Hey everyone! Just a quick note: This chapter pretty much exactly follows the movie because there wasn't really a way to make any changes to the original scene ^^; But next chapter the action really begins!
0o0
Hiro should have known that something was up when Tadashi gave in so easily, but he was too tired to notice where they were until they drove past a glowing sign announcing that they were entering SFIT-the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology, a.k.a. the college that Tadashi went to and had spent years trying to convince Hiro to go to as well.
"What are we doing at your nerd school?" Hiro groans.
"I told you, I've gotta grab something!" Tadashi answers, parking the scooter in front of a building and starting to head for the door.
Hiro, not knowing what else to do, begrudgingly follows after him.
"Is this going to take long?" he grumbles as he follows his elder sibling through the building.
"Relax, you big baby, we'll be in and out," Tadashi answers, opening a set of double doors at the end of a hallway and stepping inside. "Besides, you've never seen my lab!"
"Oh great, I get to see your nerd lab!" Hiro says sarcastically at he steps inside, only to have to instantly flatten himself against the door as a blur of yellow and black races past, accompanied by a female voice calling out,
"Heads up!"
Hiro was prepared to yell at whoever had almost run him over to watch where they were going, but his angry words fade away as he sees a girl getting off of a bike that had-were those maglev wheels?
As he glances out into the rest of the lab, his eyes go wide as he takes in an array of similarly awe inspiring tech-a robot that was playing table tennis, a cat hovering on rocket boots, even a small robot that was carrying a guy standing on top of it around the lab.
Curiosity overcoming him, Hiro heads over to check out the currently unsupervised bike, waving one hand between the wheel and the frame, just to make sure that this wasn't an optical illusion. But no-the wheel really was only being suspended by magnets! How sick was this?!
"Hey!"
Hiro jerks back when the bike's rider comes back over, sounding angry that he was messing with her tech.
"Who are you?" she demands
"I, um-" Hiro starts to try to stammer out an answer, but then he felt Tadashi's hand on his back.
"GoGo!" Tadashi greets the woman. "This is my brother, Hiro."
The woman pauses for a moment before pulling off her helmet, looking thoroughly unimpressed with Hiro as she pops her gum. "Welcome to the nerd lab," she finally deadpans before turning to set down the helmet.
"Heh heh.. Y-Yeah…" Hiro stammers out, hating feeling like stupid little kid but wanting to try to make a good impression on the girl who had made such awesome tech. "I-I've never seen electro-mag suspension on a bike before!"
Gogo seems to be checking over the bike, spinning on of the wheels. "Zero resistance. Faster bike," she answers curtly before adding, "But, not fast enough." She grabs the wheel and tosses it into a box with what looked like other discarded bike parts.
Both incredibly impressed and slightly intimidated, Hiro starts to back away. In search of new tech to check out, he starts to head into a nearby cubicle, only to be immediately stopped by a man in gloves and safety goggles.
"Whoa! Whoa whoa whoa! Do not move!" the man cries. "Behind the line, please!" He indicates a striped yellow and black line on the ground, which Hiro quickly moves behind.
"Hey, Wasabi!" Tadashi says, coming to stand behind his younger brother. "This is my brother, Hiro."
"Well, hello Hiro," Wasabi answers with a smile, adjusting his protective goggles as if to see Hiro better. "Prepare to be amazed! Catch!" He grabs an apple off of the table and tosses it towards the space in between two vertical conductors. To the naked eye, there was nothing there, and yet somehow after passing through them the apple was split into a hundred tiny, paper thin slices.
"Wow..." Hiro breathes, reaching out to grab one of the apple slices, marvelling out how perfect the cut was. "Laser induced plasma?" he guesses when Wasabi flips a switch that causes a network of thin green lines to appear between the conductors.
"Oh yea," Wasabi agrees with a proud looking smile. "With a little magnetic confinement for ultra-precision." As he says this, he straightens one of the tools on his already immaculate desk.
"How do you find anything in this mess?" Hiro wonders aloud as he looks at the rather intricate office setup, picking up one of Wasabi's tools
"Ah ah ah!" Wasabi quickly snatches the piece away and puts it back into its perfectly outlined spot. "I have a system," he explains. "A place for everything, and everything in its place!"
Gogo suddenly appears in the office, snatching up a wrench. "Need this!" she calls before racing back out.
"Wh-You can't do this!" Wasabi cries, taking off after her. "This is anarchy! Society has rules!"
As he runs, he just barely misses being run over by a blonde girl rushing past, a gigantic ball of metal rolling ahead of her.
"Excuuuse me! Coming through!" she calls loudly, rolling the metal ball into a stand inside a nearby office, only seeming to notice the two brothers after it was in place.
"Tadashi!" she cries, her eyes lighting up as she leans backwards over the metal ball, her hands over her heart. Then, if possible, her eyes grow even wider as she spots the younger Hamada. "Oh my gosh! You must be Hiro!" she shouts as she removes her headphones (explaining why her voice had been so unnaturally loud before.) "I've heard so much about you!"
Hiro was about to confirm that he was, in fact, Hiro (seriously, had Tadashi told everyone in the lab about him?) when he finds himself being kissed on both cheeks by the girl.
He blinks, stunned-he'd never been kissed, even on the cheek, by anyone outside of his family before-but before he could overthink it, he found himself being dragged along by the blonde woman.
"Perfect timing!" she cries, flipping a switch that caused the metal ball to be lifted up into the air on its stand.
"That's a whole lot of tungsten carbide," Hiro observes, not quite sure what she was planning to do with it.
"Four hundred pounds of it!" the blonde agrees eagerly before dragging him over to a table where a very elaborate chemistry set was set up. "C'mere, c'mere, c'mere! You're gonna love this!"
She rattles off a whole series of scientific-sounding terms that went right over his head as she mixes chemicals, finally spraying the resulting bright pink concoction over the ball. It hangs in a cloud over the metal until she flips yet another switch which seems to cause the chemicals to bond with the metal because the entire ball suddenly became the same vivid pink as the concoction.
"Ta-da! It's pretty great, right?"the woman says eagerly.
"Wow, it's so… pink?" Hiro says, not sure what to think of it.
"Here's the best pa-aart!" the woman sing songs, going over to to touch the metal. Instantly, it explodes into a million particles of pink dust.
"Whoa…" Hiro gasps, half wondering if this woman was a witch herself-what else could explain the exploding metal ball?
"I know, right?" she squeals happily. "Chemical Metal embrittlement!"
"Not bad, Honey Lemon," Tadashi says with a slight smile.
Honey Lemon. So that was her name-Hiro was glad to know what to call her now. Still, he couldn't quite help but wonder what was up with all these strange names.
"Honey Lemon, Gogo, Wasabi?" He looks to Tadashi for an explanation
"I spill Wasabi on my shirt one time people! One time!" Wasabi cries, stalking past and slamming the lab door closed as he leaves.
"Fred is the one who comes up with the nicknames," Tadashi explains with a fond smile, and, was Hiro imagining it, or was he actually blushing slightly?
"Uh, who's Fred?" Hiro asks, deciding that he definitely needed more information about this person.
But instead of getting a direct reply from Tadashi, he hears a voice from behind him calling out, "This guy, right here!"
"Aahh!" Hiro lets out a cry as he comes face to face with what looked like a creature from the black lagoon.
"Ah ah! Don't be alarmed! It's just a suit, this is not my real face and body!" An arm pushes back the mouth of what indeed turned out to be a mascot suit and the head of a man with shaggy blonde hair pops out of it.
"The name's Fred!" The man in the suit reaches out an arm to Hiro, who a bit hesitantly shakes it.
"School mascot by day!" Fred continues to introduce himself as he picks up a large sign and twirls it around. "But by night...I'm also a school mascot!"
Hiro noticed that Tadashi was grinning and seemed maybe a bit overly amused by Fred's antics, and he quickly deduces that, for reasons beyond his comprehension, Fred was probably one of Tadashi's close friends here at the school. Well, if that was the case, it wouldn't hurt to get to know him better.
"So what's your major?" Hiro asks.
"No no no no no!" Fred responds, shaking his head. "I'm not a student. But I am a major science enthusiast!" He holds up a comic book that had a man transforming into a giant lizard monster on the front. "I've been trying to get Honey to develop a formula that can turn me into a fire breathing lizard at will, but she says that's 'not science'." He uses the mascot suit hands to make air quotes.
"I-It's really not..." Honey Lemon sheepishly tells him.
"Oh sure- and I guess the shrink ray I asked Wasabi for isn't 'science', either?" Fred asks, finger quoting the word again.
"No," Wasabi said, having returned to the group and seeming unamused by the conversation.
"Well then, what about, invisible sandwich?" Fred asks, pantomiming eating a large sandwich. "Imagine eating a sandwich, but everyone just thinks you're crazy!"
"Just stop," Wasabi sighs, shaking his head.
Hiro tries to take in all of this-okay, so Fred seemed slightly eccentric, but overall not a bad guy. And the fact that he seemed to be pretty into comics probably explained why he and Tadashi-who was also a huge nerd-were such good friends. Speaking of Tadashi…
Hiro realizes that Tadashi had disappeared, and he looks around to try to find his older brother. Finally he spots him standing by a door which seemed to lead into a smaller lab, and when he sees Tadashi signaling with a nod of his head for him to join him Hiro eagerly follows after him. In spite of himself, he was getting swept up into the excitement of things.
Hiro had to admit that Tadashi's lab was pretty cool-it was a lot bigger than the other students' (which he felt probably said something about how well Tadashi was doing here at the school) and it was full of a lot of awesome tech.
"So, what have you been working on?" Hiro asks, playfully shaking a robotic hand that was sitting on a table. Tadashi was so closed lipped about his projects until he felt that they were, as he put it, "ready to show the world"-was he finally going to find out what his older brother had been up to all this time?"
"Oh, I'll show you." Grinning, Tadashi goes over to the desk drawer and pulls out a roll of duct tape, cutting a strip loose with his teeth.
"Duct tape?" Hiro incredulously asks before shaking his head and saying melodramatically, "Hate to break it to you bro, but that's already been invented."
Tadashi did not look amused, so maybe he should have seen this retribution coming. But he didn't get a chance to do more than let out a surprised, "Hey!" as Tadashi, without,warning, pushes back the sleeve of his hoodie, slaps the duct tape onto the bare skin of his forearm, and then rips it off without mercy.
"DUDE, OW!" Hiro protests. He wanted to demand an explanation (and an apology) but before he could his attention was diverted by a red case leaning up against the side of office opening to reveal an inflatable white robot which waddles forward and introduces itself as Baymax.
Baymax, as it turned out, was a nursebot. A very, very advanced nursebot which could diagnose a myriad of health problems with a single scan. Even though he didn't want to seem overly impressed, Hiro felt his respect for his older brother (if it was possible) growing even larger than it had been before.
"He's going to help a lot of people," Tadashi says with a proud smile once Baymax had finished putting antibacterial spray on Hiro's minor wound and returned to its case.
Hiro was just starting to give him feedback on some ideas he had for improving Baymax when a man with with grey hair pokes his head into the office.
"Burning the midnight oil, Mr. Hamada?" he asks, and Hiro could only assume that he was referring to Tadashi since he himself had never met this man before in his life.
"Hey, Professor," Tadashi answers with a smile. "Actually, I was just finishing up."
A professor. Got it. Boring, Hiro decides. Still, he couldn't help but wonder if maybe this professor wouldn't be as bad as his high school teachers had been considering there was apparently some pretty cool stuff being taught here-not that Hiro was actually actually considering going here.
"You must be Hiro. Bot-fighter, right?" The professor says, taking notice of Hiro and this time convincing the teen that Tadashi had apparently been raving about him to every living person at this school.
"When my daughter was younger, that's all she wanted to do," the professor continues, breaking into Hiro's thoughts, before gesturing to Megabot. "May I?"
"Sure," Hiro answers, nonchalantly handing the bot over, knowing that the professor would probably be prejudiced against his bot as it was one built for fights. But, to his surprise, the professor actually seemed to be impressed as he looks Megabot over.
"Hm… Magnetic-bearing servos," the professor observes.
"Pretty sick, huh?" Hiro gives him a cocky smile. "Wanna see how I put 'em together?"
"Hey, genius!" Tadashi knocks on the glass window off his office to get his attention, a smug smirk on his face. "He invented them."
"Y-You're Robert Callaghan?" Hiro stammers out as he looks back at the professor, his world flipping on its head. "Like, as in, the Callaghan-Catmull spline? Callaghan's laws of robotics?"
"That's right," the professor answers with a smile, handing Megabot back to Hiro. "Ever think about applying here? Your age wouldn't be an issue."
"I don't know…" Tadashi says as he exits his office, closing the door behind him. "He's pretty serious about his career in bot-fighting."
"Well, k-kind of serious," Hiro amends, trying not to let on that Tadashi's words were getting to him. True, he hadn't wanted to go to school here before. But that was before he'd known that Robert Freaking Callaghan taught here! How could Tadashi have kept this a secret from him?!
"I can see why," Professor Callaghan says dryly, and something about his tone cut Hiro right to his core. "With your bot, winning must come easy."
"Y-Yeah, I guess…" Hiro mumbles.
"Well, if you like things easy, then my program isn't for you," Callaghan says as he opens the elevator at the end of the hallway for Hiro and Tadashi. "We push the boundaries of robotics here. My students go on to shape the future. Nice to meet you, Hiro. Good luck with the bot-fights."
It was that disappointed look on the professor's face as the door closes that finally clinches it for Hiro. Callaghan was his idol. There was no way that he could let him down!
"I have to go here!" Hiro cries as soon as he's outside, turning desperately to his older brother. "If I don't go to this nerd school, I'm gonna lose my mind. How do I get in?"
It was clear for the smug expression on Tadashi's face that his older brother could tell that he'd finally won this battle.
"Every year, the school has a student showcase. You come up with something that blows Callaghan away, you're in," Tadashi explains once they're back in their room later that night, stapling a flyer for the expo over Hiro's desk for inspiration. "But, it's gotta be great!"
"Trust me," Hiro answers, flexing his fingers and pulling out a pencil to start sketching out ideas. "It will be."
