#I’m thinking how Reigen would throw himself into danger with no regards of his own safety

[justtrashperson]

Care

[arosnowflake]

hey anyone wants to hear about the MP100 Lieat AU that I’ve spent way too much time developing? No? Well too fucking bad here it is:

Reigen is the Theo equivalent, obviously. He’s a licensed private investigator who also happens to be a conman pretending to be a dragon with the ability to read minds travelling from town to town looking for money. One day, he wakes up and finds a dragon egg under his bed, and soon has to deal with actual dragon Mob looking up to him for guidance.

The power Reigen pretends to have is less telepathy and more empathy. He generally keeps his explanations vague enough that it’s hard for people to get a good grasp on the limitations of his ‘power’, making conning them easier, but in essence, he says he has the ability to read people’s emotions and intentions to a very high degree of accuracy. Which is true, it’s just not magic. 

The wish Mob was born from was made when Reigen had been run out of town after being exposed as a con for like, the seventh time in a row, and he was pretty done with it, and it made him wish his lies could just disappear. Que Mob.

idk this is subject to change bc it should maybe be a Bit More Serious, but I’m not giving Reigen Theo’s tragic backstory so I’m not sure how to go about this yet.

Reigen generally doesn’t feel guilty when lying to people, which is why his lies don’t manifest for Mob. However, over the course of his time with Mob, he slowly started to feel more and more guilty for lying to him, but he suppresses it, letting everything build up inside him. This is obviously going to backfire sooner or later.

Mob is Efi, a young dragon (about a year and a half old) with the ability to eat lies. Although he is quite powerful, he has little control over his powers and dislikes fighting, so he attempts to use them at little as possible. Unfortunately, since he does need to eat, and since his abilities are very useful to Reigen, he still ends up using them quite a bit, but nevertheless, he’s still pretty small and functionally the equivalent of a human 14-year-old.

For a reason he doesn’t know, he can’t make Reigen’s lies manifest. This confuses him quite a bit, especially after figuring out that Reigen isn’t a dragon and therefore doesn’t have any magic to counteract him. It sort of worries him, but since this is his norm, he figures it might just be a limit of his power.

He knows Reigen isn’t a dragon and figured it out about three to six months into his existence. However, he hasn’t told Reigen that he knows.

In this AU, Mob’s tendency to suppress his emotions/emotionless exterior is because a) he’s autistic and has flat effect, b) he’s autistic and has alexithymia, and c) when he gets emotional his powers go haywire, which he’s scared of. 

I’m not sure yet if ???% is a thing that exists in this AU, but if he does, he’s probably going to some kind of lie ooze monster.

I’m also thinking of maybe giving him an extra power, namely the power to control the lie monsters, since I feel like that would make him suitably overpowered. 

Ritsu is a human(?) kid that Mob picked up after his first job. Ritsu’s parents were murdered, and Mob decided that he deserved good parents, and since Reigen is a good parent, Mob dragged Ritsu with him and Reigen really had no way of protesting.

The three of them travel through towns looking for work and solving mysteries, and I currently have about three to four arcs planned out, More details about those and Ritsu + some other characters in this AU under the cut. 

About Ritsu:

The murder of Ritsu’s parents was the first real job of Mob and Reigen. Ritsu hired Reigen after learning he was supposedly a dragon, because the police weren’t making any progress in solving the murders. It worked out fine since Mob was able to make the killer’s lies manifest and get them caught. During the investigation him and Ritsu bonded and Mob forced Reigen to adopt Ritsu.

Ritsu hates Reigen’s guts, because he recognizes that the man is a con and is pretty livid at him for a) lying to Mob and b) taking up the investigation into Ritsu’s parents’ murders by getting Ritsu to hire him under false pretenses, which yes, that worked out fine, but only thanks to Mob; he could’ve easily gotten the wrong guy arrested just bc he didn’t want to fess up to his lies. In Ritsu’s eyes, Reigen is a selfish asshole with no regard for others using Mob for his own means. He stays with Reigen because he feels responsible for Mob, and also because he has literally nowhere else to go, though he won’t admit that last part.

Ritsu has something of an inferiority complex, believing he brings little to the family because of his lack of powers or even any special skills (like Reigen has), and overcompensates by being unnaturally polite and helpful.

This eventually leads to him subtly lying to Mob and Reigen about his feelings, but since it’s not something Ritsu admits to himself is a lie and it’s more a lie of omission than a real blatant lie anyway, this doesn’t really manifest as a monster and instead just becomes ooze. Ritsu can usually clean it up before anyone sees it, but even if they do, Mob can’t properly figure out what it is or where it came from, so nobody traces it to Ritsu, and so he continues to hide it. 

This will eventually reach a breaking point where Ritsu is consumed by the ooze and Mob can’t really save him anymore because he has trouble eating the slippery oozy lies. Saving Ritsu required the combined efforts of Mob eating whatever lies he could and giving pep talks, and Reigen talking to Ritsu, for the first time admitting to him that yes, he lies to them as well, and that he has similar feelings of self hatred and understands what he’s going through, and that he’s sorry for not noticing what Ritsu was going through, and just generally being completely honest with Ritsu (and Mob) for the first time since meeting him. 

This eventually leads Ritsu to the realization that he’s essentially doing the same as Reigen; hiding his true self because he’s afraid of what people will think of him, and instead using lies to entice people to stay, and this realization is what makes him understand that he can’t keep lying. He knows that Reigen’s way of living is unsustainable, so his must be as well. This realization is what’s needed to finally make him able to break away from the ooze, and have it properly manifest as lies, which Mob then eats. 

This incident improves Ritsu’s relationship with Reigen. While he still doesn’t like him and has justifiable issues with the guy, he does understand him a little better now and sees him as a person rather than a 2D asshole, and makes him believe Reigen has the capacity for change. 

Yes, this is probably going to be something of a combination of the ???% arc and the Big Clean Up arc.

Ritsu may or may not be a dragon. Everyone (including himself) is under the impression that he’s human, but I’m debating whether it’d be interesting if he later turned out to be a dragon, as a parallel to canon.

I also have the basic idea for the world domination arc, so have some characters:

Touichiriou. He is the captain of the police, a human presiding over the dragon department and many crime investigations. He was appointed because the higher ups wanted a human influence on the dragons. Unbeknownst to everyone, he’s still a dickhead bitch who is planning world domination, and he’s grooming the dragons in the department’s care to be his personal army. This eventually leads to this AU’s version of the World Domination Arc.

He and the family have quite a bit of run-ins, because Reigen & Co keep getting tangled up in crimes he’s investigating. He and Reigen do NOT get along, but since Reigen’s technically not committing any crimes, Touichirou doesn’t have an excuse to arrest him. That didn’t stop him from trying once, but Serizawa interfered and Reigen was free to go. Touichirou hasn’t tried it again, since that could attract serious attention, but boy oh howdy is he bad at disguising his hatred.

Touichirou realized pretty quickly after meeting Reigen that he wasn’t actually a dragon, because that’s not an act you can keep up for very long when people actually know a thing or two about dragons. Touichirou knows that Mob is a dragon and he wants him so bad. Mob is very powerful and his abilities could be extremely useful for someone who is planning to be a dictator. Unfortunately for him, everything points towards Reigen being a good caretaker of Mob, and since it’s department policy to not separate dragons from their humans if they don’t want to be separated and aren’t in danger, his hands are tied. It’s one of the primary reasons he hates Reigen so much, and why he tried to have him arrested.

Mob doesn’t really care much for Touichirou, but doesn’t necessarily think he’s a bad guy either, just thinks he’s kind of rude and very no nonsense. Ritsu is somewhat suspicious of him, first because Ritsu is suspicious of everyone, and later because he has more interaction with Shou, and although he doesn’t necessarily see any immediate reason to think Touichirou might be up to no good, having your best friend tell you to keep your brother away from his ‘father’ is not something you forget. Ritsu does not tell Reigen or Mob about this, because he doesn’t want Mob to worry, and because he trusts Reigen about as far as he can throw him. 

Serizawa is a dragon who is nominally Touichirou’s second in command/co-captain, like Brett is to Neil, but in practice, he defers to Touichirou entirely. He is a lot like his Claw self, and is being manipulated by Touichirou.

Serizawa was taken out of the care of his human pretty much as soon as he was born, as his human was scared of his power and kept him locked up in a small room, and called the police to pick him up as soon as she realized she didn’t know what to do with him. He was one of the first dragons placed under Touichirou’s care, and has latched onto him because he had no one else. 

He’s being manipulated, obviously, but doesn’t really realize that the way Touichirou treats him isn’t normal, since he spent so much of his life around him and no one else. He’s slowly starting to suspect something might be wrong after seeing how Reigen treats Mob (i.e. just like a human being), but he’s deep in denial. 

Serizawa’s power is energy manipulation; he can manipulate energies electricity and warmth to form ‘barriers’ that basically roast whatever comes through and attack people with explosions of power or targeted electrocution/overheating. He was most likely born out of a wish to get electricity to become warm, after the electricity in his human’s house stopped working during a snowstorm. 

He’s about five years old in literal years, but about the equivalent of a 30-year-old human, since he’s used his powers quite a lot.

Serizawa and Reigen befriend each other, though Serizawa tries to pretend this isn’t true because Touichirou would murder him. However, they get along very well, and Reigen tries to tell Serizawa to get some self esteem and not let Touichirou treat him like shit, but Reigen doesn’t really realize what’s actually going on and it really doesn’t work for that reason. 

Eventually, during the final battle, he’ll turn on Touichirou to save a bunch of the kid dragons (the Awakening Lab kids) in the department’s care, who would’ve otherwise died from overexerting their powers. He takes over Touichirou’s place at the force, afterwards, and slowly grows into his own.

Shou is a dragon born out of Touichirou’s wish to have someone who would be capable of doing all the sneaky things Touichirou himself can’t do. He has the power of invisibility as a result, and Touichirou frequently sends him on ‘errands’ that are mainly just missions to steal stuff or infiltrate something or another to get information. He’s working to take Touichirou down.

Shou is still very young, only about six months old, but has grown almost as much as Mob has due to his very frequent use of his power. In fact, he uses it so frequently, he’s permanently of the verge of overusing it, and he’s always in danger of dying of it. He’s not planning on stopping anytime soon though, not until he’s taken Touichirou down.

It took Shou about three months to realize what a douchebag Touichirou was, mainly because Shou read some of the comics lying around for the young dragons, and realized that the people who try to take over the world are usually not the good guys. 

Because Shou’s moral system mainly comes from comic books, it’s very black and white, and very oversimplified. He realizes murder is bad, but doesn’t quite understand why, so he even though he doesn’t kill, he still frequently goes too far à la the Kageyama House Fire. He thinks his father is the ultimate evil, and because Shou opposes him, he must be a hero. This mindset doesn’t lend itself to more complex understandings of morality, but that’s to be expected, growing up with a dad like that. It’s kind of a miracle his moral compass is this good.

Shou met the family not long after realizing his dad was a bitch, and immediately related to Ritsu, because Ritsu was complaining about having to deal with a parental figure who lies and manipulates him and his brother and uses him and his brother for his own gain, and Shou immediately went “!!!! same hat!” This led him to project his own negative emotions towards his father onto Reigen, which hasn’t been conductive towards their relationship. He gets along okay with Mob, but frequently gets annoyed with him because, in his eyes, he’s incapable of seeing how Reigen uses him and it reminds him of Serizawa.

Doesn’t like Serizawa, because he’s annoyed by his yes man attitude, and doesn’t really understand that some people react to abuse and manipulation differently than he does.

Shou spends a lot of time sowing the seeds of unrest and rebellion within the dragon police. That’s how he met Fukuda, Higashi, and Ootsuki in this AU; they’re dragon officers who agreed to work with Shou.

One of the main reasons Reigen hates and distrusts Touichirou (aside from clashing personalities and the whole getting arrested thing) is that Reigen is aggressively not on board with the way he treats Shou. While Touichirou obviously doesn’t let people know that Shou does spy stuff, he does frequently bring Shou along with investigations and has him work for the police, and it’s clear that he doesn’t see him as a kid, but rather as an employee at best and a tool at worst. Mob and Ritsu don’t really pick up on how wrong it is, because they’re kids and they have some difficulty grasping the nuances in this situation, but Reigen, as an adult, can see how Touichirou treats Shou completely inappropriately for a child, and he’s Not Having It. 

He suspects that Touichirou may actually be abusive and not just a dickhead, but he doesn’t have any evidence, and since the way he treats Shou isn’t illegal or anything (and even if it was, what’s he gonna do? call the police?), his hands are tied. He does try to get Shou to talk to him, subtly trying to figure out exactly how far Touichirou’s dickishness goes, but Shou trusts him about as far as he can throw him and is unresponsive.

A large part of his arc is going to be learning to be a kid and recovering from everything. It’s mostly going to take place after Touichirou’s defeat, though it starts during it, when Reigen jumps into the fight to try and kick Touichirou’s ass in his place because he doesn’t these fucking kids fighting, damnit. That was a moment of revelation for him, pretty much, and his opinion of Reigen approves afterwards, and so he agrees to travel with him, Mob, and Ritsu.

(Obviously the kicking-ass-thing doesn’t go all that well, and Serizawa and maybe Mob have to jump in to help him, but hey, it’s the thought that counts.)