Night; a city partially destroyed. Here, people desperately fleeing as behind them rubble flies into the air. Moments ago, their bodies were enslaved to the will of another, forced to attempt to subdue a villainous-looking youth. Now they have been freed, but the heroes-in-training who liberated them are waging battle with the potential villain and no one with a weaker Quirk is safe.

  But here, a child who until moments ago had not manifested a Quirk, comes sprinting the other direction, heading straight for the altercation. Breath sobs out of his mouth and suffering suffuses his features. "This time," he pants. "Surely, this time…"

  Ahead of this youth, the conflict comes into view. The villainous teen is flying through the air, a short purple hero attached to him by some sort of rope made of large balls like those on the hero's head. "I never thought it was your power that made you awesome!" yells the purple hero. "I fell for you when you were scared and sweating buckets and quaking in your boots! Back when we found a path forward together…the way you were back then!"

  The villainous youth, however, flicks the purple hero away with contemptuous ease. "Sorry, Mineta!" he calls back as the purple hero falls away. "That old me is gone…"

  The desperately sprinting boy below them notices none of this interplay. "MOM!" he screams, and the other teens, who were preparing something on the ground, turn his way with shock and alarm on their faces. "TODOROKI, WAIT!" screams someone, and a teen with white and red hair stumbles slightly as he aborts his Quirk activation.

  The youth sprints directly past them, straight through the area Todoroki had been planning to construct a huge ice ramp and disappears into the ruined city blocks beyond. Todoroki shakes the surprise off, stomps his foot, and summons his ramp…but the villainous looking one has disappeared into the night, slung away by a black, whip-like Quirk.

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  "DEKU!" screams a girl floating in mid-air, nothing responding but silence and a burgeoning sense of failure.

  The pebble having dropped, now the ripples spread. Midoriya has escaped, and the distraught Class 1-A returns to U.A. in defeat. In the days to come, several of them will break with the school and try once more to bring their wayward classmate and friend to his senses. Others will stay with the school, unwilling to defy one of the few vestiges of authority that remain in their lives. One of these is Minoru Mineta.

  Society continues to crumble, and the villain called All For One rises briefly to prominence before his public reign of terror is overthrown by a last desperate alliance of heroes and what is left of the Japanese government. When the dust clears, All For One is no more, but the cost is more than Japan can bear. The heroes who brought him low are, almost to a person, slain. All Might and his heir Izuku Midoriya are both missing and presumed dead. U.A. is almost entirely destroyed.

  But life goes on, and although Minoru plummets to the lowest point of his life so far, the years continue to pass. Order—in the form of growing numbers of gangs and foreign agents—reasserts itself, to a large extent. And if hope is in short supply, and violence an everyday occurrence, well…life continues. All For One has left terrible scars on everything he touched, but humanity finds its way regardless.

  With help from an unexpected source, Minoru claws his way out of the dark place he has been stuck in for years, but then just as he seems on the cusp of achieving happiness, tragedy strikes: a Quirk-fueled altercation levels an entire city block and takes Minoru's happiness with it.

  Unbeknownst to him, however, the ripples from that long-ago pebble have not yet ceased their spread…