Whaddya Think, Idiot?

Even the car you were taking to the Yaoyorozu house was opulent. Honestly, who used a limousine as a regular people carrier? As it wound its way through the city, you employed all the quirks in your arsenal to check your safety. Rich people were paranoid, which meant you had to match that.

The driver had a powerful combat quirk, and a hero licence. It was common practice for security guards to get hero licences, allowing them to publicly use their quirks in their work, though they tended to be unconcerned with either the publicity or the morality of heroism. A look through both his and Momo’s minds told you that the limo was quirkproofed against anything short of a supervillain and, more importantly, had one hell of a dashcam setup.

A 360 degree view of the outside of the car, three different angles on the interior, and a microphone setup that could pick up anything louder than a thought. Prior experience had taught you that it was not a good idea to violently change opinions while you were being recorded. Somewhere, there was a patient in a mental ward somewhere with unsolvable memory loss. They were the one who had almost gotten away. They were the one who almost told the world about your power.

Which meant you were going to have to finesse this.

The easiest way to enact change on a mind was through speech. The way that people think differs so much that it was incredibly difficult to know what you were actually changing, but issuing verbal commands meant that their mind changed itself. Clean, easy, and unfortunately, highly noticeable.

You reached into Momo’s psyche and began to impress the feeling of friendship, trust, and the image of yourself. You’d always had difficulty with this in the past, never having met a person that you actually liked to inspire the first two. Now though, you had the all consuming love you felt for Izuku. Sure, some amount of that devotion would leak through to Momo, but that would just give you a headstart when you did the rest of her reprogramming.

Next was the tricky part. You needed her to be less trusting of her parents or, more accurately, to convince her that she knew better than them. Momo was a very respectful person, so you needed a powerful emotion to match.

Reaching deep into the recesses of your own mind you found your memories of your mother. Risa Yamada had once been a proud woman, but that had all been broken by your father. By the time you were born, your mother was a shell of her former self. You had trawled the depths of her mind to see if she could be repaired, and had come back out with an unshakeable certainty that your mother would never be able to take care of herself.

A muted version of that memory should give Momo a healthy amount of rebellious spirit against her own mother. You considered using your memories of your father as well, but decided against it. Yaoyorozu didn’t need to despise her parents, just be willing to act against them should the situation demand it.

The car came to rest in front of a mansion of truly ridiculous proportion. It was dripping with the kind of glamour that had become popular when Japan had shed its self-imposed isolation. It was in good repair, showing just how long the Yaoyorozu family had lived there. Corners tended to be cut in caretaking when these houses were sold, and it always showed.

Momo showed you into an obscenely large entry hall, paved in marble and lit by chandeliers. Waiting for the two of you in there was a woman who looked like an older version of her daughter.

The largest difference between them was their hair. While Momo kept hers in a spiky ponytail, her mother let hers hang free, dark black tresses tumbling gently over her shoulders. She also had about an inch in height over her daughter, and the quiet confidence that came with age and overwhelming wealth.

“Momo!” She smiled broadly, spreading her arms out for a hug. “It’s good to have you home.” She pulled her daughter into a warm embrace.

“It’s good to be here, Mom.” Momo leant in, hugging her back.

“And you must be Miss Yamada! I’m Mitsu, Momo’s mother.” Her smile was still there, as kind as it had been for Momo, but her mind was awhirl, examining how likely you were to either try to sue her or steal something.

Charming.

You captured your feelings for Izuku again, impressing them onto Mitsu as you smiled. “Lovely to meet you, Miss Yaoyorozu. Thank you for having me. I’m so sorry for the imposition, by the way.”

“It’s no problem at all! And please, call me Mitsu. You’re a friend of Momo.”

“Then I insist you call me Ren.”

Mitsu chuckled. “Of course, Ren.” She stepped back from Momo, letting her arms fall to her sides. “I hope you won’t think of me as rude, but I haven’t been able to talk to my daughter in some time, and I’m rather **** to see how she’s going.”

You gasped, continuing to play your part. “Please! Don’t let me get in your way!” The three of you found your way to a relatively smaller sitting room. Momo and Mitsu began to catch up with each other, and you took out your phone, scrolling through something on autopilot. Cover made, you started probing the minds of the people around you.

First, the good news. Momo’s father wasn’t home yet. That would give you time to modify the other people in the house before he entered the picture.

The bad news was significantly worse. There was surveillance all over the place. And it was routed off-site. If you wanted to use your quirk without raising suspicion, you’d need to find areas that were safe, or that didn’t pick up audio. There were three areas of note in that regard.

First, Momo’s bedroom. Though all entrances were monitored, the room itself was not. Get Momo alone in there, and you had your moment. Second, the grounds and gardens of the mansion only recorded visuals. If you made your first command act natural then any conversations there wouldn’t register as suspicious.

The third location made you very nearly laugh out loud. It was the guard house. Surveillance being routed off-site isolated the people who could see any issues, so there was an on-site guards house as well. Because the people there were able to defend themselves, and because there wasn’t anything worth stealing, The Yaoyorozu family had decided against monitoring the building.

Not only that, but the way that shifts were set up meant that guards started at the house, then moved to the surveillance area for the second half. It was ludicrously weak to mind control, but anyone with a control quirk worth its salt had removed themselves from the quirk registry early on in life. Nothing short of a casino bothered considering mind control in their setups.

Modify the minds in the guardhouse, wait for the shift to switch, and then act with impunity. That was your plan.

“Now, Ren.” Mitsu, having finished talking to Momo, turned to you. “Is there anything you’d like? I’m terribly sorry, I haven’t even offered you a drink.”

“I’d actually like to see the gardens.” You said. A request so normal wouldn’t be seen as odd. “Would you mind giving me a tour?”

“Of course!” Mitsu clapped excitedly. “They’re my pride and joy. Momo, would you like to come along?”

Well, you couldn’t have that. You couldn’t change multiple people at once and make it look natural for the cameras. Reaching into Momo’s mind, you pulled on the thread of rebellion you had laid down earlier.

“I think I’ll retire to my room, actually.” Momo said. “It’s been too long since I’ve seen it.”

Mistu blinked, mildly surprised, but nodded. “Of course. Well, Ren, I suppose it’ll just be the two of us. Come along now.”