A Comic-Book Marvel World?

"Waaah!"

A thin, high newborn cry rang through a clean delivery room.

Then, just as the nurse finished handling the umbilical cord, something strange happened.

Crack.

A tiny thread of pale yellow electricity snapped from the baby's body and struck the nurse's glove. A heartbeat later, golden current began spilling off him in bright little arcs. The glow and sharp crackle filled the entire room.

Yet neither the doctor nor the nurses panicked.

They moved as if they had expected this all along, steady and practiced as they continued their work.

Even stranger, the dangerous-looking current did not harm them at all. It did not so much as disturb the surrounding equipment.

"Boy or girl?"

The black-haired woman on the delivery bed stared up at the ceiling, watching the light flicker above her as she asked in a weak voice.

"Congratulations," the experienced male doctor said. "A healthy boy."

One look at her eyes told him what she wanted to ask next, so he added in a calm, low voice, "You cannot hold him yet, and you should not get too close for the moment. Just as expected, his Quirk is electricity-based, and it looks fairly strong. Without insulated clothing, it would be too dangerous for you."

"Electric, then..." The woman sounded disappointed, but only for a moment. "I thought so. All right."

She was sorry she could not hold her child right away, but she understood. And once the tension in her body finally eased, exhaustion flooded in all at once.

"Baby... I'll see you in a little while..."

She did not force herself to stay awake. Listening to her son's cries, she slowly closed her eyes and drifted into sleep.

She was too tired.

On the other side of the room, the nurses cleaned the little electric boy with practiced care and gently placed him inside an incubator with anti-static protection. The doctor stepped out of the delivery room to meet the child's father.

For a short while, the baby kept crying.

Then, not long after the doctor left, the crying stopped.

Denki had finally calmed down.

The earlier wailing had not been ordinary crying. It had been panic, shock, and a string of nonsense no one in the room could understand.

'I've crossed over... no. Technically, I've been reborn.'

'I'm a baby now. A baby who can discharge electricity!'

The more he thought about it, the more excitement burned through the fear.

'I really made it to a world with superpowers. And not just that. A world where superpowers are normal.'

He had been terrified at first, but he had still noticed the way the doctors and nurses reacted to his electricity. To them, it had been normal.

He still had no idea how he had released it.

That part could wait.

For now, the important thing was that no one had treated him like a monster. No one had tried to kill him or lock him away because of what he was.

That mattered more than anything.

He was a newborn. He had no way to protect himself.

'What kind of world is this?'

When a gentle nurse wheeled him into a room filled with rows of incubators, Denki's barely settled nerves shot up all over again.

This time, he did not cry.

His attention had been stolen by the other babies.

Some of them were strange enough that he honestly wondered whether they were human at all.

Horns, tails, red skin... those were odd, but at least they still looked like babies. The black-and-white little creature that looked almost like a panda cub was harder to explain. So was the giant black ant lying in another incubator as if that were perfectly normal.

'Is this some kind of fantasy world where different species live together?'

Denki studied the babies nearby and tried to guess the truth of the world he had landed in.

'No, that doesn't fit. The delivery room looked modern, and these incubators are way too advanced for fantasy. This is a technological world. Maybe even science fiction.'

The cameras mounted along the ceiling only made that guess feel more likely.

'Technology, superpowers, and people who barely look human... yeah. This place is going to be interesting.'

That was about as far as he could get with so little information.

Still, one thing was certain: he was looking forward to the life waiting for him.

'I hope the luck from my previous life came with me.'

Days passed. Then months. Then years.

In a stretch of time that felt both long and impossibly short, Denki finally turned three.

By then, he had a new name.

Denki Kaminari.

He had no objection to it. The name from his previous life had only been something he used for himself anyway; there was not much attachment left there.

Besides, he had parents now.

Real blood relatives. A mother and father who loved him, cared for him, and fussed over him with an attention so constant it sometimes felt unreal.

Compared to that, what was a name?

This name carried his parents' hopes and affection. That made it worth cherishing.

Of course, he had not spent the last three years so wrapped up in family love that he became a perfectly innocent little baby.

There were plenty of things he could not do because of his age, but he could look, and he could listen.

Those two things alone gave him a surprising amount of information.

The television became his most important source of intelligence.

There was a computer in the house too, but a toddler typing out research questions would have been hard to explain. If someone caught him, he doubted "I'm a genius" would cover it.

Even in a world full of superpowers, that would have been too disturbing.

He was not some super-genius. He just had basic caution.

As for what he knew so far, the first and most obvious point was that superpowers were everywhere. He had learned that on the day he was born.

Later, he also learned that he had been born in Japan. His parents were Japanese, and so was he now.

That was not something he had chosen, but it did tell him something important.

This was a parallel world.

The major nations were still there. The world map was close to the one he remembered. It was not a completely alien planet with nothing familiar at all.

That was good news.

At the very least, it meant he had not been thrown into total unknown territory. He had even brought one extra language from his previous life, though for now there was nowhere to use it.

The second and more important discovery was the existence of heroes.

Not one or two of them.

Heroes were everywhere.

Every day, at almost every hour, the television showed something related to heroes.

That made Denki nervous, because it gave him one bold, half-formed theory.

'This world might be Marvel. More specifically, the comic-book Marvel world, with mutants, Inhumans, and all kinds of superpowered races.'

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