"What the fuck is the point of all this nerdy shit?"

Katsuki Bakugou stared down at the tabletop as he spoke, the confusion in his voice matched only by the creeping sense of dread in his stomach. While he didn't recognize the materials laid before them, he could identify their suspected purpose. There were books, many books, with bright images of fantastical creatures and environments on their covers. One was all in red and orange and white, some lady with a glowing hand jumping at a giant figure with a huge beard and a(n admittedly sick as fuck) skull on his head. Another featured a skeletal being all in purple and grey looming tall and menacing with an arcane staff in one hand, two dead men rising at his feet ensnared by a web of purple light.

There were dice, many dice, dice with far too many sides and others with far too few. There were the simple cubes Bakugou understood, but there were also pyramids and dodecahedrons and other unfamiliar dice-shapes. There was paper, two notebooks and many loose sheets, some of which were covered in bizarre boxes filled with numbers and words. Alien words at that, shit like 'Cantrips' and 'Channel Divinity' and 'Superiority Dice'. It was all quite confusing, and Bakugou stopped looking when he saw all the sheets featured the word 'Constitution'. Pencils were scattered here and there and everywhere, intermingling with the dice and making the table look even more like a hurricane had dispensed a bunch of dumb loser shit across it.

The table was also home to several of his classmates, all of whom he had the great misfortune of knowing well enough to remember their actual names. Ashido was one, and Kaminari, and Sero, and Kirishima to his right, and last but not least Mezo Shoji sat behind a big cardboard screen also covered in depictions of fantastical things, a vast red dragon sprawled across most of it. Kirishima grinned, raising a hand.

"Dungeons and Dragons!" he declared with a laugh, holding aloft one of the books where the title was indeed splashed across the top, summarized to a simple 'D&D'. "You ever played, Bakubro?"

Bakugou had not. He'd barely even heard of this; only in the most basic of senses. It was some nerdy shit, the kind of thing Deku would have been into if he'd had any friends probably. Fantasy was a genre that had lost some steam in a world where fantasy had become reality to some extent; now it was a more niche category of fiction for people who still sought escapism of the traditional sort, to worlds of kings and queens and dragons and dwarves and elves and all that. Bakugou cared about as much for the fantasy genre as he cared for anything else that wasn't heroics, training or studying; he didn't.

"No." He very nearly turned to walk away, but before he got the chance Sero grinned at him as well with those big dumb shark teeth of his.

"Then take a seat, dude!" he said, pulling one of the chairs out. "We can show you! Besides, more people makes the game more fun for everyone, right?"

Shoji, sitting behind the screen, simply nodded once and used one of his six arms to retrieve another copy of the orange and red book, and another for a sheet of paper that looked like the ones sitting in front of the other four, though this one lacked all the numbers and words inside the boxes. He handed them both to Kirishima, who set them down on the table next to his own in front of one of the chairs. He then patted the seat of the chair and looked up at Bakugou with an expression like a happy puppy of some kind.

Bakugou stared for a long moment, and then let out a defeated 'fuck it' and sat down heavily in the proffered chair, staring at the empty sheet and wondering just what the fuck he was doing. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Kirishima was eager to be of assistance, opening the red and orange book and pointing to one of the pages.

"So, when you're building a character, you've gotta start with race." the redhead declared, stabbing a finger at the short list provided by the book. "You've got Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Human, Dragonborn, Gnome, Half-"

"What was that last one?" Bakugou interrupted, looking down at the book suddenly.

"What, Gnome?" Kirishima replied, moving his finger back up one.

"No, dumbass, the other one." Bakugou shook his head, jabbing his own finger at one of the entries. "This thing. Dragon-whatsit. What do they do?"

"Oh!" Kirishima grinned and flipped through the book, until he came to a page depicting a freaky orange lizard-dude wearing blue collared robes with a massive totemic stick covered in severed heads. Bakugou took one long look and nodded.

"I'm gonna be one of those." he declared. "What can they do?"

The list of jargon Kirishima rattled off right after that question clearly made Bakugou's head spin, so Ashido decided to intervene with a much more newbie-friendly explanation of the mechanics. Bakugou took in the list of benefits with a slow nod.

"So I'm bigger and stronger than you guys, and I can breathe fire?" he clarified.

"Well, it could be lightning or acid or poison or even cold, but yeah, that's about the gist of it." Ashido agreed. "So, you wanna play a Dragonborn?"

"Fuck yeah." Bakugou grinned suddenly, surprising even himself. "What's next, then?"

"Well, next you'll need to roll stats." Kirishima said, nodding. "That'll tell you if you're strong or smart or fast. Take these..."

He placed four six-sided dice in Bakugou's hand.

"Roll them, take the three highest numbers, and add them up." Kirishima said. "You can re-roll ones once. Just do that six times and then you can choose which numbers to put where."

Bakugou nodded, and began rolling. He got pretty average numbers according to Ashido and Kirishima, though the sixteen and fifteen were both apparently pretty good. Nothing else broke twelve though. He wrote all six in the margin next to the boxes where they were supposed to go, but both of them advised him to wait before allocating them.

"Alright, now what?" he asked.

"Next up is the most important choice; class." Kirishima said, flipping through a few more pages. "You've got twelve options; Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock and Wizard."

Bakugou stared.

"Which one of those can blow shit up?" he asked.

"Ummm..." Kirishima looked at the list again. "Sorcerer and Wizard can both learn Fireball, which is sort of the default explosion spell."

"Make me a Wizard." Bakugou declared, not understanding why everyone glanced at each other after he declared such a thing.

"Are you sure, Bakubro?" Kirishima asked, sounding a little nervous for some reason. "Wizard is pretty complicated; maybe you should start with a Barbarian or Fighter or Monk or something?"

"Fuck you, I'm gonna be a Wizard." Bakugou grabbed a pencil and wrote 'Wizard' on the line labelled 'Class and Level'. "So, I'm gonna be... uh..."

He grabbed the book and scrawled through it quickly, heading back to the Dragonborn section and rolling his eyes at the names. They were all stupid and long. He pondered for a moment and then was struck with a bolt of inspiration, his eyes going wide and his grin getting wider.

"I'm playing as Karak Bakari, Dragonborn Wizard, and I'm here to blast the fuck out of bad guys." he declared, and Ashido cheered. Shoji nodded, looking down at his notes behind the screen and quickly scrawling something down.

"Allocate stats and apply bonuses." he said through one of his tentacle mouths. "Starting at first level, same as the rest of the party."

Bakugou took one long look at his sheet, then at the Dragonborn and Wizard entries in the book. Kirishima leaned over to help, only to get a hand placed on his shoulder to shove him back as Bakugou shook his head. He would be doing this himself, though Kirishima did interject when he accidentally wrote the wrong proficiency.

"Are we ready?" Shoji asked, to which the whole table either nodded or gave a verbal affirmation. "Wonderful."

Two mouths formed, one one each side of the boy's head, and he began to speak with one.

"In the sleepy town of Mistvale, on the edge of the kingdom of Norn..."

AN:

Don't ask me what this is, because I honestly couldn't tell you if I tried. If you hated it, feel free to let me know. If you somehow managed to like it, please God tell me why so I can figure out if this is even a good idea to begin with.