Oil and Water
Shiketsu Hero Academy, Outside Dorm Building
Stepping out of his father’s Honda, Gyoyu drags a large suitcase out of the back seat. Its plastic wheels clatter down onto the pavement. Two more boxes of his things sit on the back seat, and Gyoyu rests one hand on his hip, considering how best to carry it all without making it a double trip. His father, a man with wrinkly cheeks and a thin beard, leans over the back of the driver’s seat. “You sure you don’t want me to help you carry it in?”
“Psh, nah,” swinging his head to the side, Gyoyu does his best to look disaffected. “It’s already gonna look bad for my brand getting dropped off by my pops, like some elementary schooler.” There’s an old fixer-upper with Gyoyu’s name on it back home in the garage, but they don’t have the thing roadworthy yet. A ride beats lugging his stuff across the city on foot, but that’s about as far as he’s willing to bend.
Just leaves the question of how to get it all up in one haul. Gyoyu doesn’t want to leave any of his things out here on the side of the road for whoever to grab. “If you insist,” his dad relents. The longer they’re standing there, the longer someone has to see them, so Gyoyu wracks his brain for a plan.
An idea strikes, and Gyoyu snaps his fingers. “Hah,” he laughs. From his pompadour, a little trail of grease runs down the back of the black jacket he wears over his Shiketsu uniform. Gyoyu grabs one of the boxes and pushes it against his back, then coagulates the grease coating into a sticky adhesive that holds it in place. Could’ve just used his grease hand, but carrying heavy stuff with it takes a lot more effort and energy. “I’m a fuckin’ genius.”
“Language.”
The short snap from his father cracks Gyoyu’s character for a moment, and he rubs the back of his head. “Sorry, dad,” he says in a more casual voice.
“Method acting or no, you will show respect when speaking in front of your father,” his dad insists. Gyoyu nods meekly, and his father returns the nod, satisfied that they have an understanding. “Good luck at school, son. You know I am only a phone call away.”
“Sure, sure. Love ya, pops.”
“I love you too, son.”
Dragging the other box out and looping one arm through the handle of his pack, Gyoyu nudges the car door shut with his foot. He watches his father drive off, and doesn’t approach the stone outer wall of the dorm grounds until he loses sight.
There’s a bored-looking attendant at the gate who checks Gyoyu’s student ID, then buzzes him through. Gyoyu avoids making any eye contact, embarrassed upon realizing someone had overheard the entire exchange with his father.
Shiketsu Hero Academy, First Year Dorms
“…no smoking within the grounds…” the old woman, in her grim-looking attire that would be more at home in a funeral procession, lists off all of the dorm building’s rules as she leads Gyoyu through the halls of the first floor. He playfully reaches into his coat and takes out what seems to be a pack of smokes, popping it open. The dorm manager, who’d introduced herself as Mrs. Teel, looks back at him with a stern glare.
Smirking, Gyoyu takes a smoke and bites off the tip with his teeth, then flips it around to rest in his mouth. The candy inside is black, with little red spots throughout to simulate embers. Mrs. Teel’s stern glare turns into a playful smile, and she shakes her head while Gyoyu chews at the candy cigarette. Grabbing it between two fingers, he takes it out for a moment to share a laugh with her. “Relax. It’s part of the look, ya know? But I don’t want lung cancer.”
“That may still send the wrong sort of message to the youth, you know,” the woman’s foreign accent tinges her Japanese, but it is clear and well-practiced.
“Only if I ain’t open about them being candies,” Gyoyu argues.
They come up to their destination, room 119. It’s right at the end of the hall. Flicking out his student key, Gyoyu steps forward to open it, but Mrs. Teel holds up a hand to stall him. “Before we go inside, you should know that your room has had some recent renovations to accommodate another student’s unique Quirk needs.”
“Oh yeah?” Gyoyu raises one eyebrow. Stepping past the threshold as Mrs. Teel opens the door for him, the fake delinquent’s hunched posture shoots his head forward. His eyes bulge out at the sight inside the room. “Nani?!”
The right half side of the room had been renovated, replacing the standard floor, desk and bunk bed with a broad tiled mini-pool. Or maybe giant-bathtub is a better descriptor. A folding desk is up against the far wall, looking a bit like a prison bench, and a waterproof computer tablet is sitting on top of it on a charging stand. More shelves line the wall, filled with strange lotions and other products Gyoyu isn’t familiar with. Inside of the pool is a slim boy with an open-faced Shiketsu blazer hanging off of his shoulders, leaning against the round, cushioned edges of the pool and relaxing. That’s not the unusual part, or what made Gyoyu’s eyes bulge out- it’s the giant octopus-body that extends below the boy’s waist. Cracking one eye open, the boy looks up at Gyoyu’s stunned expression. “Hey. You my roommate?”
Gyoyu steps in further, onto the world’s largest bathmat, arranged in front of the door like a welcome mat. Smoothing out his hair with a brush of his hand, Gyoyu regains his composure and returns to a relaxed slouch. “Yeah, that’s me. Kamiya Gyoyu, nice to meet’cha.” He extends an open hand.
Sliding easily over to the edge of the pool, the boy eyes Gyoyu’s hand, as if expecting hair product to be coating it. Seeing none, he accepts the handshake. “Kotoko Takata.”
“I will leave the two of you to get to know each other. Your roommate contract is right here,” Mrs. Teel walks to the standard desk on Gyoyu’s side of the room, setting a small booklet on it. “It is to be filled out by the end of the week, no later, and represents an agreement to your conduct as roommates.”
“Sure thing,” leaning against the side of his desk, Gyoyu takes in his side of the room now. The desk, with a comfortable looking rolling chair, then a nice-looking if cramped bed where he sets the box in his arms. Both he and his roommate have a cabinet by the door for their belongings. A dry-erase board with a magnetic marker stuck to it hangs from the handle of Takata’s cabinet, within arm’s reach of the pool. Mrs. Teel makes herself scarce, and Gyoyu stretches his back. Damn, that slouch really does ruin your posture. “I don’t think we’ll have any problems,” he tells Takata. “I’m a pretty guy to get along with.”
Wearing a flat look on his face, Takata sucks his cheek into the side of his mouth. “I don’t know if pretty is the right word.”
“Huh?” blinking his eyes open, Gyoyu reviews what he said. Nearly slipping off the side of his desk, he clears his throat and stammers, face going flush. “Pretty easy, I mean. I’m a pretty easy guy.” His eyebrows twitch. “To get along with.”
Takata in the pool is barely paying attention to Gyoyu’s social stumbling, too busy checking the charge of his tablet. “Alright.” Apparently satisfied, he plucks it off of the charger and leans back, but keeps glancing up at Gyoyu. “You stick to things?”
Scratching his cheek, Gyoyu tilts his chin towards Takata. “Eh? What?”
“Your Quirk,” the octopus-boy points a finger, bringing Gyoyu’s attention to the box still glued to his back.
“Oh yeah! Almost forgot about that. Heyy, thanks for letting me know, Kotoko-san,” taking a step forward, Gyoyu raises his head with a grin. “Lemme show you what I can do.” From his pompadour, another goopy hand made out of compressed grease emerges, flexing backwards like rubber to grab the box. Trails of oil flow into the adhesive and melt it down, breaking it back down into its original components and reabsorbing it. Lifting the box, Gyoyu leans back and uses one hand to shoot his new roommate a salute. “Aw yeah! The Delinquent Hero, Greasetrap, is finally here!”
Met with an exhausted face from the octopus guy, Gyoyu sets the box next to the other and retracts his third hand back into his hair. “You can probably guess what mine does,” one of Takata’s tentacles rises up to flop onto the side of the pool, sloshing some water down onto the absorbent bathmat in the process. Another tentacle tentatively joins it, and they clap their tips together with a wet slapping sound.
“Hey, hey, easy with the weird clapping,” Gyoyu jokes, “Somebody might get the wrong idea.”
Grabbing the two tentacles, Takata wrangles them back into the pool, scowling down at the two rebellious limbs. Gyoyu’s comment goes unremarked, with Takata merely continuing the previous subject, “I was thinking of going by the Abyssal Hero, Leviathan, for a hero name. It felt a little early but most of the students seem to have come up with one already.”
“Aw yeah, like that Lord Charbydis guy,” snapping his fingers, Gyoyu shoots one at Takata. “He’s been pretty big lately. Feel inspired by seeing another fish dude up on top?”
Closing his eyes, Takata sighs. “Cephalopod,” he says, with an irritated whine in his voice.
“Eh?”
“Octopodes are cephalopods. I am not a fish.”
“Oh, whoops. Sorry,” starting to unpack his things, Gyoyu talks over his shoulder. “Always wondered why there’s so many aqua-themed heroes in Kyoto, you know? Rescue Ray, Lord Charybdis, Magnum Shrimp. I guess Flamingal is sorta aquatic too? Water bird anyways.” His desk is soon furnished with a computer and desk lamp, alongside a pair of model cars he assembled and painted himself from kits: a black Suburu and a red Honda. Totally accurate all the way down. In the drawer of his desk, Gyoyu tucks away his pile of manga and his drawing tablet.
“Well, now that Charbydis made it big if I go with Leviathan everyone’s going to think I’m just copying him,” the boy complains in a droll, apathetic tone. “But it’s already on my student ID, so it’s a hassle to change it.” The water sloshes around in the pool when he shrugs- and especially when his huge tentacles join in with the motion, “It can’t be helped.”
“Yeah, I get it,” tossing some of his clothes from his rolling bag into the cabinet, Gyoyu peers over his shoulder. “Kinda feels like he went and yanked your brand out from under you?”
“Exactly.”
“But yet,” getting a wily grin on his face, Gyoyu reaches up into the air and squeezes the air with his hands. Takata stares at him with raised brows, as if he’d gone mad. “You seen that Akkoro lady? Holy hell, what a looker. Bet she really gets you going, huh?” He’s completely lost his audience. Takata turns away from the conversation, pretending to be engrossed in something on his tablet. “Ah,” Gyoyu waves a hand in the air. “You’ll get it when puberty starts to hit. When you know what it feels like to be a man, and have man needs, you’ll get what I’m sayin’.”
The conversation between them dies out, and Gyoyu focuses on getting settled in.
Three Days Later - Shiketsu Academy Art Room
When Gyoyu arrives to art class, fashionably late of course, Ms. Makura is already at work on her example at the front of the room. Tugging the candy cigarette he’d been outside pretending to smoke into his mouth, Gyoyu announces his presence with a bold crunch. Sensei’s ears twitch, and she greets him without turning around, “Gyoyu-kun. Late as usual, I hear.”
“Heh, hey, you know it, sensei,” he fires back familiarly, taking his place near the back of the class, next to the considerable floor space that had been spared for his roommate’s tentacles. Ms. Makura doesn’t pry any further. Gyoyu had shown his able hand at the visual arts, and she’s been cool about humoring his image.
“Detention with me as usual,” she says casually. Detention with Makura-sensei usually means listening to music while she does paperwork, or sitting around in a circle with other delinquents and talking about their feelings. Either way it turns out oddly therapeutic.
Looks like today they’re doing dot art. On Ms. Makura’s easel is a reptilian outline looking like a crime scene photo. Several layers of dots bleed out from the outline, creating a feeling of radiance. Grabbing one of the palettes at the side of the room. Gyoyu helps himself to some of the samplings of acrylic paints. To his left, one of the students is already deep into the project, before sensei is even finished her example.
“Done this before?” Gyoyu asks. The student is Ohene-kun, one of their class’ foreign students. There’s a few more of them than Gyoyu would’ve expected, at least for a place like Kyoto. The boy’s hair dangles behind him in tightly braided knots. Meeting him had been the first time Gyoyu’d seen dreads up close and in real life. They’re kinda cool. Definitely real punk aesthetic.
“This style of art is very common back home,” the African boy says in a level tone. “I know well what I am doing.” He’s chosen a black canvas- some of the other students have, too. Gyoyu considers it, and grabs one of the blocks prepared with a black canvas too. Black is more punk.
Ohene’s painting is set against darkness, but a brilliant swirl of red spirals out from the center, broken by a few gaps that look planned. With an artist’s eye, Gyoyu recognizes that there’s definitely a plan. A vision. Staring into his own canvas, Gyoyu begins piecing together potential images in his mind’s eye. “Cool, man,” he says, walking past Ohene back to his own easel. “Lookin’ forward to seeing it.”
Parked in front of his easel, Gyoyu gets to work. The vision is clear in his mind: a blue race car, screaming through a drift and sending out a trail of red sparks. Following the imagery in his mind’s eye, Gyoyu fills in each piece of the puzzle, and smiles in satisfaction when it starts to come together into reality. “How’s it comin’, roomie?” he asks, leaning over to check out Takata’s piece. His eyes go wide.
The shape of a wooden boat in browns had been started, but now there’s giant dots all over the canvas as Takata’s tentacles attempt to join in, either a part of the ship or the water. One of his suckers is stuck to the canvas, and he’s trying to subtly tug it free while shooting glances at Ms. Makura across the room, inspecting KK’s polka-dot pattern and trying to make sense of it.
“Yo, man, you’re gonna rip a hole in the canvas,” Gyoyu whispers, stepping closer.
“I can see that,” the boy says, irritation plain in his tone. “… Think your grease could help?”
“I can try.” Turns out the answer is no. Gyoyu tries to force a trail of grease between the sucker and the canvas, but the airtight grip of Takata’s tentacles doesn’t allow him any leverage. “Man, you’re really stuck on there. Maybe if we…” Grabbing the tentacle with two hands, and trying to dig greasy fingers underneath the sucker, Gyoyu stretches to set his foot against the canvas and pulls.
There’s a ripping sound, and then a clattering of an easel knocked into the back of Ichigo the row ahead of them. Takata’s tentacles easily catch himself, but Gyoyu trips backwards over one of them and finds himself collapsed in a tangle of rubbery flesh noodles. At least one of them cushions his fall before he slams the back of his head into the floor. “Yare yare…” Takata sighs, pulling a chunk of canvas free from the suction pad of his tentacle.
“What on Earth are you boys doing?” making her way over while Gyoyu flails to get to his feet, Ms. Makura swivels her ears towards the canvas, the even metronome of her clicking an invisible background noise to the students now. There’s a gaping hole in the canvas, right where the bottom of the ship would be. She doesn’t look surprised. “These canvases are very high quality. You must have grabbed on very hard, Takata-kun. Greater care will need to be taken with your tentacles.” There’s some snickering from Reiji and Yasu’s when she says the word. “Haha, tentacles,” she repeats in a deadpan voice, reaching down without looking to pull Gyoyu to his feet with ease. Damn, sensei has a strong arm...
“It was eh,” looking at the canvas, where a huge chunk is torn out of his dotwork ship, Takata looks aside out the window and excuses it as, “An artistic decision. It’s a shipwreck.”
Ms. Makura shakes her head and looks up at the clock. “Class is nearly over, Takata-kun. You can come also to detention and work on a new painting there.”
After she moves on, Takata sighs. Gyoyu slaps him on the back, “Finally joining me in detention, huh? Don’t worry, Makura-senpai is a chill jailer.” He leans in and whispers, “I think she uses it to help the slow kids after class.”
“I’m not a ‘slow kid’,” the mutant grumbles, shrugging Gyoyu’s hand off.
“Didn’t say you were,” Gyoyu denies, even though he almost immediately realizes he sort of did. Sometimes his mouth runs off before his brain can catch up, that way. With a faux-disaffected shrug of his own, Gyoyu gives Takata space and checks on what Akuba came up with.
“Yo, this is the real shit, Akuba-kun,” he compliments, examining the painstakingly precise swirl of color spiraling along an invisible web formed out of the negative space. It must’ve taken a really good mental picture to keep track of all that. At the center are a set of white dots set in an eerie grin. “But kind of a creepy smile there, ain’t it?”
“Smile? Ah no, no,” Akuba shakes his head. “They are eyes, you see. Of the spider at the center of the web.” The real eerie smile sits on Akuba’s face, like he’s imagining something sinister in his mind.
“Aw shit, never even thought of that,” Gyoyu rubs the back of his head and clears his throat, trying not to linger on the thought. “With your spider theme and all that. Right, yeah.” At the front of class, Gyoyu spots Ms. Makura getting up on the podium to announce clean-up. “You finished?” When Akuba nods, Gyoyu starts gathering up the palette and brushes. “Alright. Let me help clean this up.”
As usual, Gyoyu helps get the classroom clean after class ends. If he’s going to be fashionably late to his next class, he might as well be doing something worthwhile at the same time.