Chapter 31: Ch 31: Quirk Deprivation

[Well this is not what I was expecting this to go]

In the middle of the school nursery, three figures were standing around, Tomomi was suppressing her laughter while waving her bloodied hand around, she was watching how Toga was following it with her eyes while trying really hard not to reveal her facade of a plain girl to Oka and Tomomi.

[Oh she is cracking!]

On the other hand, Oka was dumbfounded at the situation, she was totally expecting this kid to have some hostility towards Tomomi or at least have some other weird Anime-Esque trait like being a hidden spy or assassin since being capable of emitting bloodlust was not something a kid their age should be capable of doing.

Instead, Tomomi was trying to make the girl lose her facade, emphasizing the word 'trying' since Tomomi wasn't even doing that much to elicit the reactions from the girl. Every time the blood got close to Toga's face her nose twitched and she blushed so much that she looked like a tomato.

In Toga's case, she was beginning to doubt if she really needed to keep her facade since Tomomi seemed a bit eager to show her blood, but she forgot to keep track of time due to how concentrated she was. At this point, both Oka and Tomomi knew one thing for sure.

[[There's no way an average person would be distracted by blood for 10 whole minutes]]

"So Toga, do you know why we asked you to come with us?" Tomomi posed a question as she began to wipe the blood out of her hand with a tissue so it wouldn't stain the floor.

"Uhhh... No" Toga snapped out of her daze but still didn't make eye contact with either of them while seeing the blood slowly seep out of the wound, painting Tomomi's palm a very 'cute' crimson color.

[Fu Fu~  A bright red color, that blood is actually oxygenated!!! Maybe it will taste like metal that way?]

"Well, it is sadly not because of the adorable appearance that makes me want to monopolize you" Tomomi spoke exaggeratedly loudly. 

"I.. Wha-" Toga was sincerely confused at Tomotmi's words but she got hit again with a smirk.

"It's because you are interested in this, don't you?" Tomomi's knowing smile made Toga falter even more.

[It's like tempting a kid with candy]

"I-I'm n-not at all!" Toga still tried to advert her gaze, she definitely won't reveal herself that easily! she was stronger than that by a long shot, this whole facade was built upon for years of work.

"So you don't want it at all?"

"I DO!"

Toga's whole face was shattered like glass as soon as the prospects of blood were even remotely endangered, her reaction was so much that surprised both Oka and Tomomi.

[Scratch that! I feel like some sort of drug dealer with those hearths in her eyes]

"Well, I'll let you uhh have it? I guess that's the word... But are you up for a chat?"

---

 

Himiko Toga, a seemingly normal 11-year-old with pale dirty ash-blonde hair, bright yellow eyes with thin slits, and canines that are strangely elongated making her face seem very cat-like, on top of that, she's weirdly prone to blushing heavily due to her fair skin tone, she reflects both tiredness and wariness from her movement and actions towards other people even while masked in her facade.

This is the impression that Tomomi got from what little she saw thanks to her being good at reading people's emotions, but the little girl's explanation made everything clear to her and it only really cost her a vial of blood.

The root of her problems seemed to be her quirk, or more specifically, the instincts that came with it. These powers although were once considered an addition to the human in question, in reality, are literally a part of us, as such, they have mechanisms that make us able to use them effectively installed on us.

These instincts are manifested in the same manner as the more 'normal' instincts, like feeling hunger and thirst for our instincts to maintain our nutrients or pain and fear to know danger. In this case, her quirk makes it so that blood became something 'attractive' or 'cute' in order to make it more consumable.

After all, not anyone can just brush off drinking human blood without a bit of repulsion towards it.

Even Tomomi herself understands these instincts, she has a hard time staying put in a single place and every time something gets rid of her freedom she gets anxious, of course, not to the extent that Toga shows, but knowing what she apparently went through she could understand how she turned into a villain in the future.

[That's kinda fucked up still]

Tomomi's thoughts matched Oka's if she guessed by her frowning expression that she kept during Toga's tale, Tomomi herself was actually quite surprised at the story since she didn't know a lot about Toga in the first place. She had seen her as one of the more prominent antagonists but she never got to the part of the story where her back story was revealed, so her impression of her was a typical crazy person that happened to be cute, a sort of yandere trope.

[What the hell did they think that was going to happen?]

Tomomi was seething in anger, she really did not think that seeing a child have a vacant stare like a dead fish while recalling certain events would get her railed up but it was too much for her. Toga's own parents called her a demon every time she showed even a slight interest in blood, she was forced to wear a facade that she did not like while bottling up her feelings over the years.

[Bottleling up her feelings? Is like calling hunger a feeling instead of a necessity to be fulfilled, that straight up child abuse]

"Are you sure that I can keep this?" Toga said as she pointed at the vial of blood in her hands. She was a bit dazed at the idea of actually tasting and fulfilling her needs but she still had the resolve to not be creepy and abnormal since she did not want to be scorned by others.

"Of course, you said that you were curious about it, just don't go showing it around... just yet" Tomomi said as she began to walk to her class since the bell was about to ring.

"He he~ can you really regenerate more blood?" Toga asked while rubbing the vial against her cheek to feel just how warm it was, knowing it came from someone that liked her and how she truly was just made her more fixated on it.

"Yeah! two cans of soda and five pancakes and I will be as good as new!" Tomomi shrugged off while waving her goodbye, after all, they attended completely different classes and only just met due to coincidence.

"Bye Toga! see you tomorrow" Oka smiled at her while also waving off.

Soon enough, both Tomomi and Oka were walking back home but they decided to take a little detour to get something to eat since she actually bleed a decent amount, thanks to her regeneration due to her quirk she didn't feel dizzy but she still needed to replenish some nutrients to be at 100%.

While eating, Oka presented her with a question.

"So? How are you going to help our new friend?" Oka said while waving a french fry around.

"What gives you the impression that I will help her?"

"Your eyes? Maybe the way you got angry? or how you seem in thought since you met her"

"Ok, I get it! no need to rub it all over my face" Oka's giggling made Tomomi grumble while taking a bite out of her food "Yeah *munch* I'll help but I'll need time to think about how *much* and most importantly ask her if she wants help in the first place"

"Well with how she trembled when you rat her out like that I don't think she would need much convincing anyway" Oka said as Tomomi grimaced a bit.

[Well it'll take a bit of work]

After their first encounter, Toga, Tomomi, and Oka became friends that often hung out during lunchbreak and after school, the three of them didn't have much to do in their house, Tomomi's and Oka's parents were accepting of it since Tomomi and Oka were a bit too focused on training while Toga's parents were a bit too eager to get Toga away from their house.

As for blood, Toga was happy to actually get to taste blood from an actual human being, the feeling of euphoria was so good that her behavior started shifting into her act of a normal girl, making it seem like she often stalked Tomomi, Oka also once gave blood since she wondered how it look like when Toga used her quirk.

Interestingly, Toga had asked a LOT of questions to get to know Tomomi and Oka with the objective of being more convincing while using their blood for her quirk, she had put up a dent act at even deceiving some kids that she was Oka for a short while since she imitated her airheaded nature very well.

It was intriguing for Tomomi, she expected Toga to absolutely hate acting or simply 'not being herself' due to trauma or something similar, but that was not the case, she actually likes not only the taste of blood but also imitating or acting as the people with such vigor as to strive for some perfection in her act.

She simply heavily dislikes being forced to 'be normal', she likes the individuality of each person and their varying reaction to the same thing, and she is fascinated by it, so being forced to be the definition of 'blank' and 'monotonous' is what she despises about her current situation.

[Well with her quirk it makes sense]

As stated, quirks have some control over your psyche to make it easier to control or use your quirk, In Tomomi's case, for example, she has a tendency to be flexible and creative, so Toga has an interest in some acting and other people as to imitate them is not that surprising in retrospective.

"A-are you sure that will work?"

"Of course! This plan has no flaws!"

Tomomi stopped her thinking as she saw how both Toga and Oka looked at her to get some input into the plan they thought up, they were going to simply use a voice recorder to cath Toga's parent's tirade about her quirk, they are really on edge because of it since Toga is not very careful about her own body so that she can at least see her own blood.

So, if hypothetically, they saw Toga with a vial of blood and she drank it in front of them it should be enough to get them to say some rather incriminating stuff, or at least what Toga and Oka think. Tomomi simply let them do it since her dad is already a higher-up and could brute force the process if he wanted.

[Despotism for the win]

"While I don't think this is necessary it should make things easier since it will make it seem like you are the one who decided to seek help"

Tomomi said while nodding to herself, but seeing a child look at her with a terrified expression really made her chest tighten, Toga simply was afraid of being alone once the whole thing went down. So she could only reassure Toga of her decision.

"Don't worry about it, no matter what happens we will still be your friends"

Toga smiled widely as she went to her home that day.

---

 

"Oi dad, can you help us for a bit?"

Takeshi looked down and saw Tomomi with two of her friends, he was pleasantly shocked to know that her daughter made another friend that was close enough to bring her home for a pajama party if what he heard was right. The new kid caught his interest in her whole aura, it simply irradiated tension no matter how he looked at it.

Of course, she had the usual appearance mutations that 70% of the population has without it even being part of their quirk, but what tick him off about her was the cotton eye patch on her right eye. 

"What is it that you need help with?"

He was flooded with work that still needed to be done, and he was returning home with little time to spare for himself but he would always take time for his family but he was surprised since Tomomi tends to do things on her own instead of asking for help. She already does a lot of things like painting and that game that looks like lego so he was interested in what she needed help with.

"Okay, so here's the thing..."

Takeshi simply listened to Tomomi about how she met Toga and how she wanted help, Takeshi was narrowing his eyes the more and more he heard, at the end, he simply shook his head while looking directly at Toga's eye. From what he heard she basically snuck out of her parent's house because they grounded her due to drinking blood from 'who knows where' and she got a black eye as a result.

You are reading story Rubber Human in MHA at novel35.com

Takeshi was not really a stranger to these types of cases where children are ostracized due to their quirk, but generally, that results only in bullying from other classmates and the like, still bad but solvable to a degree, it devolving into child abuse and deprivation of basic rights such as quirk expression is messed up.

[Really what type of fucking idiot has children when they're not ready for this type of stuff to happen]

"It seems you had it hard kid" Takeshi simply patted Toga's head, which made her flinch a little "I'll help you as fast as possible since you deserve it" He was going to stop but he saw how she leaned into his hand at the end, he simply sighed and looked at her sympathetically.

"You can be a guest at our house for as long as you need, okay?"

"Un!" 

[Convicing Aiko shouldn't be too hard, she has a soft spot for kids]

 

The very next day Takeshi woke up and went to work, it was supposed to be his day off but he stopped getting those a week ago and it was becoming annoying to him, mainly because Hamada complained about it first thing in the morning, but today he actually had something to do apart from trying to pinpoint a location from a supposed coded message.

Today he was going to solve a simple case for himself, but something big for a certain cat-eyed girl, so he was very keen on doing it quickly so no problems arise, and for that, he needed the best performance, or more accurately, the perfect guy for the job.

"Another day another dollar isn't Takeshi"

"You're coming with me Hamada, we have extra work today" Takeshi said as he walked past Hamada who stopped walking while raising an eyebrow.

"Eh? We already have work though?"

"This is Extra extra work" Takeshi said as grabbed him by the collar and started dragging him to the office.

"Noooo! no more work! Please have mercy on my soul!!!"

Hamada's quirk works well for A LOT of things that it almost feels bad to be using it on mere paperwork, but the sheer amount of time saved by his mere gaze is so enough that even the higher-ups want to take him under their wings, even other department are willing to use their budget if it means having him such as the detective and forensic department, even if he doesn't have any studies on those fields.

Takeshi and Hamda didn't even have to do that much, with Toga's condition and audio recording it was plenty enough to interrogate her family but they decided to not leave anything behind, any dirt that they could get on their backs was going to be dug up by the simple reason of it being a favor for Tomomi, even Hamada was on board with the idea.

Many accounts of fraud, child abuse, negligence, and quirk deprivation.

Quirk deprivation is a human right granted to those who have quirks that involve the consumption or need for certain substances or environments for their physiological needs to be fulfilled. Since there are a great variety of quirks a great variety of exceptions need to be made for those people, especially when they could turn into villains if neglected.

Some people require blood, a certain temperature to be comfortable, more food than normal, or even the need to use their quirks due to being accumulative type quirks that could be harmful if not used for long periods of time. The law exempts or grants these people a way to facilitate the satisfaction of those specific needs as long as they have their quirk registered.

There certainly are some rather disgusting quirks that could even make Takeshi wince, but drinking blood and appreciating it is definitely not one of those, something more along the lines of having the necessity of directing people to look at their insides is what would make him doubt the system.

[Even if it doesn't kill them it was still weird]

"Quirk counseling... There's no way that's true" Takeshi sighed as he kept shuffling papers that he needed to organize.

"What gave you the idea? the whole sketchy building he is in or the fake Ph.D. that he allegedly got on the internet" Hamada spoke back while trying to make sense of all he was seeing.

Quirk counseling was a simple therapy that focused on quirks and their effect on the human mind, psychology had to develop a special branch for quirks that was called 'Idiosyncratic psychology' for their study. It simply helped people get accustomed to their quirk and how control the instincts and impulses it comes with.

It is nothing more than receiving therapy for similar causes like depression, but people generally viewed it more like a psychiatrist trying to interrogate an insane person because the premise of 'quelling someone's instincts' is a red flag for many people. So now, anyone who goes there has to hide it in order to not be labeled a savage who gets easily swayed by their quirk.

This of course has the consequences of people either going to sketchy places in order rot get their therapy or straight up not going to them and rather trying to solve the problem for themselves. It is easy to say that the average person is not better than a trained psychologist when it comes to understanding their quirk.

The following investigation that boiled down to just walking at both Toga's house and the alleged Quirk counselor's office, there were many clues that simply convicted these people to years in prison.

During the quirk counseling that occurred at the age of 4, only a couple of months after she showed her quirk, Toga got to meet the quirk counselor that basically prohibited her from seeing or even thinking of blood, every time she would get attracted to the blood she would get shocked as a way to cure her.

Apparently, it was based on a conditioning experiment and he wanted to prove to the world something about how humans could dominate their desires.

[It wasn't the first time it had happened]

The world was fucked and Takeshi knew it, these types of things had always slipped up no matter how hard the police tried to stop them since they can't really use quirks to their advantage. Hero agencies do take some of the burdens out of the police but they believe themselves to be too good for these types of problems.

The average of a hundred robberies every day even with All Might in the country was what swamped the police department every day since most heroes don't deal with their own paperwork in favor of having more time to solve problems on their turf.

"You sure want to do this quickly? You will attract some attention to yourself" Hamda warned him since Takeshi said that he wanted to remain lowkey for now.

"Yeah, don't want to stress that kid more than necessary"

The whole process didn't take them two days since both Hamada and Takeshi basically sped up the process to go smoothly with a protection order, and the proceeding trial of Toga's parents for custody of their child was basically dead in the water by the sheer amount of evidence they got if they count Toga's voice recording.

Of course, this has some repercussions, such as having to get Toga, who was still legally a child, a home to be in and subsequent adoption.

---

 

"I understand all of that, but what's this?"

The whole process took barely two weeks to solve since Takeshi brute forced the process, Tomomi was simply hearing the updates on Toga's case so that she could be calm, but she noticed the document that Takeshi carried with him that had Toga's photo on one of the corners.

"Since I was pretty adamant about solving this case, I attracted some attention due to me not doing that often..." Takeshi handed the document to Tomomi so that she could have a better view "... and because of that, some people are interested in Toga, so I got her whole document with her information"

The document wasn't that interesting, it was just normal identification stuff formatted in a different way than Tomomi was used to in her previous life, taking into account that it was a different country and three centuries in the future, it wasn't that surprising. There were only some details that really got her interest.

One is the reason for Toga's grade, she is a year older than her but she is on the same grade, this is due to her quirk counseling being active ever since she had the quirk and making her so that she was isolated from the world for an entire year, making her able to use her facade to try and be a normal person with enough accuracy to fool her parents.

Tomomi of course was actually enraged by this but she kept her cool since those guys were definitely going to prison by virtue of being prosecuted by her dad, but she noticed something else on the quirk section.

"What does the C- mean in here" Tomomi asked while pointing at the document, Takeshi simply looked at it and shrugged.

"Threat level"

"Huh?"

"When one gets their quirk registered, the HPSC assigned them a threat level based on said quirk and how disruptive and destructive it can be"

Takeshi's explanation was crude, but the quirk threat levels range from S>A>B>C>D>E with E being the lowest danger. Takeshi simply gave a vague explanation that E-class quirks are harmless quirks such as different-looking hair or extra body parts while S-class is more of a national security threat.

"I see, have you encountered any powerful ones?" Tomomi asked while heading him back to the document.

"All Might" Takeshi answered with no hesitation, which made Tomomi's eye twitch.

"... Let me word it better, some like other than All might"

Takeshi this time took a few seconds to think, quirks are not overestimated at all in his experience so almost no quirks even reach that threshold since they start breaking the user itself. Because quirks are ever-evolving 'software' they always leave the human body or 'hardware' behind, so most quirk users end up deconstructing themselves from the inside before even becoming an S-class threat.

So S-class threat quirks generally break that convention not by being extremely powerful like All Might's but by bypassing the human body limitation by being smart.

"If I'm not wrong, there is a rich heiress with the quirk to make any material from lipids if she knows their atomic structure and the making of the said object" Takeshi said as he scratched his nonexistent beard.

[Is he talking about Yaoyorozu?]

Seeing Tomomi's confused expression, Takeshi elaborated thinking that she didn't really get it "She can make anything, so she could theoretically create hydrogen bombs with enough learning materials and fast food" Takeshi smiled at Tomomi's look of understanding.

Of course, Tomomi already knew the implications of such a quirk, but she never thought any deeper than its uses as a hero and understood that technically if Yaoyorozu was a suicidal villain she could theoretically wipe out a city in the blink of an eye, which made her a bit nervous. Takeshi simply shrugged the thought.

He was not really affected by that type of thinking by simple virtue of its commonality, he simply compared it to driving a car, is not really uncommon to be in a car accident, but because people drive cars every day and they are mostly fine, we perceived the risk of it as low, even if a lot of people die because of it.

[Cars, quirks, Same difference]

"These documents are simple information to make the preceding easier so that Toga can have a new home, of course, if she agrees, don't wanna take any agency from her" Takeshi explained as he pocketed the document.

"Nice!" Tomomi spoke with a smile before asking "So who's going to adopt her?"

"One of eraser head's acquaintances, Vlad king, sees himself in the girl and since his wife is not in the best condition they were thinking of adopting a kid, Toga just happened to attract their attention due to me pushing her case a bit too hard" Takeshi said with a wry smile.

Sekijiro Kan better known as Vlad King is a Pro-hero with a quirk of a similar nature to Toga's quirk so Takeshi wasn't really concerned about his reputation, but he still wanted to see him to asses him, Takeshi believed that a picture could only tell so much about a person and that seeing him would tell him just what type of person he would be. 

"Can I visit Toga in her home later?" Tomomi's question interrupted Takeshi's train of thought, he simply smiled lightly while continuing to write on Toga's document.

"If you get permission from your mom then yes you can go to Toga's house"

"Alright! Consider it done!!"

You can find story with these keywords: Rubber Human in MHA, Read Rubber Human in MHA, Rubber Human in MHA novel, Rubber Human in MHA book, Rubber Human in MHA story, Rubber Human in MHA full, Rubber Human in MHA Latest Chapter