#Fun fact! because Yellow and Dark both hate their powers and use tech instead and they bond over it as civilians.

[styck-figure]

What are all their super names for the synthdragon au? How did they get their powers?

Most people are born with their powers--though they'll crop up at different ages, normally when you're a kid, but the hollowheads tend to be exceptions. Purple got theirs through genetic experiments. King realized his when he was an adult because it was so understated.

I am not proud of all of these. If you have better ideas for some of them go ahead. Putting it under read more because it's a lot.

Perpetia - Chosen - Narrative powers. Summons powers based on narrative need or comedic potential.

Lytic - Dark - Weaker form of narrative powers. Hates being a joke, and can't utilize the narrative as well, so she uses tech-support.

Sketchpad - Second - unknown powers. Uses tech-support from Alan that can physically form what they draw. Second can also animate them to life--is that his powers or the tech? Alan's not quite sure, but isn't going to tell Sec that.

Beastkeeper - Red - Usually just goes by "Beast." He can read and understand souls. Animals "Speak with their whole souls" so Red can undertand them. To a lesser extend, he can manipulate them too. This gets harder with more complex souls, so he can't quite manipulate humans. His own soul is also very easy to manipulate, so he can get possessed and mind controlled a lot easier than his peers. Alchemist - Blue - Plant creation. Uses it to make potions and poisons. Knows the human body ridiculously well, and can pretty much talk to plants. Sort of. We ignore the fact that she is addicted to his netherwart (it is the one thing he cannot grow on her own). Synthwave - Green - He can create physical objects/barriers out of rhythms and songs. Rhythms can make stable but simple things, like a staff, but full songs can make complex objects. The more familiar he is with the song, the more complex and stable the object. Which is why they make their own songs

Statistician - Yellow - She's a fun one. Probability manipulation. The more she uses it and the more she tries to change ‘unchangable’ events, the more she just becomes a vessel for it. She has to take a lot of breaks and understand butterfly effect really well. Doesn’t sleep much. I really like the lucky block episode. She can read probabilities without much of a drawback, but she hates looking at it in general, so she prefers tech too.

Dragonfly - Purple - A handful of biological upgrades. The main ones mentioned are dragonfly wings and antennae that can scent the air. Most people think it's tech, like King, and Purple lets them believe that. The first time King saw them in the dark their eyes glowed with bioluminescence and he screamed.

King - MT - Primarily his staff, which is his own technological creation. His actual power is being able to read anything really fast. He trained it up when he was a young adult and only realized then that being able to flip through a book and understand every word was actually not normal.

[stillness-in-green]

Spinaraki Week Level 2, Day Three: Folklore | Memory

For the folklore prompt, a yokai AU.  For the memory prompt...  Well, let’s just say that this is probably not going to make much sense if you haven’t seen Sarazanmai.

Spinner dies, but he doesn’t.  He’s empty, but he isn’t. He wants to connect, but he mustn’t.

(With apologies to Sakaki Deidoro, who probably didn’t deserve to be turned into a kappa zombie anymore than the ones in the show did.)

———–      ———–      ———–      ———–

“Sure I know him,” the man in the bird mask slurs, leaning back from them with a loose shrug.  “Think there’d be a guy in this uniform who doesn’t?”  

The air stinks of booze; there’s an open bottle in the man’s hand as he lifts it, a pointing finger drawing figure eights in the air, wobbling between Shigaraki and Spinner.  Spinner to Shigaraki, back and forth, Shigaraki to Spinner.  An invisible line of connection.

“Who’s askin’, that’s the real question.”  The man giggles, then hiccups at the end of it.

Spinner can’t feel it much in this form, but you don’t get involved in the sorts of things this would-be tengu is involved in if there isn’t something you want, or someone you love. He doesn’t even need to glance at Shigaraki to know this is their next target.

“No beginning, no ending, no connection,” he pronounces.

“We’ll open a door,” Shigaraki echoes, and sluggish alarm registers in bird-mask’s slackening mouth as Spinner pulls out the gun.

“Is it desire?” Shigaraki asks.  Around them, the humming of the machines changes pitch.  Bird-mask glances around wildly, hearing them for the first time.

“Or is it love?” Spinner asks, the word tasting like the flesh of an overripe plum on his tongue, cloying, too sweet.

“Let’s extract it and find out.”

The lights from the extraction chamber rise—focus—flash.

The sound of drumming drowns out the gunshot.

-

“How was it?” Toga asks, floating down from above to coil her arms around Shigaraki’s shoulders when they make it back to the hideout.

Shigaraki huffs.  “Just another one for the machine, same as always.”

“Usso…” The pout is audible in her voice.  Then she looks back over her shoulder at Spinner, her eyes glowing yellow as Shigaraki walks them both into the shadows. White fangs flash in her grin.  “Did you have fun today?”

He can’t not hear a mocking edge.  He tells himself it’s just how otters are, even their criminals.

“Like Shigaraki said,” he grunts.  “It was the same as always.”

She sighs, wistful as a fading flower.  “I’m sure we’ll find a lover someday.  Maybe that one’s boss?  Oh, I’m sure he’ll be otterly delicious.”

Shigaraki just snorts again, and in Spinner’s chest, his hollow heart aches.  Again.

-

“I’ve never met a kappa with such an empty heart,” the otter in the white lab coat says the first time Spinner wakes up on his table.  “How otterly fascinating.”

Spinner looks up at him, vaguely surprised that he survived the fall of the kingdom, but somehow not at all surprised that, having survived, his luck has landed him here.

“I am Chief Science Otticer Ujiko,” the otter introduces himself, and extends one fat paw towards him. “And I think there’s someone you should meet.  Someone who can help you understand.”

“Understand what?” Spinner whispers.  The lights above him are so bright, electric white and so much colder than any lamp or lantern from home.

“That those connections you kappa prize so dearly—are poison.  Usso…”

-

Shigaraki plays video games when they’re not out hunting for desire energy.  He’s unreasonably good at them, hands flying over controllers he never does more than glance at, instead staring fixedly at the TV screen.  He doesn’t seem to care what it reflects back at him, as long there’s some goal he can point his avatar at instead.  Preferably a bloody one.

Before the empire found him, Spinner had never touched a video game—or, really, much of any kind of human tech.  A stray talking children’s toy lost in the tall grass of a riverbank.  A drowned radio carried downstream by the currents until it wedged up against a rock in the riverbed and sat there leaking acrid mercury from its battery compartment into the water around it.

Shigaraki doesn’t comment when he comes back from an appointment with Ujiko and finds Spinner fumbling through an early level on one of his games, though the sound of the door opening startles Spinner badly enough to send the character onscreen careening into a bottomless pit.

Instead, he just takes the controller out of Spinner’s hands, navigates the jump for him when the character regenerates, and hands the controller back.  Then he drops onto the other end of the ragged couch and watches Spinner play.

“…Man, you really suck at this.”

-

They dance, ballroom-style, a thing Spinner only ever saw from a distance, frozen in human art.  He should be terrible at it, and maybe he is, but the music seems to guide his feet all the same.  Or maybe it’s Shigaraki, the emptiness at the bottom of his heart so very, very easy to follow.

-

“Why do you do this?” Spinner asks Shigaraki, not long after their first meeting.  “You aren’t one of them, are you?”

They’re staking out a local yakuza spot from a few buildings over, watching cars come and go.  In the dark, Shigaraki’s eyes could pass for normal.

“Why do you this?” Shigaraki echoes, not even looking at him.  “You aren’t one of them.”

“Because—”  Spinner can’t finish the sentence.  Shigaraki may not be an otter, but that doesn’t mean there wouldn’t be consequences for saying, Because of you.

“Connections,” Shigaraki says, “are bullshit.”  

His white hair stirs on the breeze from the open window.  

In the distance, Spinner can smell the river.

-

All For One strokes back Shigaraki’s hair, his grin a pale crescent against the black nimbus obscuring the rest of his features.  Shigaraki’s head twitches to the side but he doesn’t otherwise move, neither to lean in nor pull away when the Emperor of Darkness bows his head to whisper into his ward’s ear.

Whispering poison, maybe.

Spinner, waiting at the other end of the basement with Toga, watches the two of them, and wonders.

The otters want to destroy the circle, or so Shigaraki and Ujiko say.  Spinner doesn’t know why—the otters use desire energy just like kappa do, and destroying the circle of all will make it just as inaccessible to them as it would become to kappa.

There must be something they aren’t saying, not that anyone’s going to tell him what that might be.

He watches Shigaraki and All For One, and he thinks about pyramids.

-

Shigaraki hates.  He hates humans, hates kappa, hates otters, hates the circle.  He breathes it, swims in it like it's his own river of life.  It drips off his words, flows through his veins, powers his heart like a turbine.  When they dance, Shigaraki’s eyes never leave his, gaze boring straight through Spinner, as if he’s trying to dig his way into Spinner’s skull with his stare alone, the two of them carried fully by the intensity of his emotions.

Shigaraki leads—across the factory floor, up the escalator, out onto the broad balcony that overlooks the city, the thousands of city lights that shape themselves to the curves of the river.  He leads until the very end, where he pulls himself in close, guides Spinner’s hand to his chest, and splays himself out over Spinner’s arm as Spinner’s claws slip beneath his skin to pull his heart out of his thin white chest.

Spinner draws the organ—ember-red, ember-hot—to his mouth, breathing in the energy of it in shuddering gasps. Ujiko’s implant in Spinner’s chest gives an answering tremble and groans back to life, an uneven pulse that isn’t quite a heartbeat.

And so he’s ready to go for another however-long before they do this again.  A few days, maybe a bit over a week.  He could go longer without, probably, but the machines are always hungry.

Spinner is too.  Laying limp and lax in his hold, Shigaraki’s eyes flutter, his cheeks flushed, a thin whine audible beneath his breathing. Still, his lips are pulled up in a small, tight, fierce grin.

Spinner’s teeth itch. If he sank them into the hot lump of flesh clutched in his taut fingers, would he know why Shigaraki can smile like that?  How he can feel things so strongly and still want to throw it away?

I want to connect, whispers a dangerous, treacherous voice in his mind as he eases Shigaraki’s heart back into place, averting his eyes.  But I’m afraid.

-

Where Shigaraki came from. How he fell in with the otters.  Why he wants to destroy the circle—the sarazanmai could tell him.  The sarazanmai reveals everything.

There are a thousand problems with that, starting with the fact that Spinner is pretty sure that you can’t even perform sarazanmai with a human, and, whatever All For One and Ujiko have done to him over the years, it doesn’t change the fact that Shigaraki is a human.

Spinner turns over in his bed, limbs splaying out every which way.  It’s stiflingly hot in the hideout, both because it’s summer and because of the concentration of desire energy below the building.  He sits abruptly, tank top clinging to his skin, then gets up to open a window.  

Air moves over his face, a laggard breeze that still draws out a soft sigh of relief.  He looks out over the city, breathing in the smoke and the exhaust, the taint of sweaty humanity clinging to every corner of the place.  Beneath it all, he can still smell the river.

…The prince could turn Shigaraki into a kappa.  He’s done it before, or so the stories go, in very desperate times.  He’d have no reason to grant a wish like that anyway, not for a bedraggled, unconnected outcast like Spinner; he’d probably cough up a thousand brass plates before he’d even think about it.

Not that it matters anyway. The prince is dead, lost when the kingdom fell.  Shigaraki’s human, and human he’ll stay, brimming with the kind of raw emotional potency that has drawn youkai towards humans since before humans had even developed a word for connection.

There’s the shirikodama.  The thought arrives in his head so perfectly formed that Spinner looks over his shoulder, suddenly paranoid that Ujiko or Toga appeared to plant it there.  But Toga’s off running around with Twice tonight, and Ujiko never leaves the bowels of the processing plant.

Spinner shivers.

He has never swallowed a human’s desire, not even to hold it in his gullet long enough to deliver it to the prince like the noble delicacy it is.  He could, though.  The city is built on water; they cross streams and rills and offshoots multiple times every day.  It would be so easy to pull Shigaraki into one and let it carry them to the river, let its cool waters soothe away the fever of his hatred, if only for a little while.

Spinner would rest their foreheads together, pull Shigaraki close, and—and extract his desire, drink it down there in the river of life, and with no prince to surrender it to, it would just be his, only his.  All of Shigaraki’s memories, all of his emotions, the very soul of him, made one with Spinner forever.

And maybe he’d be safe there, safe and connected, no matter what becomes of the circle...

…He’s gotten hard.  Fuck.

Spinner makes his way back to bed, but it’s a long while before he gets to sleep.

-

In the morning, there’s a second game controller sitting on the floor, green next to the usual red, their cords winding around each other in a loose spiral.  Spinner stares down at it, then lets his eyes track up to the sound of the low laugh from the rafters.  Shigaraki looks back down at him, his form limned in red light.

“Spinner, I thought of another way for us to connect.”  The delivery is a bit too high, but the voice is Shigaraki’s.  The cajoling lilt of the cadence, though, is otter through and through.

“Knock it off, Toga,” he grits out past clenched teeth.

If the red glow didn’t give her away, the way her eyes flash gold would.  She winks at him, waves, and disappears, laugh lingering behind her.

The real Shigaraki comes out of his room a minute later, still half-asleep, and almost walks into Spinner before he catches himself.  Unselfconscious, he elbows Spinner out of the way and looks down at the—gift? Test?  Spinner hasn’t decided yet.

“Toga?” he asks, voice rough.

Spinner swallows and nods, hyper-aware of Shigaraki’s warmth, and stutter of his own heartbeat, and the grumble of bio-engine below.

Shigaraki exhales, a sharp gust that ruffles his bangs.  “Figures.”

“I can return it,” Spinner offers, which is stupid, really.  It’s not like he knows where Toga got it.  It might not have even come from a regular store; she sees Ujiko just as often as the rest of them, and he always has some new project he’s wanting to test.

But Shigaraki’s already wandering off towards the kitchen.

It’s another day, and there’s plenty of desire waiting to be found.