Having made the agreement, Johanna would run off and use scrap metal around her to slowly start grafting a thick layer of armour onto her being, it would slow her down, but she was betting that the hooligans were more interested in a fight than playing grabass.

Also, she was grinning from ear to ear. Everyone even had hero names ready, this was already one of the coolest days of her young life and she hadn’t even been accepted into U.A… yet.

”Hey you buncha gongheads, you want some trouble, how about you all take a free swing at me?!” she exclaimed with a loud boisterous claim.

She wasn’t lying either, it wasn’t much of a hero thing to do to let her opponents have free shots at her, but behind the metal plating she was confident that her claim wouldn’t lead to a shattered ego, not against these lowlives for certain!

The lowlives chattered amongst each other, real enough to come across as human beings rather than the bots they were, but despite them being ‘disposable machinery’, Johanna knew that wrecking them wasn’t going to be the right way to go about things.

Like a hero, she had to protect lives, even the ones of scumbags…

The first one would run at her and plant a boot on her shiny metallic armor, leaving a print but also leaving Johanna grinning confidently. The next one immediately came up and shattered a wooden baseball bat onto her back, with a ringing ‘ping’ echoing through the rainy night.

They tried a few more moves to little effect, and all that distraction had allowed Johanna to plate up her baton and in one quick move she swiped the legs of the first two with a heavy laboured arc.

”How about you two sit down before you make mistakes you’ll regret!” she claimed, feeling all heroic and tough.

Maybe style points weren’t part of the ratings, but she knew that demoralizing her opponents was very much a good tactic anyways.

As she went through the first group, she made sure to leave them with minimal permanent damage but enough lumps to rethink their life choices… She only stopped when she bumped chest to chest with a goon that was twice as tall and thrice as wide as she was.

”So you’re the boss of this mob, right?”

She smiled as she took a step back, digging in her heels and making clear that it was on the boss to try and topple her…

---

Johanna was practically a bouncing ball of energy the moment she had woken up this morning, stress and excitement all coalescing into one excessively hyperactive and overeager package. She had managed to pass all the hurdles before her, somehow gotten herself through the written portions of the entrance exams.

And now there was the big test to see if she was as good as she believed she was, alongside dozens of other students who wanted to show their own merits to the U.A. faculty and probably to one another too.

Outside it was beautiful weather, but once she walked inside she felt the humidity rise like a pressure cooker, amplified by the own pressure cooker in her stomach that was probably regretting not going for a light meal in the morning, but it was no time for regrets as she would be slotted in with two other students before coming face to face with pro hero and U.A. proctor Dauntless.

As if her excitement wasn’t high enough, she was going to be judged by pro heroes on top of all that.

”Save people, stop the villain, sounds like we can knock that one out of the park.” she’d big herself up.

The moment the floor was theirs, Johanna near enough immediately went into a dead sprint before being stopped at the last second by one of the other prospects. A red-haired girl who didn’t seem to her like they were a front line type of hero…

… She didn’t try to judge people on how they looked, but right now her mind was mostly running on instinct, stress, and excitement…

”Oh right, yeah, it’s probably smart to explain our abilities to one another before we run headlong into the fight!” she conceded, although the yearning to run off still tugged on her natural instinct.

Slapping her bicep Johnana would beam a smile at the other two. ”I can manipulate metal to surround myself with an armoured suit, I can also use it to cover objects and people in metal!” she’d exclaim in terms both simple enough for others as well as her own. ”There’s nobody that can push me from my place when I am determined and dug in, so let me take the brunt from those villains and I’ll make sure everybody can do their work in safety!”

She had spent the past week tweaking her exo to be able to carry just a little bit more than before, and had made sure to work out extra hard so that her body could carry its fair share. She was primed and ready to take on whatever was thrown her way.

”What about you?” she’d point at the third member of the group with an interested look on her face. ”Can you shoot laser beams from your eyes, or maybe shoot lightning?” she’d ask, her question genuine but equally interpretable as slightly mocking.

---

There was something utterly amazing and transfixing about seeing a legit professional hero at work doing a training session, the way they approached it seemed like the videos she saw of them in action. There was no going through the motions, even fighting droids like these ones they took serious like a life and death struggle.

And the robots even got a few good licks in, despite Dauntless having quickness that made Johanna’s eyes strain just to keep up with what was going on.

”I should totally record this.” she’d mutter to herself.

Putting her backpack down she started rummaging through it, already figuring out how cool it would be to study the footage but also show it off to others who totally wouldn’t believe she had the chance of seeing Dauntless practice with her own eyes.

But whilst rummaging and daydreaming about her next plans, she took her eyes off the situation and just as she would look back up with camera in hand she saw that two of the training enemies had split off and were now beelining their way towards Johanna at a pace that would make it impossible for her to dodge it, or even put up a hasty shield of armour.

Bracing herself she gritted her teeth, but the hit never came as she saw the streak of lightning that completely overwhelmed her senses, and Dauntless would completely run through and demolish the androids like they were children’s toys.

”So that was the true power of Dauntless!” was the only spark that came through in her mind through all of it.

”That was… AMAZING!” she exclaimed out loud.

She got up on her feet and had to stop herself from fistpumping at someone else’s actions. The thought of sneaking into the place during an training session didn’t even cross her senses as she had stars in her eyes.

”Like I knew you were awesome from all the vids I saw, but you completely wiped the floor with those androids, like, one of those could wipe the floor with half the seniors I bet!”

---

It had been a while since she had come to Akiba, when she was younger she loved to come here with her father and gawk at all the new technologies on display. Just as much as it was a heaven for Otako, the sheer amount of electronics and high tech stores made it an absolute dream for techies like Johanna and her father to explore it.

Her studies ahead of joining U.A. had kept her from really enjoying herself, so when she had found a flyer about a new café she simply had to come, mostly because it was right up her alley.

”Mister, do you know where the Gundar Fighters Cat Café is?”

She had gotten lost, which was easy to do with how many cubbyholes this district knew. But fortunately a regular seemed to know exactly where she had to go, and her feet would continue moving forward.

Johanna didn’t know who had invented the concept of combining Gundar Space Robots with a Cat Café, but she wanted to shake their hands for their absolute brilliance. They even had cat mechas that the cats could operate, which was mind blowing to even think about.

It took a bit of walking, but eventually she stood there in front of it. Holed away in a back alley, the façade looked a bit shabby, but as was often the case the outside didn’t truly show what the inside had to offer.

”So this is it, my kind of heaven…”

She was about to go in, when her eyes seemed to catch a familiar face walking up to her…

---

Her eyes didn’t particularly notice the girl moving around, with how much she was transfixed by the mecha suit instead. And she was a bit surprised when she heard a voice talking to the teacher and before long someone dragged her along back into the workshop.

”Are you taking me to heaven?” Her voice would softly stray.

A free pass into the workshop, to look at and maybe even tinker with all the cool stuff, with someone vouching for her. It took her a few seconds to realize that they were still being dragged and quickly decided to willingly move along with the girl.

”Woah, are you the one that made that armored suit?!”

Just as quickly, Johanna would realize that she was being whisked in by the creator of the suit, and by the looks of it they were a freshman just like she was. Which made the creation all the more dope, because there were so many people she could get inspired by for her own stuff.

Quickly she’d let her eyes be transfixed by the suit again as she gotten up close, and she quickly started to move around it touching and prodding all sides of it, finding every seam and trying to analyse every design choice whether it was practical or aesthetic, or even a mix of both.

The notion that maybe she shouldn’t touch it, simply did not dawn.

”This thing is so dang cool, how much can it lift? Are those opticals for lasers or for different uses? Can it fly?” she’d rattle off.

---

Even if she didn’t try to look like it, her eyes almost physically glassed over at the title of the book they were reading. She had honestly done all her studying ahead of joining U.A., those years of cramming to get to the point she was accepted into U.A., that had been the hard work.

Now she wanted to show what she could do with minimal booklearning. She was a practical girl, she loved mechanics, she loved working with her quirk… But study-books, it was practically torture for her at this point.

”Something to do?”

For a second her voice trailed of, then she remembered what she came her for and would eagerly grab her phone.

”You’ll call me weird, but I kinda came here to browse cat videos… I think if I wasn’t going to be a hero I’d probably be running a shelter or maybe even a cat café somewhere.”

An awkward laugh escaped from her lips as she rubbed the back of her head, but then she’d grab one of the videos she had made a few days earlier and she wanted to show it to Leo.

”I saw this Norwegian forest cat the other day just wandering the streets of Tokyo. You don’t see them much around here, they tend to be from Norway… because you know, ‘Norwegian Forest Cat’, but it was super cool to see them here!”

Almost immediately she started rambling with little regard if the other was ever comprehending half what she was saying. She was now transfixed with the overly hairy ball of fluff that was called a ‘cat’ in the video, lazing in the sun and doing nothing particularly exciting or spectacular.

”My dad’s originally from Norway too, so I kind of feel like a kinship to the cat, you know.”

---