Chapter 137: Perspective
Chapter 137: Perspective
Yaoyorozu Kiyomi was both incredibly proud of her daughter, and incredibly bemused by just how she’d turned out. Not any one thing, mind you. No, it was how the entirety of little Momo’s existence seemed to be some sort of self-perpetuating circle powered by sheer will and a healthy dusting of genius. Like many children, Momo had decided she wanted to be a Hero. Normal enough, certainly, and she and her husband had been more than willing to indulge her. She did have the Quirk for it and, even if she gave it up, she’d gain the training needed to help her survive having that Quirk. A Quirk that half the world would cheerfully kill her or, much worse, kidnap and imprison her dear daughter for.
Life had proceeded apace, Momo showing Kiyomi’s own stubborn will in sticking to the Hero thing despite also keeping up with her training as the Yaoyorozu heiress. Then, when she’d already been pleased and proud of her daughter, Midoriya Izumi had hit all of their lives, less like a wrecking ball and more like five shots of espresso and an existential crisis. Within just a few years, somehow, her daughter and Izumi, along with 2B of course, had started shifting the bedrock of the entire world by introducing the HSN.
That alone had been a confusion circle of sorts. Momo had abruptly shifted gears to bring an entirely new company and worldwide industry to reality with a speed that still sort of boggled Kiyomi. For a time, she’d thought the two of them would give up on the Hero thing and focus on this massive new project…only to discover that they’d somehow still been making time to train. Then, just for good measure, they’d started getting themselves certified for various first responder situations and actively going out to start helping people at disaster sites.
Kiyomi and her husband had been unspeakably proud but equally baffled by just how their little girl was managing to balance training, running disaster relief efforts, and altering the fundamental underlying technology of the Hero System, all at the same time. While also, just because of course that wasn’t enough, discovering she was in love and lust with Izumi and embarking on a whirlwind romance that almost made Kiyomi jealous! Despite, she might add, the fact that she was incredibly happy with her husband, who was a horrible softy of a romantic and pampered her shamelessly!
So, daughter of industrialists, turned hero obsessed child, turned inventor, turned disaster relief coordinator, all before the age of 18. Kiyomi had legitimately thought that going to UA of all places might actually slow the two forces of nature that were her daughter and her daughter’s girlfriend down. Nope! Of course not! Instead, they’d been swept fully into the Hero world in just a few months, repelling major villain attacks, taking down major criminal enterprises, and becoming so monstrously strong that they were compared frequently to All Might!
Why, it was enough to make one wonder if their real Quirks were actually ‘be the protagonist of a superhero story!’
Of course, now the circle had once again spun, as a literal alien invasion decided that her daughter needed to be an industrialist after all, and the two of them were building an entire new industry in space. In the process, she and Izumi just incidentally becoming possibly the two most important people on the planet, since half of the things keeping the planet going against the invaders were their work! For once, she was actually slightly glad that things had gone a bit wrong with Momo’s birth and she couldn’t have any more kids. Because if, somehow, she’d produced another one like Momo she was fairly certain reality would have just packed it up and wandered off rather than putting up with another one of them.
So, yes. Very proud.
Also very baffled.
Also, also, very, very busy.
After all, her daughter, Izumi, and 2B were all three the sorts of geniuses that tended to randomly create world-altering inventions, then forget about them on a shelf. Literally, actually. When the two were younger she’d started to make routine checks to make sure they hadn’t accidentally invented something insane again, and on seventeen separate occasions had ended up filing patents for devices the pair had simply forgotten about as ‘not important enough.’ Yet which were, in reality, the sorts of things that normally changed entire industries and made their creators billions of yen. Worse, or better, it was hard to say, those handful of patents she’d filed for them didn’t even cover the dozens of additional major patents that they did remember.
The vast majority of which fell firmly into her purview.
What all too many people didn’t realize when they looked at the pair’s accomplishments was that, for every shiny new toy, the genius trio of Momo, Izumi and 2B tended to produce a dozen entirely new component parts. New chemical processes, new metamaterials, vastly superior microchip architectures. Occasionally, entirely new fields of science. For every new product released by Aegis Inc, there was a need to figure out just what else could be done with all the shiny new things that had made it possible.
Which, of course, was where Yaoyorozu Industries came in.
Her husband was the head of the entire Yaoyorozu Group, it fell to him to manage their widely dispersed assets and the dozens of subcompanies that fell under the overall umbrella of the Group. Kiyomi, who had originally been a brilliant researcher working for one of their R&D companies when a much younger Yaoyorozu Hideki had met her and promptly fallen head-over-heels, had eventually ended up as the head of Yaoyorozu Industries. It was the largest single company under their umbrella, the original manufacturing company that had been founded while the world was trying to pull itself back together after the Quirk Wars. Large enough to have its own subsidiaries, Kiyomi hadn’t really wanted to end up in charge of it. She’d just sort of ended up needing to, when her daughter and Izumi kept rewriting the rules for numerous entire industries worth of materials science.
Now, there was barely a single division left untouched by the changes in processes and advances in materials that had come about from filtering Izumi and Momo’s successes into the company’s production lines. Something which was proving a new level of hell now, as the slow process of trickling those materials and processes out to the rest of the world needed to be accelerated. Originally, even aside from retaining their own edge, they just hadn’t been able to provide all of what the girls made to the rest of the world without crashing a dozen different industrial sectors and wrecking havoc on the world economy.
Not willing or able to just shove it all out there on the internet, they’d focused on those new materials and methods that would make the biggest difference and slowly filtered them out by licensing out production to various other manufacturers. Several of the new alloys and the means to make them cheaply had made their way into various industries as a result, without upsetting the apple cart too far. As had new completed products. Things like vastly improved solar panels, better cybernetics, and several major improvements to the microchip manufacturing process. The last of which had caused the biggest worldwide upset. Izumi and Momo had designed a chip twice as powerful as the previous best on the market, that could be made with facilities that cost a tenth of what the previous best had. The scary part, of course, was that Kiyomi knew their own in-house-only designs they used for the HSN were five times more powerful than that.
Sighing as she forced herself to stop reflecting on how ridiculous her life now was, she got back to work on figuring out how to give more technology away faster. Something she’d never thought would be a problem. Turns out that trying to manage an uplift on all of humanity in the middle of an alien invasion? Significantly more difficult than just helping run what was now the single most successful and profitable company on the planet.
Still not as hard as teaching Momo how to cook had been, at least. That girl might be a genius, but she’d been even more hopeless there than Kiyomi herself had once been in the kitchen…
… … …
Inko was delighted that she was finally getting to meet her little girl’s other paramour! Kyoka had joined them only after the Invasion had begun, and thus they had all be quite busy, but she’d certainly heard plenty of lovely things about the young Heroine! She was positively adorable, too! It might have been better if they’d found a young man they were willing to be with, so she’d get grandbabies to spoil, but she’d long since realized that her own Izumi had no real interest in men. Dear Momo was a bit more open to such things, but entirely loyal to her Izumi. As she should be!
Ah, well. Since Izumi and 2B were effectively immortal-until-killed, it perhaps wasn’t as terrible that they didn’t want to contribute to the next generation. She had little doubt her daughters would find a way to extend Momo’s life as well, and perhaps it was for the best not to create an entire family of immortals just so she could spoil grandbabies?
It would be worth it, though…
Well, never mind that! All three of them seemed happy together, and that’s what really mattered. Even if poor Kyoka was clearly less comfortable than the others. That wouldn’t do at all, but she had the cure for that.
“Kyoka, dear? Do you want to see pictures of Izumi and Momo when they were younger? They were both adorable.”
Ah, the look on her daughter’s and Momo’s faces was perfect. This, too, was a mother’s duty…
… … …
Akira hadn’t realized who had been in her and Kiki’s not-so-little street shop until Kiki had cheerfully identified them afterward, causally stating they were surprisingly nice for ‘such important people.’ An explanation later, and a disbelieving search on the ‘net, had made Akira freak out just a little. Not that she was going to admit that to anyone but Kiki, or mention to anyone ever that the famous duo who owned Aegis Inc had been slumming it among the night crowd of the Neo Ge Market. She supposed her own disbelief at the two increasingly famous Heroines/Inventors being there was, most likely, the reason that they hadn’t been recognized and swarmed in the first place.
They and their apparently second lover had been remarkablly normal.
You know, aside from the whole lesbian threesome thing they apparently had going on. Which, you go girls! Kiki was enough for Akira, but damn if all three of them hadn’t been gorgeous. Doubly so once they’d gotten them all fitted out in proper style. She hadn’t been kidding with that comment she’d embarrassingly let slip. That leggy, muscly ravenette could ride her face anytime and she was sure Kiki would forgive her. Doubly so if Kiki got a chance to join in. Pity they seemed to be exclusive.
Not really the point though.
Actually, she wasn’t sure there was a point. Other than the fact it was sort of nice to see that some of the big shots handling the whole Alien Invasion thing were actually super cute and down-to-Earth. The world was changing in a lot of ways, and unlike Kiki, Akira paid attention. She was smart enough to keep her fool head down, her Compressed Space Quirk that let them take down and put up a larger shop than most. Her Quirk was good by almost any standard, it allowing them to store most of the shop in a single trunk, but she sure as hell wasn’t a combatant. She kept on top of the underground news feeds, though. The shadow feeds that told it like it was rather than trying to frame the war outside the city in as positive a light as possible.
She was pretty sure the world wasn’t going back to the way it had been before the monsters.
Not anytime soon, and maybe not ever. Secretly, guiltily, she thought that maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing, though. The world before was…okay. A hell of a lot less dangerous and way better than the Era of Chaos, but…well, nothing like the Neo Ge Market could have happened back then. In a lot of ways, it seemed like her homeland hadn’t learned anything from two hundred plus years of chaos and horribleness. Under All Might’s protection, the government had tried to go right back to how things worked before the Quirk Wars.
Which, okay, that was sort of good in that it meant the economy had stabilized and most people had regained a pretty decent standard of living. The villains honestly hadn’t been that much worse, most of the time, than pre-Quirk Yakuza, really. Not for the average person, at least. Yet....
Yet, they’d brought back the bad with the good, too.
They had, for some god-awful reason she didn’t understand, tried to bring back Japan’s tradition of societal conformity along with all the other stuff. Quirk usage laws in other parts of the world were way looser than here in Japan, just for one thing, and discrimination against those with ‘Weak Quirks’ or the Quirkless like Kiki? Absolutely awful. All Might had managed to usher in an Era of Peace, all right, but it had been a horribly stagnant one. One in which the powers that be had actively tried to crush counter-culture movements like their own.
The Era of Chaos had induced a deep-seated fear of change in the powers that be.
As horrible as the monsters were, as terrible as the death counts were, a guilty part of Akira was aware that she considered life better now than it had been before the Invasion started. At least, with an obvious enemy to all mankind at the Gates, there were a lot less people willing to fight over the small differences that, as far as Akira was concerned, made humans people. She didn’t know if it would last, humans could be awfully terrible to each other no matter the circumstances. But for now, at least, most of the world had fallen into an ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’ mentality that left the most unlikely of people helping their fellow man out.
She just had to hope that, when the dust settled, assuming they were all still alive, that it was people like those three girls left in charge of whatever remained of Earth…
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AN 1: So, this chapter was an ATTEMPT to zoom out a bit, and show the greater effects of the Invasion and Izumi/Momo/2B's efforts on humanity. I'm not quite happy with how well it went, but it does at least do the job of showing that their old/current efforts are spreading through other sectors and causing a general uplift effect. Along with showing, through Akira, a common woman's perspective on the changing world. Not all takes are nearly as positive as hers, of course, but I wanted to show that at least SOME people aren't depressed or isolated, actually considering some of the changes as positive things.