AutumnXd
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CHAPTER 11
🕑 Added 2025-06-17 15:42:25 +0000 UTCWhile the city mourned a hero, the ghost of Professor Callaghan was hard at work. In the cavernous, forgotten shell of an abandoned cannery by the bay, he quietly established his new empire. He sat in a makeshift command center, a neural transmitter strapped to his head, its settings subtly altered. With a thought, he repurposed Hiro’s genius, linking the swarm of microbots to his own brainwaves. But the thousands of bots he'd stolen were not enough. A silent, efficient assembly line now snaked through the factory, churning out millions more, funded by back-alley deals for raw materials on the black market. He worked with a singular, vengeful focus, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.
Meanwhile, Ward was on a different kind of journey. He immersed himself in the research Callaghan had given him, a treasure trove of handwritten notes, complex equations, and theoretical models on space-time mechanics. Callaghan’s annotations were a godsend, a map through the labyrinthine concepts, and with his System-granted "Affinity," Ward devoured the knowledge, his understanding growing exponentially each day.
In the world outside Ward's lab, life went on. A recovering Tadashi was visited daily by Hiro, who brought Baymax along for moral support. One evening, back in his garage workshop, Hiro noticed something strange. The single microbot he’d kept in his pocket, the only one left, began to twitch and move, trying to pull itself in a specific direction as if drawn by an invisible magnet. Tadashi’s survival had blunted the sharpest edges of Hiro’s grief, replacing it with a burning curiosity. He grabbed his jacket, tucked the twitching microbot into his palm, and followed its lead.
The trail led him across town, onto a train, and finally to a desolate industrial district. The microbot pointed insistently toward a derelict factory, its windows dark and broken. A heavy chain and padlock secured the main doors, but Hiro spotted an open window on the second floor. After a panting, precarious climb up an old brickwork facade, he scrambled inside.
The vast, dark space made him shiver. He followed the microbot's pull through the gloom, his footsteps echoing ominously. He soon found the source: a fully operational assembly line, its conveyor belts carrying thousands upon thousands of his microbots into large collection barrels. He picked one up. It was a perfect replica of his own creation.
Suddenly, a shadowy figure moved in the distance. Hiro ducked behind a stack of crates, his heart pounding in his throat. A man wearing a black trench coat and an eerie, black-and-white Kabuki mask entered a control room, seemingly unaware of his presence. Hiro held his breath, realizing he was in terrible danger. He began to back away, moving with agonizing slowness. He finally reached the window he’d come through and was halfway out when his foot slipped on the crumbling brick. He fell with a heavy thud and a sharp cry of pain. Scrambling to his feet, he sprinted into the night. Behind him, a tide of microbots swarmed to the window, the masked figure looking down at the empty street below.
Hiro, gasping for air, eventually reached out to his brother's friends. Ward was invited to join their investigation, but he declined. "I'm on the verge of a breakthrough with Callaghan's research," he’d said, his voice a convincing mix of focus and regret. "I can't stop now."
As Hiro left, disappointed, Ward’s eyes flashed with cold calculation. Let them have their adventure. Let them fail. He turned back to his own work. With a fresh infusion of cash from the Firebrand contract Fred's father had finalized, he began construction on his own equipment. A city-wide resonance scanner, a sleek, powerful jetpack for maneuvering in zero-g environments, and a handheld chronometric flux gauge to measure spatial-temporal distortions. He was going to be busy.
While Ward forged his new arsenal, the "Big Hero 6" team, as they began to call themselves, created their suits and tracked Callaghan to a decommissioned military island. They discovered his true identity, but in their shock and confusion, Callaghan escaped. Baymax’s scanners were damaged in the fight, and they lost his trail. Piecing together surveillance footage and Callaghan's vengeful motives, they realized his target: Alistair Krei, and the grand opening of the new Krei Tech campus.
Onstage, Alistair Krei was basking in the glow of his achievement. "This beautiful new park is the culmination of a lifelong dream," he preened. "I have to thank the stumbling blocks in my life, without which I wouldn't be standing here…"
The crowd behind him wasn't listening. They were staring in horror as shimmering black tentacles made of microbots snaked down the walls of the new building. The tentacles converged, forming a pillar of black that deposited the man in the Kabuki mask directly in front of Krei.
"Callaghan? You're not…" Krei stammered, his face pale.
"Was my daughter just a 'stumbling block' in your life, Alistair?" Callaghan roared, his voice distorted by the mask. The microbots began assembling a massive, three-ringed structure behind him: the portal.
"Abigail… that was an accident! A tragedy!" Krei pleaded.
"No! You knew the risks! My daughter is gone because of your arrogance!" The portal hummed to life, a vortex of swirling, unstable energy. "You took my everything the moment you let her step into that machine. Now you get to taste what that feels like!"
"No, no, no!" Krei screamed as the portal's powerful gravity began to pull his life's work into its chaotic maw.
At that moment, the Big Hero 6 team arrived. Their attempts to reason with Callaghan failed. They attacked, but their uncoordinated efforts were useless against the millions of microbots. Gogo was trapped in a crushing sphere. Wasabi was pinned. Fred was tangled and lifted into the air. Honey Lemon barely dodged a razor-sharp spike.
Just as a massive blade of bots formed to crush them all, a flash of white light and a high-pitched whine cut through the chaos. A figure in a sleek, white armored suit descended from the sky. With a single, precise slash of a glowing plasma lance, he severed the tendril holding Gogo. A targeted EMP burst disabled the bots around Fred, dropping him safely to the ground. In seconds, the remaining team members were freed.
"Ward!" Honey Lemon shouted in shocked surprise, as he gently set her and Gogo down, his jetpack humming quietly.
"Not fair, I wanted to be carried too!" Fred yelled, ever the clown.
Ward ignored him, retracted his plasma lance, and turned his gaze to the man in the mask. "Professor," he called out, his voice amplified by his helmet. "Your daughter is still alive."
Callaghan froze, then sneered. "...That's a despicable excuse, Ward! It will only provoke me further!" He prepared to attack again.
"I'm detecting a dormant life-form's energy wavelength inside the portal!" Ward shouted, his words stopping Callaghan cold. He flew closer. "I told you my theory, Professor. In a chaotic spacetime event, the internal flow of time can be nearly zero relative to the outside world!" He pointed to the advanced optical sensors on his helmet. "My resonance scanner is picking up her bio-signature. She's in there, dormant. It has to be her!"
"Really?" Callaghan’s voice was a choked whisper, all the rage draining out of him, replaced by a desperate, pleading hope.
"Yes. And I'm going in to get her."
"No!" Callaghan objected, his fatherly instinct overriding everything else. "Give me the helmet! Let me go!"
"I have to be the one," Ward said, his voice firm. "I'm the student of this science. This is the ultimate experiment." He turned and blasted toward the swirling vortex. "I hope your data was accurate, Professor Callaghan!"
With a final burst of speed, he plunged into the portal.
Seeing this, Callaghan’s face filled with the same desperate hope the team had seen on Tadashi's face at the fire. He immediately redirected the microbots, not to attack, but to stabilize the portal's fringe, to keep it open.
Inside was another universe. A maelstrom of silent, crystalline colors twisted around him, with ribbons of frozen lightning and nebulae of shattered physics. A nauseating vertigo washed over him as his own atoms felt pulled in a dozen different directions. He pulled out his chronometric flux gauge. The reading was zero. Time was stopped. He activated his helmet's resonance scanner and flew forward, following a faint, pulsing signal.
He soon found it: a single, intact pilot pod, floating serenely in the chaos. Inside, a woman in a flight suit slept peacefully. He pulled a powerful thruster from his backpack and attached it to the pod's exterior. With a burst of energy, it began to push the pod toward the exit.
As they moved, the temporal distortion intensified. A sharp, splitting headache began to pound in his skull. He grit his teeth, enduring the discomfort, and pushed forward. He burst out of the portal back into the real world, the sudden rush of sound and sensation a shock to his system. He increased the jetpack's power, fighting the portal's powerful suction.
The professor saw them emerge. Hope transformed his face. He sent a massive arm of microbots to grab onto Ward and the pod, pulling them free of the gravitational pull and setting them gently on the ground.
"Professor," Ward said, his voice strained. "Destroy it!"
Callaghan didn't hesitate. He commanded the swarm to converge on the portal device, dismantling and crushing it into scrap metal in seconds. He then rushed to the dormant pod and pressed his trembling hand against the cold glass, his shoulders shaking as he whispered his daughter's name.
"Abby…"
