#disney-muse

But she hadn’t expected this. Becoming a hostage for a villain who’s apparently All Might’s archnemesis is the last thing she’d expected.

The villain has his arm wrapped around her waist and has her pulled tight against him, her back to his front, with his hand carefully pressing against her throat, not hard enough to choke, but certainly hard enough to threaten. 

All Might is helpless in front of her, and she manages to tilt her head up to see the expression on the villain he’d called All For One’s face. 

He’s smirking, and the look is unfairly attractive.

“You know, as fun as this is All Might, I have better things to do,” All For One says, thumb gently stroking the side of Inko’s neck. “So give up, and Miss Midoriya stays safe.”

“Let her go,” All Might orders again, and Inko can tell he’s trying to figure out how to save her before All For One kills her. 

“You’re being annoying,” All For One informs him. “So you know what? We’re going to leave.”

Wait what?

Inko yelps as they suddenly teleport away. 

“My apologies Inko, but I had to improvise,” Hisashi says, pressing a kiss against her head. 

“You’re a supervillain,” she says faintly, slumping back into her fiance’s body. “You’re All Might’s archnemesis.”

“I am,” Hisashi admits. “Does it help, however, that you hadn’t really been in danger the entire time?”

“As long as you let me write the article on this,” she says, and she can practically feel the wince on his face. 

It’s his own fault for becoming part of her next big story.

“I don’t get a say, do I?”

I do believe that Horikoshi intentionally created it be the mirror parallel of the story. It’s really a nice touch in all honesty.

Yeah, that’s about where the original idea runs into a wall of sorts. On the one hand, there is the “stepped fully-formed out of the dreamscape” origin deep in the beginnings of this AU. On the other hand, later concepts and characters - such as Lucy Ann - have real-world origins that stretch back long before the Transcendence occurred. 

We could perhaps split the difference: since ghosts and demons existed independently of the Transcendence (just usually on a slightly different plane and only occasionally reachable), others may have as well…such as vampires, for instance. After all, vampires, like ghosts, are supernatural beings that were once humans, and so they would have material-plane origins.

Beings such as fairies, mermaids, and centaurs or the like, however, don’t necessarily have that human origin or transformation narrative, and so are likelier candidates for the dreamscape-merging origin.

Mod Z edit: there actually WERE some supernatural creatures on earth before the Transcendence! After all, the myths and legends had to start from somewhere; most of the time it’s due to human imagination, but sometimes tales are started from true stories.

Hhhh thank you thank you! Especially for resending this lol, I’m sorry my inbox shat the bed. You have some really excellent questions, and several of them I hadn’t even considered asking myself! Good stuff.

So Ladybug’s opinion on the “civilians” coming to her aid? Actually, she’s grateful. I think it’s really important to make the distinction between Civilian and Champion here, because in Ladybug’s world, the civilians aren’t helpful. They get in the way and they try to play hero and the get horribly injured. Ladybug wants civilians safe. But champions? Whole different story.

Ladybug isn’t completely comfortable with the idea of Champions helping her at first– having extra people fighting presents greater risk of having injured or killed people. But when they first start coming, she’s tired and stressed and needs someone else’s help. She’s in over her head. The champions are far more capable than any civilian could ever be, and she recognizes that divide and conquer is a completely valid strategy. After a few champions, she grows to trust Greyling’s choices and lets lie the backburner consideration about them possibly dying.

Greyling has a much harder time letting that go, by comparison, but Nooroo lets him know that he needs to have the utmost faith in whoever he gifts powers. So Greyling projects a confidence in his champions, and there is a small but nonzero amount of concern that he has for their lives. That’s something he vents to the butterflies about at some point.

As for the people he picks, they have to be absolutely willing to help. Almost always, they are. Nooroo teaches Adrien that to get someone’s help, you have to quickly be able to read where they’re coming from, why they feel the way they do, and how to best turn that into a positive energy. Adrien still seeks out those in a bad mood because human psychology makes negative emotions far easier to pick up, but instead of feeding their fury, he redirects it. For example, Greyling explains to an upset Mr. Pigeon that people don’t understand that pigeons aren’t so bad and can in fact be a force of Good, and suggests that helping Ladybug with them might be a good way to prove that to Paris. This puts us in a position such that the beginning circumstances are not unlike what HM faces, but Greyling completely turns the tides in a different direction.

Mizar faded first.

Of course Mizar faded first.

He hadn’t even noticed when the stars vanished from the Earth’s sky; he had been too busy (being alone). It was only when he turned his mind to numbering the galaxies for something to do that he realized something was gone, something was missing--

(It took a moment, a human age, for him to realize what it was. The cosmos had shifted since before. There was no long-handled cup in the sky, not any longer, and the Twin Stars had likewise drifted apart to new places, unfamiliar though he had seen it happen, knew it would.)

Four stars in one, and all four had faded - his mind reached - millions of years, numbers running down through months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, smaller in his mind, and what had he been doing when they had gone, what had he been doing when the last of their light reached the earth before winking out forever - he hadn’t known.

Alcor still shone. Of course it did. Two stars there, smaller, longer-lived because they burned less brightly, and for the first time in how long? he felt the first stirrings of...something.

He reached across the universe with wings of golden light and encompassing darkness, felt the dying stars, burning the last of their lives away (how long did they have? Numbers, years, months, days...)