Chapter 1

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Kyouka Jirou was by no means what anyone would call an ostentatious kind of girl.

She strived to not necessarily be forgotten, but to blend into the background of things.  Her style was definitely rebellious - mostly black clothing with a punk rocker edge - but it was never too over-the-top. She wore makeup, but not much - just black eyeliner nowadays. She had stopped painting the red triangles on her cheeks for her hero costume at the end of her first year at UA.  It was just for fun, and really, it gave her more attention than she had wanted. She had grown sick of answering the questions as to why she wore that particular shape on her face. She just really liked Princess Mononoke, alright? Was it such a crime to want to emulate a badass female character?

Jirou, shortly before starting her first term as a third year at UA, had opted to change up her hairstyle a bit as well.  She was initially a little nervous about how it would be perceived by her classmates, but after some debate, she decided she wanted to do it, others’ opinions be damned.  It would look pretty much the same as before, after all, besides an undercut on the back and sides of her purple-haired head. 

Yes, purple. One would think she would stick out more for someone with such oddly colored hair, but that was not the case, especially in the newly-dubbed class of 3-A.  First, there was her best friend, Mina, who was entirely pink, as well as Midoriya’s emerald green hair or Todoroki’s red and white colored locks split evenly down the middle.  No, in class 3-A, she was...normal. Average. Nondescript. Just the way she liked it. When school started up again after summer break, she had gotten a few compliments on her new hairstyle from the girls in her class, but none of the boys had seemed to notice - that, or they had decided not to comment on it.  Typical.

Our heroine Jirou Kyouka was now a few weeks into her third year at UA. She was walking by herself to homeroom from the class A dorms, her wireless earbuds blaring her current favorite song in her ears, trusty coffee thermos in hand.  Sure, she could use her earphone jacks to listen to music, but she had gotten sick of accidentally ripping them out of her phone port when distracted and lost in thought...which was often.  Besides, as one would assume, yanking on them unexpectedly was quite painful and not at all enjoyable.  Anyway, halfway through her first year, she had gotten into the habit of getting up early to avoid people in the breakfast hall and on the way to class, as she was barely even a person in the mornings before having consumed at least one cup of coffee. She got up so early, in fact, that the only other one of her classmates that rose around the same time as her was none other than Bakugou.

Said classmate woke up every morning at precisely 6 am to go for a run prior to coming to class. She would know this because her hearing was, as expected, excellent, and her room was the closest to the class 3-A boys’ hallway. She could hear his alarm go off as soon as the clock struck 6. Thankfully, this worked in her favor.

The explosion quirk user was usually just returning from his run when Jirou was walking out the door each morning, not that he paid her any mind.  They had been going to school together now for over two years, and both had - mostly - the same circle of friends, but she doubted Bakugou even knew her real name. He insisted on calling her 'Ears' on the rare occasion he would ever address her, which she hated.  She was hyper aware of the wires permanently hanging from her earlobes, thank you very much, though she had grown more confident with their appearance over time.

She was capable at this point of retracting the wires to a much smaller length at will, to about the length of a rather dangly pair of earrings, and she would do so if they ever got in the way during her training and patrols, but she had grown comfortable enough to not want to bother shortening them for the sake of vanity.  Besides, it kept the extremely shallow boys in her class and other classes at bay, for which she was thankful. If you couldn’t accept her at her weirdest, she didn’t want you in her life. Which was more than fair, Jirou often thought.

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