CHAPTER 32: RE-CENTERING

The new core pulsed red, time had frozen but the mana within had not. Hiro distractedly pulled her hand back quickly allowing time to return to normal. The mana restarted its flow into her evolving mana channels.

She massaged her hands together and stared down at the glistening logo. No, not a logo, a name. It was a name patch of someone who worked for Headquarters. It was her father's name. She turned around, about to push her consciousness out and ask the Professors about it. About Him. She stopped after only one step shaking her head.

Hiro schooled herself. Rushing about during a change caused her predicament in the first place. She was human, she could make mistakes, and she could fail. But humans also learned from their past mistakes and she was going to do that.

She closed her eyes to get an estimate of how much longer the change would take. Her cores and channels were still in flux, and with a snort, she laughed at herself. She couldn't leave until they were done even if she wanted to. Her body was still partially shut down to protect itself while it was altered magically.

The second change was unfolding differently from the first, both smoother and easier. Everything felt right, and after everything had been wrong she could breathe a sigh of relief. Assuring herself that her momentary lapse in judgment hadn't messed anything up, she started pacing and pondering what this new revelation meant.

Her father was a Spark. His name was in a silvery white-grey thread. She had seen some patches on the uniform jackets of some folks. Moria's had a silver embroidered name patch. Some others had iron, copper, or gold. It indicated the rank of power they held. Hiro had a cadet's blue patch with a gold trim on her jacket but the shirts didn't have anything on them like the replica she currently wore. She wondered why that was. It was just one more thing to ask as soon as she was done here.

So many questions race through her head. Why was there a Spark on earth when she was told that there hadn't been any Sparks there? She was told she was a fresh Sparkline. If her father had been one that was not the case. Shouldn't there be a record of him and by extension of her if she was the daughter of a Spark? Or was she getting ahead of herself and he wasn't a Spark and rather just someone working on her planet monitoring it? Someone without any power himself? That didn't make much sense, but it was possible.

There were too many possibilities, and she was here within herself fixing her magic. Her father hadn't been there since she was three, so now she needed to put him to the side like he had in the past and worry about herself for a moment. There was a burning curiosity but it could wait for now, simmering in the background.

There's still lingering anxiety from her earlier panic attack the aftereffects were well known to her. To take her mind off it and her father, Hiro could do something else she had put to the side to deal with the magic at hand. While she was stuck here letting her magic channels adjust to her new braided mana, she might as well tidy up the place.

She had a few ideas about how she wanted her core to look. While everything was in flux she might as well adapt to what she wanted now. Closing her eyes she envisioned the light of a golden sun that would trace its way across the false sky above her. It would have a corona of color radiating out like a comic book page. What was light without a little dark, as the sun would set the stars would come out highlighting the sky.

The ground was already hard under her feet she had felt the metallic metal earlier as she had tapped her finger on it. She wanted to highlight her control over metal now at least the ferrous sort. She raised various metals out of the ground into rocky ore clumps. Hiro thought of ore deposits in video games. They were not nearly as dirty and covered in rock and dirt, as real-life deposits. Instead, they looked like set pieces in a mining-style video game.

Next, she wanted prairies that surrounded her hometown, she is set to raise a grassland around her. The sky and water could mix create clouds and rain and wind and she can have her private inner world filled with the things she liked most. If only she could bring a camera inside her center. With her magical control here she could get the best pictures and she could make the golden hour last indefinitely.

She sighed wistfully and opened her eyes. The grasslands rustled in a gentle breeze and greeted her providing a symphony of noises in the background. Hiro didn't create any life within herself. She wasn't sure if she could, but the thought of having insects or birds within her core gave her a little bit of the heebie-jeebies. The sounds of the wind and clouds floating across the sky seemed like the perfect thing.

She flew up and observed the new landscape. It was beautiful but flat. Gentle rolling hills would help the landscape. She watched her cores move as they braided her magic and matched some hills like a casing underneath their floating forms like the cases they put around ball bearings without the top. She created natural hollows that she would one day make into power banks like Moria's tidal pools.

Finally, she made the lowest point under the central orb of Time and Water. She approached it to examine its new form. Inside there was a wire-framed clock face laying horizontally. The face of the clock was made with rippling water with the hands sticking above the surface. Dark clouds heavy with rain were frozen above it. As she watched the hands moved forward and the rain fell in a mad dash rippling across the surface of the clock. The clouds emptied and dispersed. The clock hands froze and the water was still.

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Suddenly the clock hands moved backward. The ripples and rain moved in reverse, reforming and then filling the clouds above. It was surreal to watch the rain fall up. It paused again before the cycle repeated itself.

"That's so cool," Hiro whispered as she watched a few rotations of the cycle swing back and forth. The short hills she had raised around the core formation blocked the outskirts of her center from view.

Hiro slowly reached out with her hands pushing mentally the ground into a depression underneath the raining core. She wanted a reminder of her folly, but she also wanted to reclaim it and make it her own. Something to inspire her to grow. So she reached upwards and grabbed a sliver of her power off of one of the branches. It came eagerly and freely like Ness when they were doing training. She guided the strand to the circular pool below the cores. Closing her eyes and listening.

It was so easy and intuitive to fill the pool with liquid mana. She didn't have to spend days trying to figure out how. She already knew. She had already figured out how to control it and build constructs to work with what she had. There was a small hiccup at the end. The tenor of her power had changed and a few mild adaptations to the pool later and it was perfect. She severed the thread of power. A waist-deep circular pond reflected the orbs floating and rotating above it. Streaks of color tinted the mana. Flashes of electricity and flecks of metallic glitter floated in the water in a dazzling array of power.

Hiro smiled. She was happy with how her center looked. It felt like her and it housed her power. She had even technically made a reservoir of power with little issue, even if it was supposed to be a decorative reminder not necessarily a power bank.

Her fingers started to itch and she looked down at them. A double sensation washed over her. Her metaphysical hands were fine, but her mana had reached her fingertips. The aching pain she had felt shifted to that of a healing itch of a scab. The power quickly chased even that away. With her healing water being backed up by her time concept as well as the rest of her power, her healing must have kicked into overdrive to finish fixing everything.

"This is getting better and better!" Hiro told her reflection in the pool of mana. Her hazel eyes glinted with the mix of magic in the pool. Her red hair was a wild mess around her face from her confrontation with her mother and fear. Her brow furrowed and she ran a hand through it. As she did it smoothed itself back into her preferred braids. She still wore her father's shirt and a pair of women's boxer shorts she used to sleep in. It was a far cry from the majestic creature Moria was in her center.

Briefly Hiro thought about making herself into something cool. Her ears grew into elf ears and she snorted at what she looked like in the pool. She shook her head and they disappeared. She flashed through a few different things just to test it out. In the end, none of it felt right. She settled on a form that was mostly true to her real self. Maybe slightly more fit than her real body. She might have moved past some of her fears, but the cruel words of her mother about her looks still lingered.

She pictured what she might look like in a magazine and tried that. As if someone photoshopped her. She frowned as a stranger appeared in the pool. Her boobs and butt were too big and her body too skinny her face was perfectly symmetrical. She shook her head and returned to her mostly normal self. This was the body she had, she might as well work with it. She didn't add her scars but did add a bit of definition as an aspiration to what she hoped to look like when she had combat training to hone some muscle on her lithe form.

"Well, that was fun just to get back to normal," She flexed an arm to show a muscle that normally wasn't as defined, "OK mostly normal. I'll get there with some training." Messing with her appearance was entertaining but didn't feel right. It wasn't her. She updated her clothes into comfortable flowing tye-dye pants and shrunk her father's baggy shirt to better fit her form. She added some comfortable shoes and she looked like she was ready to wander around in a park and do some yoga.

She nodded at her reflection before checking in with her magic. A few last tiny channels were still processing as they branched throughout her system. She felt her center begin to firm up at the same time. The time of ease she had shaping the space was coming to a close. Hiro was happy with what it looked like and what she looked like. She was willing to bet that most folks couldn't adjust their center as fully as she had done since most of them get whatever the change gave them from their subconscious.

Her real body was starting to tingle with power. The braided thread of mana began to grow in size. The final step was a fast oncoming. Her core would pulse a massive amount of energy through her entire system. Hardening the channels to deal with whatever amount of power she could bring to bear.

In most cases, it was whatever the highest capacity of power their core could output in a single burst. She had to manage four cores with all their confluences woven together. Her burst of power needed to be monitored so she didn't blow any skin off again. After this though, it should be close to impossible for it to happen again.

She watched the mana cord condense and grow into a massive trunk. Occasionally a flash of red would indicate a needed adjustment to the spinning cores. Hiro would take control and make the fix before leaving it to continue its path. She instinctively had the pulse of time in her control, in case she had to slow things down, but it was unnecessary. Her mana filled the entire shape of her center with energy and then in a massive tidal wave of power, it pulsed and ran through her mana channels with ease.

Hiro floated to one of the main channels heading through the floor and to a leg. The channel glistened with a rainbow metallic sheen. Stripes of blue lighting flashed in veins throughout it. It all glowed with the blue-green color she associated with her sense of accuracy and when things were correct. A faint hint of pressure came from the edges of the channel keeping the massive cord of mana firmly in the center of everything. Finally magic flowed like water through the center of the cord.

Hiro beamed. Her magic was beautiful, it was fixed, and she was ready to face whatever came next. She cast her thoughts to her father, at least she hoped so. Either way, it was time to exit, so with one final sweep of her senses she confirmed everything was in place and flowing. Then she pushed her senses up and out. It was time for some answers. it was time for some magic.