CHAPTER 31: EYE OF THE STORM
Time crawled, as Hiro raised her hand like a conductor. The ticking sound that accompanied Hiro's time powers thrummed through her being. The beat was like a slow timpani, setting the tempo for what was to come.
She stood at the center of her being, the house of her power. The false sky she created shone bright blue with hope above her the ground below her metallic and rocky. She had an idea for what she wanted this place to look like, but for now, she liked that it was a blank canvas for her to do her work.
Three of her cores floated far above her. Thin threads of power connected them to the donut construct that now hosted all of the water mana roiling in a sped-up version of the water cycle. A golden thread ran from the donut hole down into the time core before her.
She rose on her toes lifting her arms high. Then in time with the beat, she brought her hands down like a conductor striking up an orchestra. The construct followed her hands and the golden thread down. She spread her hands apart willing the already large construct to grow so that the time core could fit into the center of it.
"Step one, bring together the parts for the new core." She recited the procedure Professor Davenport had given her as the construct sunk and grew in time with the pulse of power she was conducting. "Listen to your power and work with it." She added thinking of Moria's tutelage.
The sound of rushing water, rain, and storm grew louder as the construct drew near. She spread her fingers swaying them gently back and forth, and seamlessly incorporated the sounds to the rhythm the time core had set. She matched the tempo as if she were back in band class, mimicking Mr. Eflier as he would bring in the melody.
The beginning of a smile tugged at her mouth as the construct fit over the top of the time core. The golden beam of light ended and the core took the place of the clock of power at the center of it. She moved her hands together and the donut shrunk to fit the center perfectly. The tempo sped up as they touched.
"Blend the power into a unified mana," Hiro muttered. She needed the water and the time powers to touch and blend. To do that, she needed to carefully break down parts of her construct and allow the water mana to flow into the already-formed core. She needed precision. She needed accuracy. Luckily she had always been detail-oriented. It was what made her such a good machinist and welder. Now she also had magic to back it up.
She called on the thin thread of power stretching up to the sky and accuracy core allowing it to help guide her where the best places to remove or push power. It gave her innate insight into what to do, where to do it, and the most accurate place for a specific action.
She guided the water mana into streams and rivers much like what they had looked like flowing through her channels. This time though, she guided them through the most accurate points possible for them to combine with the time core. Pulsing power along them still matching the tempo as she did so.
She made twelve entry points from the donut to the core. She spaced the streams around it like clock numbers. She allowed the smallest trickle of mana to flow through each one as she made the next working her way around the orb and following the flashes of color her accuracy concept gave her.
The first major complication happened when she enlarged the first stream into a river to feed the core. The massive amount of power held within the construct wanted to burst forth from the newly weakened walls like a flood through a damn. Multiple areas of the construct flashed in warning reds and oranges.
A whisp of self-doubt curled up her spine, but luckily time was on her side. She pushed the worry away, she could manage this. It was just reinforcing a construct. She did that all the time at work. The tempo slowed once again and she took the time it gave her to push back against the wave. Palms out and pushing down as if to quiet the rush. It resisted, but she pushed back with a will. Only the amount of mana she allowed was going to leave the construct.
She called upon her power over magnets and metal and reinforced the walls of the construct with a dark silver sheen of power. It worked to reinforce the spots that the streams of water came from. She moved around the clock to check each one was reinforced and pushed out the ideal amount of power.
She brought the tempo back up slowly watching her fix closely to ensure it would hold. The extra time the slowdown had given her ensured she had plenty of time to fix it before it became a major issue.
She walked around the mass of power in front of her. A measure of anxiety continuously tickled the back of her mind. But she wasn't going to slow down now. She had handled the problem. Hiro constantly checked in on the construct as her water mana drained rapidly from the twelve entry points she had made into the time core. She increased the tempo of magic again bringing it up to real time.
She reached out wondering if she could push it faster. She probed feeling that she could speed time, but a flash of red accompanied the realization she should not. She backed off immediately. Intuitively she knew that rushing would do her no favors, and she was acutely aware of her failures from the past she did not wish to repeat. Her pulse sped up with fear as she realized the mistake she had almost committed, but she was listening and working with her power as she was supposed to.
She settled into the rhythm and continued to monitor and control the power as it flowed into the core. About halfway through emptying the construct, the next hurdle reared its head. The time core had been filling with water mana, but the powers within had not combined yet. The core was almost full of foreign mana. The water inside the construct and the core were trying to equalize instead of combine.
Hiro slowed time down again, a slight frown touching the corners of her mouth. The professor had said that at some point the powers in the concepts would start combining and blending as she introduced them to one another. That had yet to happen, instead, the power stayed separate like oil on water.
She probed at it with her will, gesturing for it to blend. She even 'shook' up the water within as if to stir it. Each time the two manas would break up and mix. Then separate like a particularly annoying salad dressing. She pondered the problem as time ticked slowly around her at a crawl. The voice in the back of her mind tried to intrude, but then an idea struck her, silencing it.
She didn't need the power to mix temporality like salad dressing, but to combine permanently like a chemical reaction. One way to combine things was through heat. it's how you make alloys or welds. And she had some sources of heat above her.
Hiro looked up and narrowed her eyes in concentration. She had two choices and instinctively picked one over the other. She raised her hands to form a circle above her. She envisioned light streaming down from the light orb, passing through a lens, and becoming a concentrated beam directly focused on the time core and donut. Light flooded the landscape as the core above her showed like a sun before focusing into a beam of light as she envisioned.
Hiro watched as the partially filled core began to roil in the heat. the flow of water resumed to the core but it was sluggish. Her brows furrowed, it wasn't enough power to get the platinum concept to combine. The water concept was ready, but the platinum concept of time needed more oompf.
She looked at the sky and electricity core apprehensively before glancing at her raised hands. Here, no scars showed her misuse of power, but they tingled with the echos of her physical body's pain. The whispers of failure intrusively wormed their way back into her mind. No stroke of inspiration came to block out the voice this time. It insidiously made its way into her thoughts taking over her reason and logic. A fog began to pour from the core as her eyes grew and her breath came quickly.
"You are a waste of potential," the voice of her mother whispered, "You are a failure and will never be anything more than that. You failed with your magic before you could begin, and failed again when you blew off the skin from your hands. What makes you think you can control the powers of the universe? Don't make me laugh."
Hiro took an unsteady step back. As the voice continued, it grew louder, a cloudy form manifested between her and the cores above. A fog bank roiled obscuring everything but the figure of her mother within. She sneered down at her.
"What the fuck?" Hiro whispered, it came out in a higher-pitched voice than normal. She didn't have control over her center anymore. The figure grew in front of her as Hiro shrunk to the size of a young child in an oversized nightshirt. Her curves of womanhood smoothed and her carefully braided hair became wild and unruly scarlet curls floating around her head.
Fear and anxiety washed over her in waves. The emotions she had been suppressing and ignoring hit her with full force. When Moria or Professor Davenport had been here, she had been able to hide it from them. She had always been able to stand firm when others were around. But now, alone, her center had other plans for her. It had manifested her fears in the form of her toxic mother.
Her mother continued to berate her accusing her of all the hidden thoughts she held within. She shrunk down like she had when she was small and her mother was drunk and angry. She pulled her legs up within the oversized shirt and wrapped her arms around them. Her wild curly red hair fell in front of her face to form a shield between her and the rolling fog.
The fog hid her cores from view, the comforting blue sky disappeared behind the cloud of her mother. She had lost the rhythm when her mother had formed and her mind had been enveloped in fear. Her fingers tapped nervously on her knees and she couldn't feel the pulse of power that thrummed through her moments before.
"No, this isn't right," She muttered. The sounds around her discordantly bouncing around with her mother's words on her worst days. "She can't be here!" Hiro's voice sounded small in her ears.
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"Can't I?!" Her mother screamed, "I'm here, this just proves you can't do anything right. You fear your own power, so you deserve none of it!"
Her mother continued her litany of things Hiro had done wrong throughout her life as she shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut at the words trying to block them out. She cast about for something to calm herself. Another voice drifted out through the fog.
"What you're describing sounds like a panic attack." The words were soft and calm, they drifted, her mother shouting over it as if to mask it from Hiro's ears.
Hiro tilted her head to the side trying to pick up the voice again. "Let me give you some tools to cope when the anxiety gets to be too much. Medicine is just one tool, I can show you some techniques to add to your toolbox. Grounding yourself can help."
Her mother's incoherent shouting reached a fever pitch, but something had shifted within Hiro. She had what she needed, a path out of fear and panic. She had coping tools like she never had as a child. She could ground herself to get out of this overwhelming panic. She could deal with her Mother and finish what she started. All giving up now would do would prove her mother's words right.
"What can I feel?" She felt the shirt fabric on her cheek. It was a washed-out black shirt. Softer than any other she owned. The shirt had been her favorite thing to sleep in as a child. It was her father's left behind when he left. Her mom had thrown out everything else, but a tiny Hiro had thrown a tantrum and her mother had relented. One of the few times she could remember her doing so. She dropped one of the hands wrapped around her knees to the floor to see what else there was. It was solid and warm. She felt a slow pulse through the floor. She tapped her finger in time with it.
What could she smell? She took a breath through her nose. A weird double sense came through. One of salt water and one of a foggy spring morning. The double sense made her snap her eyes open. Her reason started to return through her fear and anxiety. She was in her center. Her body was submerged in water. She had access to part of her power, her mother's ranting held lies. If parts were lies, why not all of it?
Her eyes now open, to both her surroundings and situation, she took a moment to do the next grounding step. She lifted her head. What could she see? The fog surrounding her was obscuring her vision. She was in her center. A place where the professor and Moria both said she had all the control. Why was she allowing that control out of her hands and into this sector of her Mother? She pushed the fog back until the time core and water mana construct came back into view a beam of light backlighting the scene.
Her eyebrows rose as her finger tapping the ground matched the pulse she could see thrumming through the pair. She had been tapping her finger to their beat felt through the floor. She looked up and saw her mother. Her wraith-like form stood between her and the sky and electricity core.
"Just because you push around some fog you think you can control lightning?!" She screamed at her. Hiro just looked at her. Inconsistencies between what she remembered and this apparition came to mind. Her mother had been beautiful, it's how she had kept a litany of suiters around to pay for things. The creature in front of her was ugly, its proportions were wrong, the eyes were black, not green, and its hair was flat and not curled.
"You're not my mother," Hiro stated, standing and waving her hand as if to brush her away.
A light within the creature's eyes flashed with electricity. The form of her mother fell away, A storm of clouds and electricity was left behind. Her mother's voice remained. "You cannot control what you fear! Let the water reflood this place! You don't deserve the power! You are worthless!
Hiro shook off the remaining panic. This screaming ball of power didn't frighten her like her mother had. It was like the power of her core had been animated by her unacknowledged and suppressed emotions. It was yelling what she feared the most at her in a voice that had the most power over her. She hadn't talked to her mother in years, why was she allowing her to have power within her at all? She had worked hard to move past her. Time to use another tool in her toolbox.
"Listen here you," She gestured vaguely at it as she stood to face it, "Ball of fear," she needed to acknowledge the fear and let it wash past her. "I am scared. I'm scared I will get hurt again. I'm terrified that I'm going to mess everything up and never be able to fly or use magic again. I'm angry with myself for messing everything up because I didn't understand how things work and I didn't listen to those who did." She took a deep breath, the lightning ball of fog and cloud had gone silent as she spoke.
She touched the spot behind her ear where Button would be in the real world. She should've listened to him. "I shouldn't have lashed out in anger when I was scared of my own mistakes and failures."
The creature tried to start up again and latch onto the pain she was sharing, "You are a failure!"
"Stop!" Hiro commanded. The voice stopped while the mouth of cloud stuff kept moving. "I failed. That doesn't mean I'm a failure. That means I'm human." She repeated the words her therapist had told her. It had been near the beginning of her healing journey. Her boss had given her a pamphlet about mental health counseling the company provided after she had a panic attack at work. She had repeated it ever since, sometimes believing the words and sometimes, just paying them lip service. This time she believed them.
She didn't need her cores to be formed or a change to happen to fly here in her center, in her soul. Her child-like form rose into the air until she was before the manifestation of her fear. A tail of power led into the core behind it like a genie. A wild flicker of power was coming off of it. She opened her hands before her, the creature watched her eyes wild and lightning flickering. She willed it to shrink, and as it did, she grew into herself. The black shirt hung loose, but better-fitting on her adult form.
The cloud of fear was now in the shape of her as a child. She drew it into her arms wrapping it in the hug she had wanted when she was scared or hurt as a child. The electricity ran across her skin and she let it move through her metaphysical form. This was part of her after all, she had chosen it. She should be mindful and careful, but fear was unnecessary.
The cloud being was dispersed as she absorbed the power into herself. Her center thudded with sound. Her innate sense of time told her the inner turmoil she had faced took no more than thirty seconds in real time to deal with. She had drastically slowed time on instinct.
"I just speed-ran a therapy session with magic." She said incredulously. "And hugged a monster to defeat it." She shrugged, it was a monster of her design, and she got to choose how it was defeated.
Hiro turned back to her forming core, flares of red flashed across it as she examined it. Some of the fog had dispersed as she worked through her fear and doubt, but now she saw some of the fog leaking from the construct as the water mana was heating up under the beam of light that had been obscured within the fog.
That wasn't good. She needed the power condensed for this to work. She was still charged with sky and electricity from her confrontation. Time to get back to work. She raised her hands and began to direct her power. She condensed the atmosphere above the forming core. The fog turned into clouds that rained back into the donut.
With that taken care of, she needed to feed the whole system more power. The last piece of the puzzle of her power was electricity. All other parts had been used to form the new core. She needed to use this last one too. She had to time it just right. She positioned herself under the core of the sky and electricity. Thoughts of being a lightning bender ran through her mind, she needed to be accurate, and have perfect timing to jump-start the process.
Good thing she had magic on her side. She allowed herself to feel the apprehension before the final moment. The water mana condensed and rained back into the donut to be forced into the time core. Then it was flashed with heat preparing to combine with the time mana. She reinforced the whole system watching like a hawk from above until... "Now."
She swung her hand down to point at the core and lightning ran through her. Unlike when she blasted Genisis' horde, it went through her with no resistance, It flowed through her metaphysical body and into the core. The combination of light, heat, and power finally did it. The whole orb lit up as the mana combined into something new.
"Step three, weaving and containment." Hiro smiled. She shot down as the core became an amorphous blob of mana writhing as it changed. The forming mana began to work its way up the power strands that held the construct in place and connected back to her other cores. If she wanted one unified core, she couldn't let this happen. That's not what she wanted.
Power radiated from outwards from the blob, she should condense it down and let it form its own core before it enveloped all of them. Outwardly she knew her body was going through the rest of the change. Distantly she could feel everything inside her affected by what she was doing. Now that she knew how to meditate, she could direct it. She was present even as she lost the ability to awaken. If she didn't do this final step correctly, there was a real possibility for her not to wake up.
She pushed back the creeping power, she used her will to shape the orb drawing out a single thread to be the core of her rope of mana. The tempo increased as she directed the other three cores to glide down smoothly. She carefully set them into motion in a dance of power. The threads began to braid themselves around the central core.
She monitored this with all her focus, checking for any hiccups as her control over time lessened as it was temporarily pulled from her grasp. It transformed into a new type of power. A sense that something was wrong with her physical body came to her almost jolting her out of her concentration. She couldn't think of it now however, her magic had to come first. The professors could worry about her body.
She continued to weave the power making a large central strand before she began to branch it out. She fed it through the five main corridors of her mana channels with apprehension. The true test was if her channels would accept this new type of mana and adapt to it. She felt the whole system convulse, her eyes widened as the channels changed in front of her eyes. Then suddenly the power was getting pulled down them as fast as the mana was woven together. A ripple of change flowed with new power.
She slowly backed off of her control of the weaving. It would have to maintain itself without her direct control to be successful. The time and water core was still condensing, but the other three spun without her direct guidance. She focused on keeping everything in balance until, from one beat to the next, everything snapped into place.
She felt her body take a deep breath and realized what had felt wrong. While her mana was changing she had been cut off from her ability to breathe water. Luckily this change had not taken the same amount of time as the last one. She was not in danger of drowning and never would be again.
She sunk to the warm metallic floor that had grounded her earlier. She sat and watched as her core settled. It would take time for all of her mana channels to be filled with her new type of power. She planned on waiting until everything was done before leaving. She was taking no chances. Time was running at normal speed and though she felt she had access to the flow of time, she let things run their course, content to watch and bask in the feeling of power running through her.
Hiro looked down at the black shirt she now wore, a replica of her father's. A familiar logo of some company shone in silvery white thread on the breast of the black shirt embroidered on a patch and sewn onto it. She ran a finger over it. She hadn't thought about it in years. Hiro remembered trying to look up the company logo with a reverse Google search once in high school in a misguided attempt to find him when things had been rough at home. Nothing had come up. Her finger paused, she tilted her head and plucked at the shirt examining the shape of the logo more closely.
Time slowed once more, as realization struck. The hexagonal symbol with spiraling lines coming from it in neat concentric rows was something she recognized. It was the same script that was on the doors of the out base, it was on the breast of every uniform she saw. She might not be able to read it, but it was in the language of Headquarters.
She rose slowly to her feet and time came to a halt as she reached a hand to steady herself against the fresh core, "My dad was a Spark?"