"MR AIZAWAAAA!"
There were many people in the world prone to yelling for Aizawa Shōta: his mother, for one, and several of his childhood friends, and at least five of his former students who'd latched on and refused to let go. This vaunted group of people included such individuals as a man who frequently had to make himself heard over arm-mounted engines, a young woman whose squeals had been known to break glass, and one individual prone to literally earth-shattering screams. With a lineup so experienced, then, it was some sort of miracle - or curse - that the loudest person in his life was a fifteen-year-old with anger issues.
He didn't bother getting up to go to the door; rather, he set his block of ink aside so it wouldn't spill, and waited the roughly 1.5 seconds between said action and first contact with the source of his newest headache. The logical choice - because within that time, the door was being kicked down with a noise like rubber balloons encountering the business end of a block of concrete, and his student was standing in the emptied-out doorway, covered from head to toe in soot, hair wild and frazzled like he'd had a bad encounter with a thunderbolt. Just like normal, then.
(Teach high-schoolers, they said. They're less self-absorbed than middle-schoolers, they said. They don't get suspiciously sticky like primary-schoolers, they said. They're more mature. Almost adults. Capable of taking care of themselves.)
"Mr Aizawa," the blond said, slightly more calmly before - only slightly, but Shōta would take the wins where he could. "Sparky and Deku are doing blood rituals in the kitchen."
(Everyone Shōta had ever spoken to was a dirty liar.)
"Again," his student added, with an air of great grievance. It was, perhaps, an air that was somewhat earned, considering the potential consequences of biohazardous waste in a cooking envirionment. Offhandedly, Shōta wondered how, exactly, humanity had survived through the days of dysentery and no houses and getting their heads bitten off by marauding yōkai. Sheer dumb luck - yes, that had to be it, he decided. It was the only logical explanation for the seemingly universal human urge to do incredibly stupid things.
"Have you tried to kick them out yet?" he asked, for the sake of thoroughness, and was rewarded with a look that would have been rude, if it didn't also bring forth memories of watching the nation's best practitioners of magic huddled around a door for a quarter hour, trying to pull a push-door open without breaking it. People had said many things about his most explosive student - but his expressiveness, at least, was a treat to behold, when it wasn't being used exclusively for rage.
"Of course I've tried to kick them out!" His student threw his hands up in the air in a motion Aizawa recognised well from his own life - although he had always kept it to something imagined, locked away in his head where his Problem Children couldn't see his willpower draining. "They've got their goddamn equipment anchored to the - the shitty tiling, or whatever! I can't even touch the damn candles!"
He probably should have known better to hope for a simple resolution. In all fairness, it was raining far too hard outside for any sort of ritual that didn't call for several litres of continuously-applied water, and the best place inside the dorms to perform rituals was almost certainly the bathroom. Shōta, if he was entirely honest, did not want to deal with the fallout of children locking themselves in the bathrooms together. Or even just existing in there together, if he was honest. He would still be telling them off, of course; the bathroom was, all awful conversations notwithstanding, a much better option than the kitchen, and anyone in Kayama Nemuri's vicinity ought to have picked up at least some residual shamelessness. But on a purely selfish level, one that longed to avoid things like awkward conversations and the terrible, horrible, lie-driven beast that was the UA rumour mill?
Bullet dodged. Continue your non-food-safe experiments at will.
With a low grunt of exertion - he was getting too old to sit in such a bad office chair, he'd need to fix that some day - Shōta stood up, and jerked his head towards the door. There was no need for words when a gesture would do, and all his students had come to understand that with time; and as such, the blond followed him out the door, grumbling under his breath about cross-contamination and improper cutlery use and other such crimes. They wound their way along the corridor, back towards the dormitory block; and as they were about to enter, encountered another of Shōta's students. Short, black-plum hair and a choppy fringe framed a half-dead-eyed expression, and she raised her eyebrows at them, shuffling her armful of books so they sat better in her grip. "Mr Aizawa. Bakugō. Is this about the fact that Floor Three is missing a hallway?"
Shōta had not, in fact, heard about the fact that Floor Three was missing a hallway. If his own days as a student were an indicator, he thought, that was the type of problem with a standard injury count tallying broken backs, or perhaps something worse, if the cause of the lacking foothold was so inclined. If he knew anything, though, it was that the vaguest sign of fear on his part was likely to set off a chain reaction of hysterical screaming, and other types of similarly-hysterical behaviour; and if there was one thing he didn't want to deal with today, it was a pack of terrified teenagers. "It is not," he said, slowly and carefully, "About the hallway. I will, however, be investigating that, now that you've brought it to my attention."
The girl blinked. It was the only twitch of movement on her face. "Right. Tokoyami says he's sorry, sir," she informed him. "He didn't mean to replace the entire floor with a portal to intergalactic space, just a bit of it."
Shōta heaved the sigh of a man who'd once been naïve enough to believe he'd seen every type of chaos teenagers could possibly create. "He shouldn't be replacing anything with portals to intergalactic space, Jirō."
She just shrugged, as if it was a case of lost homework and not a likely radiation hazard. "Iida said that, too."
Ordinarily, Shōta would have said to tell Tokoyami to listen to what Iida said. Unfortunately for the latter, Todoroki had chosen yesterday to politely remind everyone with half an understanding of subtlety of the Sword Incident, and thus Shōta had been rudely reminded that while Iida was usually one of the more sensible of his students, Tensei's little brother was more than capable of leaving his brain behind given half a chance. No, Tokoyami would not be censored for his choice to ignore his fellow student, this time.
He was still on thin ice, though. Intergalactic space, indeed. Why couldn't it have been something simpler? Invisible flooring? Lava? Had he gotten so old that forests of toxic mushrooms had gone out of style?
He paused, and considered for a moment, and knocked the final idea off the list. He'd clearly been listening to Sekijirō's ramblings about his own charges for too long, if he'd become irrational enough to forget Tokoyami's familiar's penchant for eating objects indiscriminately. God, he had too much marking to do.
"Come on," he grumbled, and Bakugō fell into step behind him as he strode off down the hallway, Jirō wandering off to who-knew-where. Probably to unstick Ashido from the ceiling, again. The perils of dating into a friendship group with a tendency for bad ideas...
Although, he thought wryly, it was probably hypocritical of him to be too sharp about it. He wouldn't complain about his own youth's many, many incidents; and it wasn't as if he hadn't dated into all-encompassing chaos, too.
He opened, finally, the door to the common room. Immediately, much to his chagrin, a plume of verdant mist began drifting out, dull in lustre but deep in colour and carrying the vague scent of rosemary. It would have half-justified the kitchen, if Bakugō hadn't mentioned blood - consumable rituals were just as susceptible to mundane contaminants as any other edible object - but it didn't explain why they'd apparently needed the entire thing, nor why they'd used so much magic that everywhere from the couch to the refrigerator was thick with smoke. Perhaps it was something for Yagi, he hoped. That would cover some of the excess smoke, at least.
Unfortunately for him, the truth turned out slightly more complicated than that.
"How the absolute fuck do you accidentally buy weed?" Bakugō demanded, as if he had any sort of right to make noise about ridiculous circumstances. Kaminari, for his part, had the decency to look vaguely chagrined as he unstuck what smelled like vanilla-toffee candles from the floor. Midoriya, on the other hand, did not, and if the brat hadn't already been scrubbing the distinctly rust-coloured array off the floor with what looked like an old toothbrush, then Shōta would have made him do it.
"We wanted weeds," Kaminari explained, weakly. "Weeds, not weed. Pond-weeds. We wanted to balance out the dorms' disposition - there's probably too much fire, what with the heating system and me and Bakugō and Todoroki and Aoyama sometimes, so we figured - well, the protection wards have gotta be a bit off, right? Or they'd have weak spots, or whatever. But, uh. The girl misheard us, a bit."
"She - she was really generous with it!" Midoriya insisted, as if that made up for the mess. "We barely had to spend a quarter of our last profits on it, right, Kaminari?"
Kaminari, for his part, popped the last candle off the floor and rested his head against the refrigerator with a dull think, eyes closed as if he didn't want to look at his handiwork. Shōta wished he had that privilege. "I can't believe we managed to accidentally buy a controlled substance," he grumbled. "I'm too pretty to go to jail by accident."
"None of this explains why you built a goddamn blood spell in the kitchen," Bakugō snapped. Shōta shot him an aside glance; he seemed less genuinely angry, now, and more reluctantly curious. It was an angry version of the expression, but recognisable all the same; the sort of expression UA's less violently-inclined students tended to wear when they found themselves reluctantly ogling the remains of a half-exploded demon in the courtyard. "You idiots know Mr Ectoplasm told us anything needing more than a whole drop was more than you're meant to do inside, especially in my damn kitchen!"
"Well," Midoriya began, placing his palms together as if in prayer and smiling as if it would earn him points with either his teacher or his classmate. "Weed is - is kind of illegal for us to have -"
"Yeah, no shit, you glorified pile of leaf litter."
"-shut UP, Kacchan, I'm - explaining it!" Midoriya took a sharp breath, pressing the tips of his fingers to his lips, before he spoke again. "We figured, since we already had it back at the dorms, it would be risky to go out again and give it back, but, well, there's devils with vices just like humans, right? So, we thought - we thought we'd just do a trade for it, maybe get something slightly valuable, like - like a shirikodama or an alicorn tooth or something! But - uh. But it turns out that it's a controlled substance in a lot of Hells too...?"
Shōta felt his eyelid twitch as his student trailed off with a half-nervous, half-defiant look. "Midoriya."
"It's not - it's not totally banned in most of them!" Midoriya blurted, all at once. "But you - you have to pay a heap of taxes on it, and it's really expensive and - and stuff. I think it's because it affects some devils as much as it does humans, and stops them getting work done, or makes them too - too nice. And they get more focussed on food than dealing with sin, and all that. So - so the only devils who can actually afford to trade for it in decent quantities are more rich and powerful, and we didn't think a minor summon would contain a devil of that sort of caliber, and arrays are less inclined to outright malicious summons than closed circles so we'd be less likely to pull someone who'd cause an outright problem, and -"
"Yeah, okay, I get it, nerd," Bakugō interrupted shortly. "You've explained why you needed to spill blood all over the damn tiles. This still doesn't explain why you had to do it in the middle of the freakin' kitchen."
"It also," Shōta added, "Doesn't explain the mist. Summoning mist is grey, and twice as sparkly as this, and, if my memory hasn't failed me in the last three hours -" He shot his students a significant look, ensuring they knew what the consequences would be if they claimed he had experienced such a failure. "-it's about a tenth as thick. Talk."
"Um. Well, we did summon a guy, that - that worked," Midoriya said. "Really well, actually! But, um, he said he doesn't really get out much. So he's not got a lot of spare stuff from around here lying around? More just. General hell supplies." He giggled, and Shōta noted the slight curl of nervousness around the sound. So he hadn't lost his edge, then. Good.
"And you asked for...?"
Midoriya did not stop giggling. He also did not look anyone else in the room in the eye.
"We panicked and asked for brownies," Kaminari offered, eventually and weakly, opening his eyes to stare at the floor, and Bakugō made a dreadfully concerning noise. Dreadful for the other teenagers in the room, at least.
"Deku, Dunce Face, you absolute morons," he said, slowly and clearly, as if he could both drill sense into his classmates and hold back his own frustration through sheer will alone. "Who. Did. You. Summon. In. My. Goddamn. Kitchen?"
Kaminari visibly flinched at the question; Midoriya, for his part, looked vaguely manic. "Eh... it's not - it's not as bad as it sounds?"
"Midoriya," Shōta growled, wearily and warningly, and finally - finally - the teenager squeaked in fear.
"Um, we - we summoned Satan? Or - maybe just a Satan, I don't know if it's The Satan, you know. But - um, it's not so bad! His Hell isn't universal by any means, so any power he has is mostly exaggerated! According to - to all reliable sources he's only a 7/10 at most, and - and his domain is almost completely in transfiguration, transmogrify and plant life! So - so. Um. We probably shouldn't eat the brownies, legally speaking, but -"
"Deku, you idiot!" Bakugō snapped. "You can't hold Satan -" He caught sight of Midoriya's slight frown and huffed. "-a Satan, whatever! You can't hold a him in a basic array even if it's got blood in it! At a Level 7 you'd need something much more complicated like - like a freaking crossword or something!"
Midoriya, inexplicably, perked up like a shrub after a rainstorm. "Well, actually, that - that's why we picked the kitchen!" he explained, eagerly. "I never noticed it before today, but the refrigerator, the stove and the sink are equidistant from each other! So - so, um. Because they're a trinity of creation, preservation and destruction, they can be used to form a bounding triangle that holds significantly more power than any regular boundary!"
He waved his hands from place to place, emphasising the distances between each object, and Shōta frowned to himself. There was, he thought, absolutely no way the distance between the kitchen appliances was any sort of coincidence, but there was no way he could prove it. Rats. Or Rat, rather. "Alright," he drawled, and nodded over at the tray sitting innocently - or as innocently as anything still wafting green mist could - on the pristine kitchen counter. "What's the best case scenario for what's inside that?"
Kaminari shrugged helplessly. "Some weird nut from the Cretaceous, maybe?"
Shōta hummed to himself, then turned to the only child who'd had the good sense, however questionable the actual motive may have been, to actually report the summoning. "Bakugō? You're the one who actually spends time around food, what do you think's actually likely?"
Bakugō squinted for a moment, head tilting slightly in a sharp little jerk as he shifted his weight. "Well, teach, considering all the lectures I got from damn Hakamada... crack?"
There was a brief silence.
"Aw man, market saturation's an asshole," Kaminari complained. "Literally anything's better than that. Poison's useful. Caffeine's useful. Hell, psychedelics are valid, Komori uses them all the time! All you can do with crack is give Hagakure hives."
"We don't KNOW that it's crack," Midoriya pointed out. "And besides, no matter what it - what it is, we have a safe disposal strategy, don't we? Nedzu loves eating potentially deadly substances."
"Crack's not the same as rat poison, Deku," Bakugō said irritably.
"And I don't really... wanna think about Nedzu high on crack, thanks," Kaminari added.
Shōta couldn't help it; half a snort escaped him before he reined himself back in. "I'm pretty sure that happens twice a week," he grumbled, reluctantly, and was rewards with three sets of eyes snapping to attention. "It's as poisonous as any other bioactive substance, children, don't give me that look. He'd probably increase the increased..."
He fished around for a word, knowing quite well that Nedzu was prone to setting up recording spells in strange places, and not particularly wanting a lecture on the precise mechanisms of action of certain substances. That was more a Ms Shūzenji thing.
"...cognitive rate," he decided on, after a pause.
"Not the increase in productivity?" Kaminari asked tentatively.
"That's heroin, dipshit," Bakugō said, as if it was basic knowledge for 15-year-olds. Which it would have been, if Shōta had his way, but he didn't, and so it was vaguely alarming.
"Building a construct capable of annihilating the entire prefecture is not 'productive'," he settled on saying. "We have taxes to file. Homework to mark. Work to do. I have a job, and so does my boss. Theoretically."
"I guess we could feed some to Dark Shadow and see what happens?" Kaminari asked, voice tilting high-pitched in a manner that told anyone listening that he was entirely aware of how questionable the idea was.
"Do not," Bakugō said, in a tone that promised nothing but death, "Feed the goddamn crazy bird familiar potential drug cake. The bag of sugar was enough of a shitshow, genius."
Shōta looked at the tin. Something tugged, vaguely, at the back of his mind. "Perhaps," he said, slowly, "It's perfectly harmless, ordinary cake?"
The three teenagers paused for a moment, faces scrunching slightly. "But - but sir," Midoriya said, with a vague petulance, "That sounds like something you'd do. How are we meant to know if - if Satan would do it?"
"You should have figured that out before you summoned him," Shōta said flatly.
Another silence, this one longer.
As with most silences longer than three seconds that Shōta had the pleasure of observing, this one was broken by the sound of a door being thrown open and banging against the wall. Yaoyorozu Momo rushed in, breathing heavily and leaning against the nearest chair, black hair plastered to her forehead. "Sir," she said in between breaths, "We've got a slight problem in the courtyard. The new cantrip Kirishima was working on turned about a bit too good, and none of us can figure out how to fill the hole back up again. I think - sir, I think it might be eating the dirt we put in."
Shōta stared unblinkingly at her for a moment and mentally increased the count of holes in places they shouldn't be to two. It wasn't a lot, to be sure, but it was an unusually high number, but still. Two unsanctioned holes. "Midoriya, Kaminari," he ground out. "You're responsible for getting rid of that tin. I don't care how you do it, so long as you don't summon another creature from some forsaken plane of existence. I want it out of the dorms by the time I get back. Yaoyorozu, go get Mr Ishiyama and meet me at the - hole."
And with that dismissal, he strode away from one disaster and towards another.
Become a teacher, they said.
At least nothing had burned to the ground, yet. Small mercies.
Bonus:
"How does the Principal know about Satan's brownies?" Midoriya hissed as they scuttled away down the hallway, bereft of a tin of baked goods and most of their nerves.
"It's Nedzu," Kaminari whispered back. "I bet he's got Satan on speed dial. Let's just be glad we asked for brownies and not cheesecake."