She wakes up.

She's laying on grass, face up to the sky - the sun is at the wrong angle for Japan, almost directly overhead - She is a clone of the original Yaoyorozu Momo.  She belongs to the Pirates (- Sable Maya Ruby Neo Hailey -) now.

Her support gear is...  All still there and functional.

There is one other human body laying on the tiny chunk of Skyblock.  (...That was strange.  She's never heard of that before, but she knows what it is.)

This other human probably needs her help.

A Hero's work is never done.  Up.

She pushes herself upright and looks around. She's on a grassy island, and all around her can be seen clear blue sky. There's a tree nearby, with five fruits hanging from its branches. Each one is shaped like a peach, sized like a grapefruit, and inexplicably a vibrant blue, shading toward purple where a mundane peach would be reddish.

Huh, that's definitely not an Earth fruit.

And then her eyes land on the black-haired girl across the island from her.

Oh. That's Momo. She's... prettier in person, but that's not the point right now. No liberties, no assumptions, not until they have a talk and Momo makes decisions about this stuff for herself.

She kips up the rest of the way — wow this new body is agile — and waves curiously. "Hi."

"...Hello."

There is still, despite everything that the Company did, a wariness in her.  You can't take that sort of wariness out of a professional Hero and still have them be one.

"You are...  The Pirates, then?  The Company has... informed me that I am at your service, if so."

"Yeah, we are. Didn't expect them to explain anything about the plurality stuff. And well... 'at our service' may be the official description, but we're not going to do this the normal way."

Sable frowns slightly, looking down at her hands. Not the same hands she's had for her life up 'til now. Better ones, that suit her more. Different, though.

"The usual thing here," her tone reveals just how disappointing she finds typical behavior for people in this situation, "would be to lean on the imposed bond and take liberties and make assumptions and take advantage of this whole... fucked up slavery mess. We're not doing that. I won't lie; all five of us are absolutely interested in you in all sorts of ways. You're clever, impressive, thoughtful, hard-working, heroic, and gorgeous to boot. But we're not doing anything unless you independently decide you're interested in such, because very nearly everything about this situation is fucked up.

"We don't like the Company. They," her breath hitches a bit, "killed us to coerce our posthumous recruitment. They're multiversal slavers, they're a pox upon the multiverse, and we're going to do what we can to bring them down. That'll be a long quest, though. In the meantime, we're just focused on making this new life on this island a good one."

"...I appreciate both your goals, and your candor.  And your compliments, for that matter, as much as I do agree that it would be a bad idea to do anything with this information at this moment, given what you have told me.  As far as ensuring we have a pleasant experience - as best we can, given...  Everything that has happened to the both of us...

"Well.  I have found myself doing a lot of disaster recovery, lately, and while this isn't quite the same, the skills such work needs do seem quite transferable."

"Yeah, I think you're right, that'll be very applicable," Sable replies, smiling slightly. "Probably the first things to do are unbox our survival kit, set up the tent, and see what else we need."

"...Yes, let's.  We will also, I think, want to begin propagating that tree.  I'll need the calories if I want to do anything truly impressive."

"...We should prioritize water reclamation, I think.  Both in making sure our existing supply doesn't evaporate, and in making sure we can reuse it.  Food's handled.  Water is not guaranteed to us, especially with the weather being 'random', and while I can make more, I'd rather not make myself so immediately critical to our day-to-day survival.  Certainly I could handle that, it's not all that much mass, but...  Accidents happen."

"Propagation shouldn't be too hard, we just plant a seed from each of those blue peaches we eat. Space 'em out far enough to prevent crowding," Sable replies, nodding and humming. "Probably we want a mix of filtration and distillation, at a guess? I don't have a lot of experience with water reclamation, unfortunately. My only other idea for water is maybe we can build some kind of moisture condenser?"

As she talks, she walks over to the wooden crate, prying the lid off with ease to reveal a packaged tent, sleeping bags, axe, pickaxe, shovel, knife, flint & steel, MREs, and canteens. "Probably we save the MREs for emergencies, too. They're not renewable."

"...Yes, a moisture condenser would be a good idea.  I have blueprints for that.  For most everything, really; my agency's support staff got somewhat competitive about preparing me for even absurd hypotheticals.   I had been more focused on preserving our supply, but since we can add to it, that would be better.  And yes, save the MREs for energencies."

"...The other medium-term concern we should have is probably erosion."

"Huh, good point. Hadn't thought of that. And while we can buy more soil in worlds we visit periodically, I don't know if the rule about the soil having enough nutrients to grow crops is fiat-backed and tied to this particular soil, or just the starting state. If it's the former, then skyblock soil is a valuable resource we don't want to lose track of."

"...Hm, we'll have to test that."

"Maybe if we pot the trees, we might be able to see if they stop germinating in unchanged soil..."

"...but then, the trees have their own rules as well, don't they?"

"Either way, while I probably have blueprints for any number of things that could be used to test this more directly, I don't have the training to use most of them properly."

"Probably need to buy textbooks in the first world likely to have them. Keep 'em in a watertight box to start with, digitize 'em when we have the software for it," she muses with a smile. "As for testing, we could pick up seeds for a fast-growing plant of some sort, and I think farm supply stores will have soil testing kits?"

"Probably.  Although I actually can provide quite a bit of software.  The support techs took it rather personally that if my tech ever got broken in the field that I then wouldn't be able to repair it myself, because I couldn't replicate the software, and therefore equipped me with more software than I ever expected to need."  Her hand drifts to one of the additions to her 'canon' costume - USB sticks, discreetly tucked away in little pockets where parts of her costume have been (quite flatteringly, to be honest) padded a bit more than they were.  "One of them had been talking about some sort of hardware memory that I could just make, something about hoops and wires - but I don't think that had gone past wild speculation about how small they could make the physical footprint while still having it be useful, yet."

"Honestly, working with them like that...  I have to know a lot of engineering to make my Quirk work for heroics, but it's made it quite obvious to me that I am not a support engineer, because I'm a very different kind of absolutely insane than they are."

"That sort of cleverness is really quite impressive. It's requires so much thinking outside the box, looking at things the hero hasn't thought of, ways their Quirk isn't being used. It takes a mix of engineering skills and training skills and a good helping of 'hey what if' madness." Sable smiles fondly at the thought. "Honestly I wonder what you'd make of our powers, or Quirk, I guess. It's... not originally ours, came with this body, which we switched to both to be less useless and also to get an instant transition, but it's decently versatile. Modest super-strength and durability and regeneration, substantially enhanced agility, the ability to stick to arbitrary surfaces (useful for climbing), the ability to shoot webs from our wrists and swing from them, and short-term danger sense."

She pulls the tent out of the crate while she talks, and then gradually everything else, laying it all out in rows to inventory it.

Hm.

(She busies herself with the tent while she thinks.)

"A wingsuit.  If you are less reliant on anchor points to turn direction, it can only be for the better, even if you will still have problems getting started in flat environments.  Additionally, exploiting your strength as a power source."

"...There has to be something Quirk-enhanced adhesion could be useful for beyond just sticking to things, I'm sure, but I'm not our class's quirk analyst."

"Ooh, a wingsuit is a great idea," Sable exclaims as she helps with the tent (which wound up a few meters west of the pond). "I wonder if we could work it into the costume in a storable way. And your mention of the adhesion actually gives me an idea: sure I can use webs to disarm, but also when I'm in melee I can get a better grip on an enemy's weapon with a single touch then they've got with their whole hand."

Then she laughs cheerfully at the thought of Izuku's analysis. "Yeah, if Izuku were here we'd probably be treated to an adorable mutter-fest and a bunch of ideas neither of us even considered."

"...I am assuming that the Midoriya you're used to is a boy, because I cannot imagine that someone who has, herself, seized an opportunity to transition, would willingly deadname Kiyuko-chan."

Sable whirls up to look at Momo in shock, cheeks flushed with embarrassment. "Oh shit fuck I wish I could apologize to her!" She shakes her head. "Yeah, in my old world the supposedly 'official' depiction didn't depict her as trans, only a minority of fanworks did. Always liked those ones better, but I didn't expect you'd be from one of the timelines where she transitioned. My bad."

"...As you have done no harm to her, you should owe no apology, I should think.  It's okay.  You neither knew nor had much reason to suspect, as far as I understand what you've said.  Do I have it right, then, that...  You read stories about us?"

She nods, smiling a bit now. "Yeah, our old world was one without any noticeable magic or quirks or superpowers or fancy technology at all. We came from the 2020s, so it was well into what you'd think of as the past, too. And lots of worlds that I now know for sure are real had fictional depictions, including a version of yours. There was a manga, and then an anime adaptation, along with a bunch of fanworks. We had theories that maybe the multiverse was big enough that all these worlds we wrote and read about had matching universes somewhere out there, but no way to check."