CHAPTER 33: WHO'S YOUR DADDY?

Up and out Hiro rose through herself back into consciousness. More than a few things had changed since she started forming her new core and completing her change. First, she discovered an air mask over her mouth and nose. The professors must've strapped it on when they realized she was drowning for a moment as a backup way for her to breathe.

There was a flurry of activity outside the tank. All three professors stood around a display of Hiro's pathways as several more assistants joined the group. They were working on various machines directly. All of them were talking animatedly between themselves. Finally, the Headmaster had appeared. He was standing near the door watching everything unfold but staying out of the way.

Hiro checked her internal clock and was surprised. According to her innate sense of time, it was late the next day. They had started the process close to midnight the day before, and now it was past dinner time. It had only felt like hours within Hiro's center. Plus with Hiro continually slowing down time wouldn't time out here be slower? Unless she had paused time only within herself and the passage outside had gone on like normal. The more she examined the magic behind what happened the more vertigo she felt. There was a disconnect between what had happened within her to the outside world. She would have to check in on that later.

She reached and tapped Button using her interface to wake up the overlays. "Welcome back Miss!" Button told her cheerily as she tabbed through to see her mana channels. "All of the data recorded indicates a success! Congratulations!"

Hiro couldn't reply with the air mask on and a tube in her mouth so she nodded and examined what the readings gave them on her channels. The network of rivers had grown and expanded. Instead of anemic tributaries, they looked like solid streams and rivers and were twice the size they were before. Plusing mana ran through them.

"According to readouts you at least doubled your channel size and output amount." Button supplied helpfully. "For more information, I suggest talking with the professors. They are eager to debrief you on how the process went."

Hiro nodded again before swimming up to the surface. A helpful assistant waited to help her unstrap the mask and take off some of the monitoring equipment. They worked together to get everything detached from the wetsuit before handing her an unnecessary towel and leaving her to climb down when she was ready. She stood on the platform and wicked away the water with a thought. She beamed as the water practically jumped off her. No long drawn-out gestures anymore.

She started down the ladder listening before remembering she could fly. She tapped into her ability to control the atmosphere and her magnetism to the metal around her and the planet and pushed herself through the air beaming at the feeling of floating outside of water. She listened to the professors' excited chatter floating toward them. She wanted to ask them about the symbol on her dad's shirt.

"The power output we read during the surge was off the charts!" Professor Davenport exclaimed. "Are you sure you calibrated things correctly Gendry?"

Professor Gendry gave a long suffering sigh, "As I told you we double-checked everything afterwards. The reality is that she had more gold concepts with confluences than we've seen in a millennium, so of course her power would top the charts."

"But it's close if not level with that of a platinum right after a change. That's unusual. Is that because of the incomplete change or because of how she planned to weave the mana into a thread versus combining all her powers? Is this something safely repeatable?" Asked Professor Daubenton.

"I don't think we'll be gambling with the futures of our Sparks Anytime soon," Headmaster Death's voice cut across the conversation.

"Of course Headmaster," Daubenton conceded immediately. Her bat-like ears flattened slightly at the reprimand.

Hiro made her way floating across the crowded lab as assistants scurried around turning off equipment no longer in use. She had draped the black towel over her shoulder when something occurred to her. She stopped and closed her eyes to visualize A little bit of clouds and a little bit of light later and she had a pair of sweats on over the wetsuit and a pair of slides on her feet. The soft cloud stuff enveloped her and turned a dark green with light reflecting through it. She touched the conjured light and cloud mixture. Before her clothes had been light constructs. Now she mixed it easily with the ambient water and atmosphere to create soft clothing.

"Button! Everything is working again!" She whispered excitedly continuing to cross the room in her new clothes.

"I feel it, Miss! Quite excellent. I am excited to see what you can do in the Arena of Weights and Measures."

"The what now?" Hiro asked as she stepped up to the group of Professors. Her Mana network was hovering above a display with words in the spiraling language of Headquarters hanging around it.

"It is how we measure the potential of Cadets. I will explain more later. I have a request to share information about the findings of your secondary change."

"Wait until after I talk with the professors then I will look over it."

"As you wish Miss." Button chirped before going silent all eyes had turned to her.

"Hiro! Congratulations! From our end, everything read as a resounding success with only a few bumps along the way. We're all eager to talk with you about what your experience was." Professor Davenport kicked off.

"Yes, How do you feel? Is everything in your body feeling alright?" Professor Daobenten asked.

"Yeah, I feel great, everything feels right as rain! But I do have a question for you. I remembered something as I was going through everything." Hiro held up a hand and formed the symbol on the shirt watching the Professor's expressions as she did so.

Professor Davenport's eyebrows went up when she first saw the symbol before her eyebrows drew together in confusion as her eyes traced the spiral. Daobenten was a little hard to read with the fur and bat-like features but she looked puzzled.

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Gendry just looked annoyed. "What's this all about then?" He said gesturing at the symbol she conjured. "Perfection is constant transformation. Where did you see that?"

It was Hiro's turn to frown in confusion. "It was on a shirt when I was young. I remembered it while I was changing. I thought it was a name."

"When you were young?" Professor Daobenten cut in, "We have very few people recorded traveling to your planet. The base in your system isn't even near your planet in the grand scheme of things. We were surprised when we started picking up Spark readings from you. Where did you get it?"

"Um," Hiro shifted uncomfortably as Headmaster Death approached her silently eyebrows drawn and a slight frown on his face. His large ears quivered slightly and his short form stopped in front of her. He raised an eyebrow at her waiting on her to answer.

"I got it from my dad." She took a tiny step back on instinct as Headmaster's Death's look intensified. She glanced around at the Professors who all had various looks of incredulity on their faces. "At least that's what my mom said And what I can remember. I don't know a lot about him. I was three when he left us." She had pulled the symbol into herself holding it close.

"So it's not his name?" She said quietly.

"It reads" The headmaster reached out a long finger to trace the spiral in the air. "Perfection is constant transformation. It has one too many loops to be a name. The phrase rings a bell but I can't place it."

"What color was the symbol?" Gendry asked waving a hand, "Was it that color or a different one?"

Hiro examined it closely and made a few minute adjustments to get the color as close to her memory of her father's shirt as she could get. "There it matches."

"Did she change anything?" Gendry asked under his breath before letting out a sharp oof as Professor Davenport elbowed him.

"That looks like silver to me," Davenport said while glancing around at her colleagues.

"It seems a bit darker. It could be Platinum" Gendry retorted.

"Or it could just be a color for a design on the shirt. It doesn't quite go into either color category we currently use. Maybe it faded and turned into that color or someone was trying to look self-important with their color choice when they made that slogan." Professor Daobenten said.

"There's too many unknowns." The Headmaster gave her a piercing look, "I thought you were a fresh Sparkline. Our records show no one in your area near your estimated conception time. But some Sparks have retired and travel across the galaxies." He signed, "We don't keep as close of tabs on their movements. I will check with the Public Travel branch to see if any Sparks compatible with humans were in your universe within the last forty to fifty years or so. I'll also ask Time if he knows anything about the slogan. He's the oldest of us all."

"This is a fascinating new mystery, but we need to refocus on your transformation and what happened before the memories fade." Professor Daobenten said moving the conversation away from the mysterious symbol.

"Yes of course Anastasia," The headmaster's eye gained the faraway look someone gets interfacing with their PDA. "I'll get some people on investigating this. If you're not a new Sparkline we should find out where you come from. You have so many gold concepts, at the very least it's unusual and worth looking into. I'll keep you posted on what we find Hiro."

Hiro deflated, she had been so excited thinking she would learn who her father was only to come up with more questions. There wasn't much else she could do though. She asked the only people who could find out the information.

Gendry spoke up, "We have quite good records, Hiro, I'm sure we'll be able to figure out who had this shirt of yours or at least get some answers about it. Now tell us what happened to you the last day then we can break down the data we found."

Hiro's belly chose that moment to make a loud gurgle. She was reminded she hadn't eaten in at least twenty-four hours. Something else grumbled or went to the bathroom. "Um I would love to go over everything with y'all, but I think I need food and a bathroom." Another grumble, "Maybe not in that order."

Professor Davenport burst out laughing. "Alright hun, let's get you settled and we can move into one of the conference rooms to talk."

It was quickly done. Hiro was annoyed that her body functions were being inconvenient. She wanted to finish with this so she could play with her magic and see what she could do now. They were now sitting around a round table with graphs and diagrams floating above it. A spread of food cubes were arrayed out on a tray in front of Hiro though the others picked at it as well as they discussed.

Hiro had carefully avoided talking specifically about the time core she had wrapped in the water construct, she made it sound like she made a new construct to form the core with. She debated telling them about it when she was in the bathroom.

She ran over everything in her head ordering her thoughts. This would be the perfect time to come clean to the professors. They had helped her so much. She reached for her time core thinking about telling the whole truth. Her vision flashed red and a bad feeling had come over her. It had been as clear a sign as any to edit the truth. She didn't see a clear vision of what would happen with her cores, but something was still going on.

So she had told them everything as accurately as possible but made it sound like she had done the harder process Professor Davenport had worked her through. She made it sound as if she made the core formation trigger without trying to merge it with a preexisting core. She just hoped it wouldn't be too obvious she lied when Davenport went back through her channels with her to do a final survey.

They had many more questions about how she had formed her braided mana. They ran her through how she had directed the stands to weave together several times. The professors also surprised her when they weren't all that curious about the fear monster she conjured. She had glossed past it quickly and they didn't ask many follow-up questions.

Hiro had asked why a little later and got this response from Professor Gendry, "We all have had to battle our internal demons at some point. We'll refer you to one of the specialists in the mental health department. None of us have that specialty." And left it at that.

Hiro shrugged and went with it, she didn't really want to pick apart what had happened with the vision of her mother any more than she had to. The professors took it as the reason her power had dulled toward the end of the core formation and moved on.

It wasn't until Hiro was yawning through another rehashing of how she could reform her entire center while her mana was rebuilding her mana channels that Professor Daobenten cut off the stream of questions.

"We all had a long night. I think that's more than enough for the night. Hiro, we will meet once more tomorrow and run through some more tests and a remapping of your channels. Everything went more smoothly than expected. If you get cleared tomorrow we will run you through the Arena of Weights and Measures the next day. Then we can get you signed up for classes next week!"

"Button mentioned the Arena. What is that?" Hiro asked standing and stretching as everyone began packing up.

"It's a stabilized anomaly that has been around since the formation of Headquarters. It's one of the reasons we made this planet Headquarters," She looked over at the Headmaster, "In fact. thanks to the Platinums at the time, wasn't it; Genesis, Time, Evolution, Power, Mind, and Soul who collaborated on that one?" Headmaster Death nodded in affirmation and the Professor continued, "They combined their power to stabilize it and create a subspace specifically made to measure the power of new Sparks. We have been using it to get a baseline for new Sparks ever since. It allows us to identify strengths and weaknesses and create an ideal training program for our Cadets."

"I thought I was done with standardized testing," Hiro muttered.

"Oh, don't worry, it's anything but standardized." Professor Gendry replied. His red eyes flashed.

A chill went down Hiro's spine. It couldn't be worse than facing down an army of Genisis beasts right?