Viridian: The Green Guide

Chapter 40: Theory

Izuku was about to close out of his most recent quirk theory lesson, but then frowned and hesitated before reopening his online textbook. For the past week, he hadn't been able to get what Eraserhead said about the symbol of evil out of his mind. On the one hand, it should be impossible for someone to take and give quirks like that, but on the other hand, the one thing that was consistent about quirks was that they were unpredictable. It was part of what made quirk analysis so exciting!

Which was why he couldn't stop thinking about it. If All for One really did exist, or even just had existed at some point, it could spark so many new theories about how quirks work or even how they'd begun. Even if his research was ultimately a dead end, Izuku still couldn't resist figuring out if something like that was even possible. Even if it didn't help the case, it would make for an interesting afternoon and might even help him learn more about some heroes' quirks. Not to mention that he'd be able to tell Eraser for sure that it wasn't possible, rather than relying only on gut instinct.

So where should he even start? If he tried to search his textbook for giving quirks it would probably just kick out a genetics lesson, and if he tried taking quirks he'd probably get something on emulator and copy quirks, or maybe a reference to Eraserhead if the textbook was up to date. After probably way too long thinking about it, he finally just decided to search the text for All for One and see if it brought anything up. It probably wouldn't, but it was at least worth a try, and he could cross that bridge when he came to it.

The page loaded almost intently, even though Izuku's anxiety made it feel like it took forever, and when the results finally came up, he stared at the single reference in a daze for almost a full minute before he jerked awake and practically jumped out of his seat in his hurry to click the link. It was a passing reference in one of the appendices which was why Izuku had never read it before, not that it would have caught his eye if he had without Eraser calling his attention to it.

Transferable quirks, though theoretically possible (Schnider, 2308), are largely considered to be a myth by both the academic community and the world at large, which is why they will not be covered in any great detail here.

The fact that transferable quirks were a myth didn't surprise him at all, that was both his and Eraser's first thought after all. Even the fact that there were enough people that were interested in them to have research papers written on the subject, even though it was unexpected, still didn't come as any surprise. No, what shocked Izuku was that one little line at the beginning.

...though theoretically possible...

He didn't waste any time navigating to the bibliography and tracking down the article. It was a little dated, but it would be a good launching pad for the rest of his research. The article itself was a bit dated and had originally been translated from german, so there were a few uncommon or niche words that Izuku had to look up, but it actually provided a good overview of the theory behind transferable quirks. According to the article, the main basis for the transferable quirk theory was that quirks have unlimited potential. If it was possible to have a quirk that allowed a person to survive in space or to jump higher than skyscrapers, it also had to be possible that a person could have a quirk that could take away another person's ability or even force an ability to manifest.

Izuku rapidly took notes as he read, noting down quotes and citations alongside his own thoughts and theories as his brain raced around in circles trying to disprove what he was reading. If quirks like this existed, why didn't anyone know about them? Were they just super rare? But Izuku knew about some quirks that only one person manifested and yet they still were still talked about and even taught about in schools, so it couldn't be just the rarity. And if these quirks did exist, why weren't they helping quirkless people? If they could transfer a quirk into someone quirkless, why wouldn't they? Didn't they realize how hard it was for Izuku to be the only kid in school without a superpower? Why couldn't they have given him a quirk?

Izuku forced himself out of his spiral when he realized that he had somehow snapped the pencil he was using in half. He stared at it in shock for a moment before shaking his head and getting a fresh pencil. That must be a fluke, there was no way he was strong enough to break a pencil just out of stress, even if he had been getting more exercise as a vigilante these past few months.

Izuku finished reading the article without any further incidents and was about to turn to the bibliography to find some more sources when he stopped and opened up a search engine instead. Using the bibliography would lead him to older articles than he really wanted, considering that the article itself was almost 50 years old, but if he were to look up reviews of the article, those would most likely cite more recent research as they attempted to either refute or confirm the original article's thesis.

Most of the reviews he found were attempting to basically bash the transferable quirk theory in general, and most of them cited the same three articles that supposedly disproved it. The problem was that when Izuku read those articles...they were biased. It was pretty clear that they were relying more on rhetoric than research and were letting the conventional wisdom of how quirks were supposed to work color their hypothesis. That didn't necessarily mean they were wrong! Conventional wisdom was common for a reason, afterall! But in this case...it was just slightly suspicious, considering that there was actually plenty of evidence to the contrary.

One article in particular that caught Izuku's eye was called The Legend of All for One: A Quantitative Analysis of Transferable Quirks and their effects on the body.

The article was by an American researcher a few years ago that ran in some of the same circles as David Shield, the support engineer that All Might was friends with when he studied abroad in America, but it had never been translated into Japanese, which Izuku thought was weird considering that eh article itself identified All for One as a Japanese myth specifically. It made him really grateful that his online English class was so fast paced! He still had to have a dictionary open as he read, but he was able to read the article without too much trouble, even more so because most of it was charts that showed the evidence in support of the transferable quirk theory.

Izuku's vigilante alarm went off just as he was about to dive into the charts and it startled him so badly he jumped out of his chair and slammed his notebook shut. Was it already that time? Izuku frowned indecisively for a long moment before canceling the alarm and sitting back down. This research counted as vigilantism, especially since it was looking more and more like transferable quirks were possible, and Izuku needed to know everything he could about them.

Eraserhead would kill him if he went into a fight unprepared.

Izuku spent the next several hours combing through all the evidence that the article provided. There were several people who lacked the extra toe-joint, but had still manifested as quirkless, while other people had it, but had manifested quirks anyway. Even once he considered that some of those could be explained by quirks with restrictive activation costs, mutation quirks that caused abnormalities in the feet, or even just people downright lying, there were just too many cases for Izuku to ignore.

The most concerning section of the article had been the section on people who had the extra toe joint and should have been quirkless, but had somehow manifested quirks anyway. According to the limited research that had been done, those individuals had, with few exceptions, died remarkably young. Most of them showed signs of impossibly early muscle atrophy, as well as alztimers and dementia. From the brain scans included in the article it looked almost as if the brain was eating itself alive.

It was practically identical to the autoimmune response Eraser had described in the berserker they'd captured. Which meant that somehow, the villain factory was trying to force extra quirks into these people and was trying to compensate for the body's response by forcing mutations. The only problem was that the experiments weren't working. Hamasaki was still going braindead, just like the naturally quirkless people in the article.

As the sun came up and he finally went to bed, Izuku couldn't help but feel grateful he'd never been offered a quirk that wasn't his. It seemed like it would be really hard on his body.