, and I chuckled a bit.

“You fought that thing, right?” Pony punched my arm, looking annoyed. “What were you thinking!? That thing was made to kill All Might!”

I winced. “Yeah… In retrospect, I should have waited around for help. But all I could think was that I had to get it away from everyone else.”

Pony glared up at me, but she looked more worried than angry. “Toru-chan said your shell was broken.”

“...” I placed a hand on top of Pony’s head and rubbed her head gently between her horns. “I’m okay, Pony. It sucked. But I’m okay now. I walked away from a fight with a guy who was a hell of a lot more than I was ready for, and I’m alive.”

I looked everyone over. “We’re heroes. Going to be at least. Eventually, we were going to face something like this. We don’t choose the ballroom, we just dance.”

Stole that from Spider-Man Noir. But it was true. Heroes can actively hunt down villains, lay down ambushes even. But usually? They ended up working with what they had. Being a hero, in terms of the day to day job, was reactive, same as police.

“We don’t choose the ballroom…” Pony stopped frowning a bit. “That makes sense.”

“I’m saddened I was unable to help you in your battles,” Iida said regretfully. “If I’d known the teachers were already on the way-”

“How could you have known?” Kendo said, stopping Iida before he could get going full steam. “I don’t think the teachers have explained how they knew actually. Vlad stopped in the middle of our lesson and got us ready for an attack.”

“Maybe one of the villains got cold feet?” Momo asked, though she looked like she didn’t believe it.

“What were they like?” Kendo asked Iida, Momo, and I.

“The villains?” Momo asked. When Kendo nodded, Momo tapped her lips with one finger thoughtfully. “...Unprofessional.”

“That’s a weird thing to call them,” Pony said.

“Well, untrained might be better?” Momo corrected. “They had some dangerous members, but none of them knew how to fight, not really.”

“They attacked the school with an army that couldn’t fight?” Pony looked up at me, wide eyes blinking. “That seems dumb.”

I nodded in agreement, while Kendo hummed to herself. “Maybe. But if they were trying to kill All Might, then they would just need to distract you guys and the other teachers, right?”

Iida nodded. “So because their plan broke down so early, the little weaknesses in it became exponentially worse!”

We started walking as a group, Kendo, Momo, and Iida moving forward and leaving Pony and I alone.

“Hey,” Pony looked up at me. There was an odd look on her face. “You… you would tell me if something was wrong, right?”

I thought about that. “Not every time.”

Her head snapped to look at me. “What!?”

“Calm down, calm down,” I chuckled. “There are some things I just wouldn’t want to say to my female best friend. If I had a crush on someone we knew for example.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Pony shook her head quickly. “I mean big things! Things that matter…”

“...It would depend,” I said weakly.

Internally though, I was panicking. The look on her face was so strange. You ever have someone you care about look both worried and suspicious all at once?

I had that look on my face, in another world, when one of my brothers had done something life-changing and I’d suspected it.

“Bowser,” Pony continued giving me that look, her big blue eyes watering. “I-”

“Hey, you guys okay?” Kendo asked, turning to look at us.

“Yeah, we are! Just a sec,” I waved the trio off. Kendo looked curious, but walked off, with Momo giving me a smile and Iida a nod. As they turned away, I turned to Pony. “We’re in school right now.”

She got what I was saying immediately. Her eyes widened. The short blonde nodded. “After school?”

“Well, the club is probably cancelled for today, so sure. Let’s go to your house.”

I sighed internally as she nodded furiously.

Well… fuck. I always was a bad liar. Guess it was going to turn against me today unless I could come up with an explanation that would work.

What did she even suspect of me? How much was I supposed to tell her?

I was finally done with the final event I’d been preparing for, and now I had a whole host of things to worry about next.

At least life stayed interesting?