Fanfic / Shell Game

A crossover between Catch Your Breath, a Naruto fanfic, with My Hero Academia. Can be found here on Archive of Our Own.

Summary:

The mission is simple: Infiltrate the most famous hero academy in all of Japan as undercover security, at least until All for One is brought down for good. There are a few steps missing in this plan, Kei knows, but that's not her concern. No, she has a different problem to juggle on top of cultural context, keeping under the radar, and a universe full of superpowers: the entire high school experience.

After all, "simple" and "easy" are not the same thing.

Shell Game contains examples of:

• Badass Teacher: Common among UA's faculty, because they're all pro heroes in their own right. However, the top tiers are occupied by All Might and Minato, who team up toward the end of the story for the Hideout Raid Arc.
• Big Damn Heroes: Pulled off a few different times, in the grand heroic tradition.
  • When Izuku is kidnapped by a Nomu, Kei and Hitoshi chase after him without a real plan—only for Eraserhead to show up via Dynamic Entry.
  • Kei arrives to relieve Kakashi in the fight against the Sea Urchin Nomu, having killed her original opponent offscreen.
  • Minato facilitates this, bringing himself and All Might to the fight. Right in front of All For One, who takes a superpowered punch to the face before he can finish a sentence.
• Big Brother Instinct: Displayed early on by Kei, who Hitoshi is certain would have applied a Coup de Grâce to a minor villain who threatened Hayate. The incident sticks with him for the rest of the story.
• Body Horror: Common with Nomu, but the Sea Urchin Nomu is the strongest example. It displays multiple Quirks, including imperfect healing, Super-Speed, launchable spines, and what seems like a chemical factory in its body.
• But Now I Must Go: Kei plans to leave Tokyo after her mission to take down All For One is complete.
• Call-Forward: Common, since this story takes place when Kei is a teenager before her "hell year" experience.
• Caught Up in a Robbery: Hitoshi first gets a demonstration of what the Gekko siblings are like outside of school when they're all dragged into a bank robbery without any pro heroes around to help. The second Kei, Hayate, and Hitoshi are in an area free of security cameras, it's a Curb-Stomp Battle in favor of the ninjas.
• Commonality Connection: Kei is used to the idea of being ostracized for a power she has, like Hitoshi, but obviously can't explain it to him. Similarly, she equates All For One to Orochimaru, Danzo, and even Madara, using that connection to sympathize with All Might and with the Nomu.
• Country Mouse: What Hitoshi initially thinks Kei is, because she moved to Tokyo to attend UA and occasionally boggles at the sights like a tourist. Which is technically true, but not the whole story.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: Kei's Tsunami "Quirk" becomes this, so she tries to avoid using it while in her Turtle identity. What actually blows Kei's cover is Obito, who isn't as careful to separate his Kamui uses from his civilian cover and provides an easy explanation for how the "masked figures" are getting around in Tokyo.
• Crossover: Between Catch Your Breath and My Hero Academia.
• Culture Clash: Because the bulk of the story takes place in a world where professional heroism is a cultural norm, there's a strong theme of public accountability and commercialization among the Japanese hero industry. Their Quirks and skills are a matter of public record. This is baffling to the shinobi, who come from a world where mercenary work is the norm. Public accountability also means that hero weaknesses are easily deduced, while the shinobi rely heavily on stealth, lethal force, and no one figuring out how their ninjutsu actually work.
  • This plays to Hitoshi's advantage in one small way, too: While Mind Control is considered an inherently villainous power on Earth, Kei and Hayate don't see much of a moral component to it. Hayate's jonin-sensei is even a Yamanaka, whose whole clan uses variations of standard Psychic Powers.
  • Kei has no interest whatsoever in becoming a hero, which puts her at odds with most of UA and especially Hitoshi, who wants more than anything to prove the world wrong about his "villainous tendencies."
• Curb-Stomp Battle: A few.
  • Kei never has any problem taking out the UA testing robots. Her sheer power also overwhelms Bakugo Katsuki during their match in the Sports Festival before she deliberately disqualifies herself.
  • Kei beats the crap out of some bank robbers the first time they hang out with Hitoshi, made even easier by one of them having a water-controlling Quirk and giving Kei ammunition.
  • Shinso Hitoshi vs. Tokoyami Fumikage should have been this, only for Hitoshi to eke out a win with his powers.
  • While Kakashi's struggle with the Sea Urchin Nomu is a dramatic, terrifying moment for him and the students he's defending, Kei kills it almost instantly after she arrives.
• Cute Kitten: One of Hitoshi's weaknesses. The characters visit a cat cafe twice in-story, which of course puts Cuteness Overload on display. Shortly after the first visit, Nomu attack the city. During the second visit, Kei admits to Hitoshi that she's going to leave Tokyo before the new school term.
  • Kei muses that All Might and Aizawa might get along better if they visited such a cafe together.
  • It turns out that Hitoshi's caller ID for Aizawa is a black kitten in Eraserhead cosplay.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Native, due to the Hosu Arc going off the rails.
  • All For One.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: Kei can't bring herself to care about schoolwork, which tanks her grades. On the subject of her "Quirk," though, people are surprised at its power when she goes all-out. And even then, that's just using what she can get away with in her student persona.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Done in the lead-up to the Hideout Raid Arc. During the Camp Training Arc, Kakashi and Obito both exhaust themselves getting most of the students in 1-A and 1-B to safety, because the League of Villains dropped suped-up Nomu into the forest in an attempt to overpower the heroes. As a result, they're both hospitalized for the duration of the Hideout Raid Arc. When Kei needs help, Minato shows up instead.
• Dynamic Entry: Pulled off by Kei, Aizawa, Obito, All Might, and Minato.
• Everyone Can See It: Granted, Kakashi doesn't spend much time in Tokyo, but Hitoshi only has to meet him once to instantly pick out his crush on Kei. Obito agrees and busts a gut laughing over it.
• Evil Gloating: Attempted multiple times, but ends worst for All For One. Talk to the Fist ensues.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • Kei's attitude and performance at the Sports Festival cause the League of Villains to look into recruiting her.
  • Obito and Kakashi taking out Stain as a bonus mission ends up saving Ingenium's career and throwing the Hosu Arc entirely off track.
  • Team Minato's presence prevents the League from kidnapping Ragdoll despite their reinforcements.
  • Kei getting kidnapped by the League of Villains frees her up to attack All For One in "self-defense," because she's taken to the heart of their operations, and it also attracts Minato's attention to the League.
• Heroic Bystander: Hitoshi starts out as this. When cornered by minor villains during a botched bank robbery, he's terrified and has no fighting skills outside of his Quirk. Despite this, he pulls a Go Through Me in an attempt to protect Hayate. Luckily for him, Hayate and Kei were deliberately baiting the villains into an area with no security cameras. Cue beatdown.
  • That said, Kei agrees when Hitoshi asks for training. It's framed as a deal exchanging homework help for combat training, but Kei doesn't improve her grades much over the course of the story.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Kei holds back on both her "Quirk" and her martial arts skills while getting into fights over the course of her months in Tokyo, because she matches threats as they appear. She only really cuts loose with her V2 transformation at the very end of the story.
• Identical Stranger: Aizawa isn't well-known as Eraserhead, being an underground hero, but people who meet him and then see Kei tend to assume they're related. Hitoshi, upon interacting with both Hayate and Kei, mentally deems them both "Eraserhead lookalikes." This becomes a Running Gag that drives both Kei and Aizawa up the wall.
• Improvised Training: Because there's no access to higher-quality materials or equipment at first, Hitoshi doesn't have chakra, and Kei doesn't really know how to teach civilians at this point, their attempts to prepare for the Sports Festival come off like this. Kei does teach Hitoshi self-defense over the course of their friendship, but at the beginning often forgot that he didn't have the superhuman stamina she was used to seeing from her peers. She had to outsource some of the planning to Gai's expertise.
  • Hitoshi and Kei later practice stealth by playing hide-and-seek in the repaired USJ, only to eventually be interrupted by Katsuki.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • Hitoshi Shinso's Sports Festival team still includes Ojiro and Shoda, despite him not using Mind Control on them this time.
  • Bakugo Katsuki still wins the Sports Festival and is still kidnapped by the League of Villains.
• Likes Clark Kent, Hates Superman: A common problem between UA students and the shinobi, in their civilian identities. Hitoshi in particular considers Kei his First Friend and likes spending time with her, and Kei thinks well enough of him to help him train in hand-to-hand combat from very early on. She even gets her friends involved, if remotely. However, very few people in Tokyo think well of the shinobi when they act as vigilantes.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Most of the characters native to Tokyo. By the end of the story, the Bakugo Rescue Squad and Hitoshi know that Kei and her friends are shinobi. Of them, only Katsuki, Izuku, and Hitoshi are explicitly filled in on the existence of Isobu and the not-entirely-truthful "multiple Quirks" explanation.
• Metaphorically True: How Kei lies to her schoolmates. She says she's a Bad Liar otherwise. After actually seeing how she applies this skill, it's clear she drops details all the time, but without context or with enough flippancy that other characters decide they don't want to ask for clarification.
• Mundane Object Amazement: The shinobi are fascinated by the wide variety of modern conveniences, from technology like phones to modern medical texts and snack foods. They also get caught staring at skyscrapers sometimes, which Hitoshi says pegs them as country bumpkins. The difference stands out so starkly, even to Konoha's upper echelons, that Kei is repeatedly sent out with itemized shopping lists for any exploitable tech resources she can send home.
• Mundane Solution: Instead of relying on Mandalay's Telepathy Quirk to communicate with all of the heroes and hero students during the Camp Arc, Kei's team of shinobi insists on also using radios.
• Mundane Utility: While not encouraged by Quirk laws, the shinobi have no issue using their training for things like cheating at tests, performing Cartoon Juggling, hide-and-seek, and playing pranks on people.
• Mysterious Protector: The shinobi serve as this to the Heroics students. Every time they're actually seen by said students, they scare the heck out of them.
• Not So Above It All: Even professional Ninja like Team Minato do things like coo over cats, enjoy ice cream, and get into petty arguments with each other.
• Oblivious Guilt Slinging: Done mostly by Hitoshi, who manages to make Kei feel guilty for being a shinobi and lying to him about it, and about her plan to leave Tokyo once the mission is over when she's his First Friend.
• Ordinary High-School Student: What Kei pretends to be in order to fit in at UA High School's General Education department. Coincidentally, she hates the Back to School aspects of the mission and blows off most of her school work. Her choice of Quirk and her affected apathy about grades make her stand out in a negative way, but she manages to keep her cover intact long enough to complete her mission.
• Play-Along Prisoner: Though Kei is kidnapped in her civilian identity at the beginning of the Hideout Raid Arc, this is exactly the wrong move for the League of Villains. While officially sidelined by Minato to avoid conflict with the pro heroes' operation, being grabbed means that Kei is escorted to the League's hideout and held captive alongside Katsuki. Kei even assumes that if she isn't brought to where he is, she could be taken either to a secondary location where she can wreak havoc or perhaps even to her ultimate target, All For One. It also gives both of the captives the right to use their Quirks in self-defense.
• Punched Across the Room: All Might ends up doing this to Kei (breaking one of her ribs even in V2), and the first Nomu, in that order. Both of them are launched out of the USJ's ceiling.
• Punny Name: Common among UA students, to the point of being remarked upon by Kei (who doesn't have one). Shinso Hitoshi, of course, is the one to grumble about it when Kei points his out.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: All Might ends up as this, while Nezu is difficult to read and Aizawa is more antagonistic toward Kei than either. Class 1-C's homeroom teacher, Midnight, also turns out to be very concerned about her students even though she knows Kei is a plant.
• Secret Identity: Not actually common in Quirk-Tokyo, because superheroes are public servants and celebrities who are registered with the government. Only All Might goes to the effort of separating his hero persona with his civilian ID, with even the hero students apart from Izuku kept ignorant of "Yagi-sensei." This makes the shinobi stand out, because Kei has a civilian cover identity as a UA student while going out at night as "Turtle," a masked vigilante. The other shinobi in the story don't even have official paperwork, outright introducing themselves as Kei's friends and not bothering with registration anywhere before joining her in the field.
• Secret Identity Vocal Shift: Kei, Obito, and Kakashi all wear ANBU-styled masks equipped with a voice-changing device to hide their identities when in uniform. Hitoshi also gets one from the Support Department once Aizawa starts training him to be a hero, in order to more effectively use his Quirk.
• Shared Family Quirks: Kei and Hayate are noted to be fairly similar, which is emphasized by their appearances. The main difference is that Hayate appears to be the more outgoing of the two. They tell Hitoshi they get it from their mother.
• Sleep Cute: Happens with Team Minato, whose stays in Kei's Tokyo apartment end up like this. Slightly hampered by Kakashi's blanket thief tendencies.
• Snark-to-Snark Combat: Since both Hitoshi and Kei are fairly sarcastic, this happens a lot between them.
• Talk to the Fist: Common in fights involving shinobi. When All For One tries to give his big villainous monologue, he is attacked several times before finishing his argument.
• Took a Level in Badass: Shinso Hitoshi, as a result of self-defense training with Kei.
• Terror Hero: The shinobi come across like this, preferring to appear and disappear from sight with no warning, while attacking opponents who never see them coming. However, this has the side effect of scaring the heroes when they decide to act, because the level of violence they use is well beyond legal limits.
  • Kei in particular uses Isobu's power as a Supernatural Fear Inducer, which makes the moments when she rips into her villain opponents even more disturbing. She literally burns out the toughest Nomu left with the force of Isobu's chakra, leaving Not Enough to Bury.
• Training from Hell: Unintentional example, because Kei honestly forgot that Hitoshi was a civilian and that she'd have to adjust her expectations about his physical conditioning downward. What exercise she's been undergoing since childhood lays him out flat.
• Uncanny Valley: A common reaction In-Universe to seeing Nomu, who look like they could have been human. Once. Kei, on the other hand, initially thinks that the Nomu must all be members of an unfortunate family because she doesn't know how Quirks work. She has to be told what they really are.
• Underestimating Badassery: The League of Villains knows that Kei has a "Quirk" that is strong enough to wreck shop against most people, but don't seem to fully understand that she's a lot more willing to break rules and use that power against villains than she seems. Hilariously, Katsuki is one of the first people to catch onto the fact that she's holding back all the time, and spends much of his on-page time calling her out on it.
• Unknown Rival: Bakugo Katsuki is this for Kei, but only after she repeatedly antagonizes him (somewhat unintentionally) during the Sports Festival. While she's aware he's hostile to her, Kei dismisses him entirely as a threat and mostly treats him as an annoyance. Once Katsuki sees why Kei gives him none of her time during the Hideout Raid Arc, he dials it back.
• Wake Up, Go to School & Save the World: Kei runs her nighttime patrol missions while attending school during the day. Not surprisingly, she ends up very sleep-deprived on weekdays.
• Wrong Context Magic: While chakra runs on stamina, like Quirks do, it can also produce a wide variety of exotic effects based on hand seals. The existence of superpowers based on specific motions or parts of someone's anatomy aren't strange, but having multiple, unrelated supernatural effects is. Water Release ninjutsu serves as her Quirk while in Tokyo. When pretending to be the mysterious "Turtle," Kei is careful not to use Water Release while wearing the mask to avoid associating her secret identity with her student persona.
  • As a counterpoint, some Quirks can sneak past the defenses of trained chakra users. Even Stain's Quirk, Bloodcurdle, can affect Obito if he drops his guard.
• You Fight Like a Cow: Specifically called out as something Kei hates. While she can toss snark with the best of them outside of a fight, she often refuses to respond if bad guys are quipping mid-fight.
  • On the other hand, Obito gleefully taunts opponents because he can avoid most attacks with Kamui.

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