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Tom was having a good day.
A quiet day.
In fact he’d had a good last couple of days. All Might Agency, and the heroes it employed, had very few encounters that week. And very few encounters meant very few reports to go through and very little collateral funding to dole out.
On this rather good Friday afternoon, Tom sat in his office, which was a cramped space with piles of spreadsheets and reference numbers littering the horizontal surfaces and tacked up on the wall. His computer, complete with a panoramic desktop, a gift from his wife last Christmas, sat in the center of it all. That computer was his life. The reports and spreadsheets he recorded within its hard drive keep the whole company running.
That was not an exaggeration.
Hero work and all its unfortunate sequela resulted in a complicated balance of costs and profits. All of which passed through his hard drives, both in his quirk and computer, before spitting out the correct amounts to each invested party.
Hero's salaries- nothing without him.
Agency’s bottom line and investor returns- nada sans his contribution.
His work was what paid the utilities and kept the society safe from villains. After all, who would want to be a hero for free? Tom scoffed at the idea. At the end of the day, the finance department made hero society work.
Not that he got any recognition for it…
At the moment, Tom was sitting in his well-worn leather chair, staring at the monthly expenses report and crunching numbers. Literally. His quirk, Number Crunch, allowed him to process mathematics at a rate faster than most computers. A handy quirk that had positioned him well in his post-graduate career.
He had to say, he was pleased with what was coming up, the sums supporting a net negative in terms of expenses and therefore a profit for the agency as a whole.
Thank god; the last few months they’d been in the red because someone couldn’t seem to get a hold on their very explosive personality and even more explosive quirk. Tom would’ve argued that he needed to be axed from the agency, just by the sheer cost of keeping a quirk like his on- if it weren’t for his status as a Top Ten and the resulting merch sales.
And, yes Dynamight would argue that he bagged enough bad guys to warrant the cost, but the reality was that pay-per-villain from the State was not even close to the collateral damage fees he racked up.
So to see that the economic catastrophe that was Dynamight had ONLY caused $13,243.84 in damages so far this month was highly relieving to Tom. This meant that Tom could approve bonuses for several of the administrative staff in the upcoming month. The office could get a new coffee machine- maybe even one of those fancy Keurig ones. The possibilities were endless.
A polite knock sounded from his door and Tom looked up from where he was crunching several sets of spreadsheets.
“Come in.” He called, quickly jotting down the numbers his quirk presented to him on a spare piece of paper before he could forget them.
Angela, one of the PR department representatives stepped through the door, a frown on her face. Tom knew that expression meant an incoming headache for his department.
“Oh god, what now?” Tom asked, already knowing that at Angela’s frown meant trouble.
“We, uh, have a situation . “ Angela spoke with the sigh of someone who’d grown accustomed to being disappointed.
“What did he do this time? Please tell me that there is at least the frame of whatever building he obliterated is still standing- you know how much that can help with the rebuilding costs.”
“Oh, no actually it wasn’t Dynamight.” Angela said, distracted by the assumption.
“Oh? Deku? Did he use a Smash in the middle of town again? We have spoken with him about this before, he should have-”
“No, Deku is off today. It was-”
“Jesus, PLEASE tell me Shouto didn’t encase downtown in an iceberg again.”
“No actually it was Uravity this time.” Angela said, words rushing out of her mouth, dominos falling one by one to trigger shear terror within Tom.
Silence filled the air as the horror of the event settled upon the two employees.
“....Shit. Okay. Right, you need to call in the board.”
“I already did. They’ll be here in a half-hour.” Angela nodded solemnly. Tom settled back in his chair raking a hand through his normally neatly styled hair.
“Alright, tell me what happened.” He said, resigning himself to whatever fate this news would bring, his quirk already adjusting the numbers in his head to accommodate what was likely to be a disastrous sum of money. Goodbye new Keurig...
“Uravity… well, you see, there was a villain who had a hacking quirk, he was attempting to break into the central bank building with a few buddies.” Angela started taking a breath and wincing as she finished the statement, “long story short- she maybe, used the Fukashima building as a, uh, glorified baseball bat?” Angela stated the facts as if it were a question if Uravity had used one of the most expensive skyscrapers in downtown Tokyo to hit a home run with a bottom-feeder villain.
“She did WHAT with the second richest man in Japan’s building?!?!” Tom exclaimed all the hairs on his arms standing up, just envisioning the bill coming his way in the next few days...
“The civilians inside had evacuated already!” Angela said waving her hands quickly dismissing the biggest concern.
Tom, breathed a sigh of relief- not that Uravity had a tendency to do such things as carelessly waste citizen’s lives. If anything she was one of the heroes in the agency that had the lowest civilian casualty rate.
Still, it just had to be the Fulashima Incorporated building. Of all the possible buildings, Uravity had chosen the most controversial and detrimental one. Did the universe had some sort of grudge against Tom? Why this particular building?! Why?
Tom rubbed his face, already envisioning lawsuits from Japan’s biggest monopoly. The Fukushima group was NOT going to take this lying down. Not to mention that that building was well over three billion American dollars worth of real estate. That’s billion with a ‘B’.
In that moment Tom realized he was not going to get a weekend.
“Fucking hell.” Tom sighed, looking back up to Angela to see her wringing her hands together anxiously.
The expression on her face had the blood falling out of his face in fear.
“....What haven’t you told me….” He asked, fearful of the answer to his question.
“Uhm Dynamight decided that this was the time to announce their relationship publicly, in a, and I quote ‘fucking brilliant display of badassery that any fucker on the street would get a hard-on at’... and kiss her as the Fukashima building hurled off into the stratosphere above the greater Tokyo area. It was-” Angela gave a nervous cough, “not their best moment.”
“I thought we had all decided to wait until the right moment to announce their involvement? Wasn’t PR in on this too?! “ Tom was fuming. Why the hell had he sat in on all those PR meetings strategizing the best way to capitalize on their two polar opposite heroes relationship? Why, when the two in question were just gonna fuck it all up in a moment of misplaced passion?! WHY?!
Before Angela could respond, he grasped the office phone sitting on his desk, aggressively pushing the extension of his secretary.
“Hello sir what can-” His secretary answered calmly.
“-You get Dynamight in here RIGHT NOW!” Tom said furiously, trying to impart the urgency and seriousness of the request.
“But sir he’s on assignment-”
“I don’t give a fuck what he is doing, tell him his stunt is costing him his vacation pay for the rest of his career and he better get here RIGHT NOW to sort this mess!”
“....Okay uhm-”
“Get Uravity here too. Though you can be nicer to her, she probably already knows she’s in deep shit.”
He hung up the phone before his assistant could say anything else.
Angela was looking at him like he’d grown a second head, which was warranted. He’d never, never had this big of a catastrophe on his hands before.
“Errr, sir are you….” An awkward pause as Angela tested the words on her tongue, “Are you okay?”
Tom glared at her, a breath steaming out of his nose forcefully.
“No I am not ‘Okay”. Two of my biggest heroes, who both had a merch launch and PR stunt in the future just went and blew all of months of an entire department’s budgeting and planning because Uravity just had to use a three billion dollar building as a glorified baseball bat and Dynamight couldn't keep it in his pants. No, I am not happy. “
Numbers flashed before his eyes as his quirk calculated the sheer monstrosity of a number this one slip-up would cost the agency.
Silence from Angela. His watch ticked on his wrist.
“Well I am going to go get PR and have them here shortly to review our options with you.” She said, excusing herself before he could further express his displeasure.
Tom sat in his office as he waited for the tell-tale cacophony that would signal the heroes arrival. He sat thinking of how he could spin this to the agency's advantage. They needed a PR stunt, something that would make money- fast. Ideally something that would also appease the Fukashima Group at the same time.
Tom cursed the day he got involved with the agency associated with the golden class of 1A. What a fucking nightmare job. At least the retirement matching was decent.
Now if only he could get that coffee maker...