Fanfic / A Certain Interdimensional Civics Teacher

A Certain Interdimensional Civics Teacher is a friend insert fanfiction by Spacebattles user luckychaos, who has also written other friend inserts like Fate/Noble Shade, this time based on A Certain Magical Index and its spinoffs. The Friend in question this time is the user Pangolin, or he is known in the story’s setting, Kai Saint. The fanfic is, if nothing else, truly loyal to the original in how much horrific suffering the characters go through.

As of right now, the fic has been ongoing since February 6, 2022, with mostly weekly updates. Pangolin never actually watched the Raildexverse in any capacity before luckychaos started writing, so spoilers in the Spacebattles thread are unwelcome.

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The fanfiction contain examples of:

• Action Dad: Kai becomes the living embodiment of this over the course of the story, becoming a pseudo-parent to multiple Level 5s and even the entire Misaka Network, and charges into multiple battles on their behalf to attempt to keep children from being hurt.
• Adapted Out: A very big example is the absence of Touma Kamijou in the story, as well as Imagine Breaker currently in Kai's possession.
• Adaptation Name Change: In the source, the frog-faced doctor is called 'Heaven Canceller', whose name in the original was more of a title than a name; here, he is known as Doctor Hiroto Chiba.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Index pulls this off very often. So does Kai, to a lesser extent.
  • In the fight against Stiyl and Innocentius, Kai uses his limited knowledge of mysticism to determine that the images he sees around the room are runes of the Futhorc variety. Later in the fight, Index explains Stiyl’s physical weakness from his magic, which allows Kai and Misaka to come up with a Fastball Special.
  • In the Necromancer Arc, Kai manages to figure out that the necromantic magic and the Coffin mechs powered by it are using Tao-Kabbalah motifs as their system by looking through the remains of the spellwork on the mech Accelerator wrecked. Index confirms that he’s right after examination. Thanks to this, Esther of all people thinks that he must be a magician when she meets him. Later when fighting Isaac, Kai recognizes the symbols of the Sephirot on the enormous tree of flesh and light turning the world gray. He commentates that Sephirot isn’t a proper name for something so unholy, rather, Qliphoth would be a better name for the monstrous tree.
  • Index helps out during the Orsola Arc by getting around her inability to use magic by using Notarikon code to break the sequences holding the Catholics’ tracking magic bags together. By doing this, she reprograms the bags to destroy each other while technically not using supernatural powers at all of her own, just her knowledge. She also figures out that Orsola hadn’t truly decoded the Book of the Law, it had been a false message left behind by Aleister to throw magicians off to Orsola’s dismay.
• Big Eater: Although still present in Index, her initial eating habits are deconstructed: with life on the run, she never knew when her next meal would be coming from, so she trained herself to eat all she could when she could. Being her new guardian, Kai initially attempts to get Index to reduce the size of her appetite ('three meals and a snack'), but he remembers that she made friends with the very rich Misaka, who can afford some of Index's appetite.
• Chick Magnet: Stiyl with his bad boy aesthetic gets lots of female attention from the Rail Gang once they meet him, to his severe annoyance as they attempt to “fix” him.
• City of Adventure: As in canon, Academy City is this in order to pump out strong esper abilities and secret weapons via force. Kai is understandably horrified and doesn’t consider the costs to his kids’ mental and physical health worth the advances in science.
• Death Glare: After Crowley lets his daughter get stripped of her personality and free will to be used as a weapon against the Catholics, while he’s holding his crying daughter, Kai simply glares with utter hatred at the Windowless Building.
• Flipping the Bird: During their second fight, Kai does this towards Mugino. It bought his team a few more seconds before she blasted their transport and forced them on foot just so Mugino could get at Kai herself.
• Foil: Kai Saint serves as a contrast for Touma Kamijou, who doesn't even exist in the fic. On the surface, both of them are essentially "normal people" which you can find anywhere in the world with a mysterious Anti-Magic Special Odd Hand, are great chefs in their own right, have Meaningful Names relating to their character and powersets, and are Unluckily Lucky in their own ways. But those are where the similarities end.
  • One big difference is that Touma suffers permanent Identity Amnesia at the end of Volume 1 with a more Wide-Eyed Idealist persona taking his place from then on, while Kai's memories are entirely intact.
  • Touma is Born Unlucky due to Imagine Breaker canceling his good luck and it often causes plenty of minor inconveniences in his everyday life while Kai's luck is relatively better.
  • Touma's status as an Ordinary High-School Student is entirely "self-proclaimed" while Kai really is The Everyman.
  • Touma is an Unbuilt Stock Light-Novel Hero while Kai is a downplayed Stock Light-Novel Everyman.
  • Touma is a Book Dumb high school student while Kai long graduated from college and is currently a teacher.
  • Touma is a Classical Anti-Hero with a Dark and Troubled Past that left him with a ton of issues that still persist after losing his memories in Volume 1. Kai, on the other hand, had a relatively good upbringing with his own share of angst and tragedies but didn't let the negatives dominate his personality and developed a healthier outlook.
  • Both of them are capable physical fighters with experience, but while Touma's fighting skills are entirely self-taught by street fighting, Kai is a formally trained martial artist.
  • Touma starts his adventures as a Kid Hero who rejects the so-called "adult reasoning" in manners relating to Dirty Business, while Kai starts off as a Badass Teacher who uses adult reasoning, but in a more benevolent and positive way.
  • Touma is an atheist who initially doesn't believe in the supernatural and is completely illiterate regarding the Magic Side while Kai is an agnostic with an open mind regarding the occult and has some basic knowledge of it.
  • Touma has a strong Thou Shall Not Kill belief while Kai if it really comes down it, is willing to use lethal force.
  • Touma rarely, if ever, relies on his friends for help and often leaves them in the dark while Kai has no problems accepting help and is willing to let them in on a situation too big for him to deal with unless it greatly endangers their wellbeing.
  • Touma often suffers from Dude, Where's My Respect? despite his numerous good deeds and accomplishments, not that he wants a reward or acknowledgment, while Kai is a respectable authority figure and teacher.
  • Their general relationship with some of their female companions are pretty much opposites; for Touma, they tend to be vitriol with him at times, often leading to him suffering Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male, although it's Played for Laughs. With Kai, on the other hand, they are more amenable due to his supportive behavior and often being one of the few authority figures whom they can trust and guide them with important life lessons.
    • Case in point, is their respective first encounters with Mikoto who was being hit on by college-aged males. On Touma's end, he doesn't fight the guys and ends up angering Mikoto to the point of shocking everyone near them and igniting her to seek him out to challenge him. Kai stops Mikoto from using her electrical powers by using Imagine Breaker, which successfully makes the guys that were hitting her walk away in fear, and he takes his time to teach her the importance of restraint and not using force as the first option.
• Heroic BSoD:
  • For what little Kai counts as a hero, if at all, this happens after the horrors of Seiin and Misawa, and is a large focal point of the story. Kai, unlike the canon protagonist Touma, is an ordinary person. He doesn’t have unbreakable resolve like a shounen character like Touma. He isn’t some impossible all-loving hero like Touma is. He’s a very grounded and realistic person. As such, whereas Touma could shrug off the massacres of Seiin and the tortures of Misawa respectively, and easily get back to his self-professed duty of saving everyone he sees, Kai cannot shrug it off as easily. His resolve is nearly completely shattered after seeing such horrors and realizing that in a world like the new one he was in, they were commonplace.
  • After seeing the devastation caused by unleashing the dragons to stop the demon at Seiin, Kai, unlike Touma, was utterly traumatized. He was terrified of his newfound abilities that weren’t truly his in the first place, of the fact that something, somewhere, had just taken him apart and welded a dragon army-filled arm to him without his consent. Unlike Touma, Kai doesn’t trust himself to use such great power in a selfless manner, because, as he says himself, the main difference between him and the canon protagonist is, “I’m not a superhero.” He’s an ordinary, flawed man, not a shounen protagonist like Touma. He can’t trust himself to not use such power recklessly or selfishly, because he’s human like everybody else, and is so disgusted at the possibility that he asks Index to put a spell that could possibly mind control him somewhat simply to be safe in the case of when it's needed to unlock the dragons.
  • Kai, being a human and not a shounen hero with unbreakable resolve, gets worn down by the time he spends in Academy City. Rather than like Touma, wanting to stay in it and solve all the issues he sees, he actively wants his kids to get OUT of the city if possible to live normal lives. He’s seen so much slaughter and horror and been in so many fights that it’s his new normal at this point, and he knows it’ll likely be the same for however long he stays in Academy City, and he hates it. He hates not being able to spend time with his daughter Index because of having to fight nearly every damn day against some evil. He hates how he has to put up a facade of strength for his kids so that they can rely on him in the midst of all this hell all the time. Most of all, Kai hates how his life turned out to be like this, with no peace, constant stress about dying, and no known way to get back to his real family.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Kai to the Catholics and a large part of the magic community. He gains a second epithet amongst them implied to be The Antichrist after his Roaring Rampage of Revenge at Seiin ends with him unleashing the Dragons/“Beasts of Hell” to stop Isaac. Many of the Christian faith begins to see him as a servant of hell and the son of the Devil himself, a threat to all humanity’s existence. They aren’t exactly wrong, considering one of the dragons he unleashed is a LITERAL Beast of the Apocalypse.
• Heroic Safe Mode: Kai forces himself into this to protect Harumi and Misaki from Therestina Lifeline Kihara.
  Any hesitation that could have been there within the pilot of the suit simply was not, replaced with an understanding of the situation.

  These men were going to kill people if they weren’t stopped. He had a way to stop them. They also worked for people who wanted to destroy the planet.

  Simple ethical arithmetic. The armor added a layer to protect him from the reality of the sum. It kept the blood off him, too.
• In Spite of a Nail:
  • Despite Kai and Sister 10031 managing to stop Accelerator early through convincing him that the clones are humans, Accelerator still ends up saving Last Order at the cost of being mentally crippled by a gunshot to his head.
  • In a broad sense, some of the events prior to the main series that require Touma's presence (i.e. Biohacker side-story) don't change or affect the current events much.
• Martial Pacifist: Using prior-learned martial arts and dirty tricks combined with Imagine Breaker allows Kai to fight espers and magicians face to face, but he usually spares them and tries to reason with them first, especially if they’re kids. Averted HEAVILY in Chapter 102, in which Kai brutally strangles Isaac Rosenthal to death in front of his kids in vengeance for the mass slaughter to ascend to Keter. Even before then, Kai told Esther if she wouldn’t kill her old friend, he would kill Mikihiko himself if it came down to it.
• Meaningful Name: In Japanese, Kai can have a number of meanings, but one of them can be "restoration" and "recovery", while his last name, Saint, is pretty self-explanatory in English. So guess what he serves for the troubling kids and teens of Academy City?
• Mugging the Monster: ITEM is recruited to fight 'Just an electromaster' that was wreaking the facilities running a project. Said electromaster was actually Misaka who was breaking the facilities to stop the project making her clones die against Accelerator. Oh, and Misaka had a backup in the form of Kai. After being beaten, Mugino hung the lampshade of how she and the rest of ITEM went up against Railgun and Imagine Breaker with incomplete information.
• Named by the Adaptation: More of a place receiving a name than a person; where Touma's high school went unnamed in the source, here it is named Kamachi High School, as a shout-out to the author of the original story.
• One-Man Army: This trope aptly applies when Kai in Queen Diver takes on the entire force of MAR, then proceeds to fight and rip apart Therestina Lifeline Kihara.
• Parental Substitute: As the story goes on, Kai acts as this for the younger characters.
• Poor Communication Kills: Heavily averted. Kai uses talking as his go-to method to solve issues.
  • Kai manages to end Accelerator’s slaughter of the clones and the Level Upper crisis peacefully by talking to the main antagonists in a rational and logical manner instead of giving an optimistic speech or charging at them with his fists raised.
  • Through communication, the Rail Gang gets involved in the Magic Side by talking with Misaka about the existence of magic. This leads to lots of canon solo fights against solos or teams becoming lots of teams fights against solos or teams.
  • He completely avoids the fight with Kanzaki by just talking to her and getting her help with the Index memory issue.
• Powerful and Helpless: For all the strength of Imagine Breaker’s absolute nullifying ability against the supernatural, it can’t help Kai at all as he’s being kidnapped by normal, non-supernatural soldiers against which Imagine Breaker does zilch. He’s forced to watch, utterly helpless, as his daughter Hyouka desperately fights through DA soldiers and Coffin mechs to reach him only to be slammed beneath the ground by a new Coffin. The guilt tears him up inside heavily afterward.
• Powered Armor: The mech suits MAR uses. Also, more importantly later on, Queen Diver. Though it's like, as Kai says, comparing a tank to an F-22. The specs are completely different.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: While there were many examples in the original series, Kai fits this trope the most as he constantly questions the legality and ethical problems that would arise from Academy City's Power Curriculum Program; literally bestowing kids with superpowers and letting them figure things out from there.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Even after Kai sees the Coffin mechs slaughtering Anti-Skill, his daughter getting beaten into the ground by psychokinetic force, and later Isaac Rosenthal slaughtering innocent students in his Sephirot form, he isn’t quite at the point of doing one of these. When he hears one of the Sephirot’s creations calling him Big Brother, which meant that Isaac was now using the memories of the 10000 dead Sisters to taunt him, who to Kai was quite literally his sisters, it leads to his mental state utterly snapping past sanity and rational action. In order to get vengeance, he willingly lets one of the Sephirot’s created beasts bite off his right arm in a gamble to see if the Dragon within he saw during the Alchemist Arc was real power in an act of desperate hatred. It turns out that there was more than one, and he lets them all go berserk on the Sephirot and its creatures, eating and tearing and ripping, then has them fly him up to Isaac at the top so he can slowly strangle him to death with his bare hands.
• Trapped in Another World: The Beginning to and a Major Point of the Fic. Kai was literally sent across time and space against his will to an alternate Earth because of an AC experiment with Kakine’s Dark Matter, literally breaking a dimensional barrier with his first use of Imagine Breaker. His loved ones are still back in his original universe, and he admits to himself that his attempts to throw himself into danger after danger to solve problems and save people are partial because of him attempting to distract himself from and cope with the fact that he might never be able to see his family again. He does not want to be in this universe except to help his new friends and adopted kids.
• Trauma Button: The sight of massive amounts of blood for Kai, because it reminds him of a gunfire massacre in Haiti that he and his uncle were witness too. Him not doing anything to stop the atrocity that day has haunted and traumatized him ever since, and is part of his motivation to keep trying to save kids from the damage that is Academy City. Unfortunately, this also leads to the bloodshed of the fight to defend the Exterior facility forcing him into Heroic Safe Mode from the repressed memories being dug up from the similar situation and overwhelming him.
• Violence Is Disturbing: Misaka, Mugino, Accelerator, and others across the City consider violence to be the only real resort to get anything done, for better or worse. Kai reminds Misaka at several points that regardless of intent or person doing it, Violence is Still Violence and they can’t ignore that they’re hurting people.
• What If?: Kai, Misaka, and Index intervening in the Necromancer Arc end up derailing canon heavily.
  • Accelerator gets injured early in the Arc stopping a Disciplinary Action member from impersonating Anti-Skill and has to rest the early part out.
  • Kai, Huotou, and Misaka's beatdown of Scavenger in place of Accelerator and manage to convince them that teachers aren’t so bad after all by listening to their stories and promising that they would get them out of the Dark Side of Academy City. It was difficult, considering Kai is an adult.
  • In order to get at the very socially connected Kai and get Esther and a Sister while they are riding with the Railgun, Scavenger, and Anti-Skill friends in the same vehicle, Disciplinary Action sends the Coffin mechs to destroy the van in an ambush. It doesn’t kill anyone, but it knocks out everyone long enough to tie up and kidnap Kai, Esther, and the Sister. When Anti-Skill arrives and tries to rescue them at the kidnapping site, the Coffins mass-slaughter them.
  • As a result of so many more people intervening to rescue Kai than just Accelerator as in canon, Isaac’s Kaiju Sephirot Tree has to fight against almost every single Level 5 as espers and magicians get involved one after another, as well as Anti-Skill’s forces. For obvious reasons, the amount of student casualties among the fighters and bystanders rises heavily from canon, and the Seiin Incident becomes widespread news among the world and invites heavy negative sentiment towards AC instead of just being brushed over like in the original series. When Kai finally manages to stop the carnage, he and his kids and friends get put in the spotlight thanks to his actions, putting him on the public radar and making life even more dangerous for him in AC than it was before. The Magic community also has hints of wanting to EXECUTE Esther for the calamity.
• Yandere: Meltdowner towards Kai during the end parts of their third fight when he gave her a Breaking Speech about how she’s only hurting herself by continuing to act as an agent of the dark side of AC, taking pleasure in her kills, and acting out her role assigned by others instead of trying to be better. Then he offers her a helping hand and spares her despite the fact that he’d disabled her mind, powers, and body with Capacity Down and Imagine Breaker in the fight. ......It is DEFINITELY coincidental that ITEM bought out an entire quarter of Kai’s apartment block later.