Winds of Destiny: Falling ~ {Hawks x OC}

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Second Chance

Misaki walked through the open door into the President's office and laid a folder on the edge of her desk as she announced, "I have the schedule for the provisional license training for you, ma'am."

The President stopped typing and looked up at her. "You've been busy, Misaki."

She smiled, reaching up to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear as she replied, "I volunteered to help with the planning for the training courses, since they were so understaffed."

The idea behind enacting the provisional license training courses for the hero academy students who had failed the initial exam was rooted in the Commission's push to bolster the hero presence in the nation following All Might's retirement, and the escape of the League of Villains at Kamino. The overall hero approval ratings had been taking a hit with every new incident that the League was involved in, with many people calling out more publicly for reformation of the hero industry. Ever since Stain's ideology had been published, the rumbling undercurrent of discontent in society had steadily begun to rise in both volume and insistency. Getting a handle on the situation had become their office's top priority.

The older woman folded her hands on her desk and regarded her critically. "Have you put any effort into correcting your analytical efforts since your assignment with Stain?"

She considered the question carefully for a moment before quietly admitting, "I've been collecting bits of information here and there about the League and their movements since their disappearance."

The President stared back at her appraisingly and asked, "And has this candid research of yours yielded any results?"

Misaki raised her hopeful gaze at the woman's favorable tone before nodding. "I'll have a report for you by this afternoon, Madam President."

The woman nodded to her before turning back to her computer and Misaki swiftly pivoted on her heel before hurrying back to her desk to get to work. After her near brush with losing her job over her disastrous failure with the last assignment the President had given her, Misaki had begun developing a web-based software program that would flag down and archive specific mentions to certain key words or phrases that she designated. The program could sift through any published hero agency reports, police reports, news articles, and social media posts in a fraction of the time it would have taken her to read through them herself.

The programming had been a massive undertaking, requiring several weeks of long, sleepless nights and many cups of coffee to get her through it. She'd even fallen back on some of her less than ethical programing skills to hack into the major news station servers and the most widely used social media platforms. She'd set up dummy admin profiles that would grant her access to private posts and unpublished articles that she wouldn't have been able to view otherwise. It had helped to tell herself that she was only using the information for research purposes, and only if there were specific mentions to known League members or possible activities, but there was no getting around the fact that she was basically spying on people.

She wasn't sure yet whether it would turn into anything useful, but she'd started to uncover a pattern in the movements of a few League members she'd been tracking through several different sources. At the very least, the information could be passed on to the League Task Force so that they could look into it further. There was no way she was going to make the mistake of trying to track down any leads on her own again. She'd definitely learned her lesson from that bad decision. Pulling up her tracking software, she clicked on the folder containing her most recent research query and began working on writing up a report to present to the President about her findings.

~*~

A few hours later, Misaki knocked on the President's door, holding her tablet against her chest. The woman lifted a hand to motion for her to enter. She hurried inside, noticing her report open on the President's desk, before sitting in the chair opposite her.