Chapter Text
“Long before heroes and villains…there were stories. And the most dangerous stories were the ones that could breathe.”
They say that the first humans to call lightning did not pray to gods, they spoke to them through poetic phrases.
For centuries, scattered across the globe, rare individuals carried something not in their blood, but in their soul.
An Ability.
A power born from the inner depths of their minds tied to myths.
Some called the wielders prophets, others witches, and the rest cursed.
Abilities could not be inherited, could not be cloned. When the wielder died, so too did their gift. The world never feared an army of them, only the tragedy of meeting one at the wrong time.
However, with the emergence of a new set of power it was discovered that abilities could be passed on by resonance inheritance.
When a soul dies, the soul-bound ability naturally seeks out the next closest blood relative’s soul.
The first Quirk Emergence began roughly 200 years ago in China. There was news that a baby that gave off light was born. After that came a second one, then a thousand more. Before anyone could question it, these new quirks had become the norm and dreams became reality.
No longer rare as before, the world had become a superhuman society with about 80% of the world’s population having the special trait of being quirked.
These quirks spread through bloodlines, shaping societies overnight. Researchers and doctors made these quirks measurable through data and biological proofs; quirks were the next stage of evolution in the human race.
A person’s quirk is genetic and classifiable into various sub-categories which showcased a human’s adaptability to changes.
Amidst the chaos, the old ability users vanished into obscurity. They had always been anomalies; now they were ghosts in the gene-mapped world of quirks.
Today, the Hero System is celebrated.
The world maps quirks with the precision of census data. But abilities?
They did not appear on scans. They left no genetic signature. They did not compete in the same arenas. The public hero system recognized only quirks. Leaving the ability organizations, with their Silver Oracle Licenses, to act like elite global leagues, shadow governments with power far beyond ordinary heroes.
The public believed quirks were the sole superpower, unaware that abilities had always pulled strings from the shadows.
30 Years Before Present Day,
Beneath the crystal surface of progress and regulation, a new chapter was being re-written in blood. It was in a hidden facility, far from the world’s eyes, that Paul Verlaine awoke to a destiny no child should bear, a destiny that would unravel the delicate balance between quirks and abilities forever.
Could a human vessel hold both quirks and abilities without tearing apart?