Chapter Seven


With his body aching, Chiro dresses into his white uniform and walks outside. He winces as the cloth rubs lightly against the injuries on his chest. It's very early in the morning, while the team is still asleep, which means they've left him alone for hours. The young man sighs and closes his eyes. The cold air feels wonderful. He doesn't know where's he going. He just knows that he needs to go outside.

He walks into a less inhabited place miles behind the robot and sinks down under a tree. The sun has still not peaked above the ground. Flitting needs and thoughts invade his conscience. Nova's voice. Chiro's seen her angry, beyond angry. Mostly directed at Sprx, often ending with Antauri having to intervene.

"What am I doing?" He rubs his eyes. "What's wrong with me?"


Chiro finds himself sitting on the edge of a giant chasm with his mother, whose eerie humming ignites the haze around him. Discordant chirping and other animal noises reach his ears. His heart leaps at the sight of her smiling at him, her head turned up and her countenance containing nothing but love for him. The environment is a bleak gray, and Chiro can't tell what time of day it's supposed to be.

The young man says to his mother, "I miss you."

She nods and states cheerfully, "Honey, it'll last shorter than you think. Like a shot. The wait to go into the doctor's office is often more painful than the hurt itself."

"What do you mean?" The wind howls, and Chiro suddenly wants to be back in the medical bay.

"Join me. Join us, please." The young man tilts his head downward, his heart now falling into his stomach. She wants him to—no, he can't!

"I'm sorry, Mom. I can't. They need me here." Chiro peers at the gray horizon with the city in the distance. "All of them."

Her voice, so much like Nova's—it'd only hurt for a—

Tears fill her shimmering eyes. "Don't you love me, Chiro? Do you want your father and me to be alone forever?"

"I'm sorry," he cries.

"Chiro, you have to trust me."


Chiro's eyes snap open; he remains curled up under the same dreary tree, his back causing him excruciating pain. The sun has not only come up, but the light is diminishing behind the scant trees. Did the dream really expand past most of the day? It's killing him. He hasn't eaten—has hardly moved—Chiro stands, exerting much of his effort despite his long nap, not bothering to wipe the grass off of his clothes. He has to get back to the Super Robot. He has to go back home.

As he almost limps back to the Super Robot, he first encounters a shape moving toward him. It's still cold, but nothing like the dream. The shape gets faster, calls out his name, and then grows definition.

If anger can make a monkey redder, then Sprx can surely chase away all rumors that red isn't his real color. Huffing and scowling, Sprx says, "Kid, do you know what you've put us through? Everyone's been goin' apes, outright bonkers, lookin' everywhere—"

"I'm sorry," Chiro rasps, and he leans forward and embraces his friend. Sprx stutters before returning it.

"Antauri said that he could feel that you were all right." After a moment, he states against Chiro's shoulder, "Seriously, kid. Don't do that to us again." They release each other.

"Chiro!" The rest of them rush in. Initially, Chiro only wanted peace. He's had it good. They've fought without losses. Maybe some scratches, bruises, dislocated gears, but no deaths. If any of them die—Nova, Otto, goodness, Antauri, how can he cope? It'd be like a distorted mirror. Surreal, another take at a reality he's sure he doesn't want to see again. Only worse. See, knowing someone after they die is different than believing that you could've known someone before they died. A reflection into what he doesn't want to know again: loneliness. And helplessness—the inability to stop others from hurting him.

"Ch-Chiro."

"Chuh—Chuh—Ch—Ch," Glenny mocks. "Churro? What kinda name is Churro?"

"Some kinda dumb name," BT declares, puffing his chest out. "That's what it is!"

Then they would chase him. The worst parts weren't physical. They reminded him that he had—has—no parents, insinuated that his parents didn't want him. It wasn't that they gave Chiro away, put him on the orphanage's doorstep, but that they abandoned him in death because they would rather not be alive anymore than to have some weak punk for a kid.

The young boy would open up a grate in the school and curl up there, small and thin, his muscles tensing as every second there were footsteps that clacked away toward him or the bell rang. There he was, in his dorky school costume. The only place he was ever happy was at the arcade because of the nice elderly couple, but Chiro couldn't run to adults whenever he was in trouble because they treated him like he was a hassle (which the boy didn't want to be), and even if he was safe for awhile, BT and Glenny were still around some corner. If anything, tattling gave them a larger incentive to torment him.

"These were the toys we set out for you."

He sniffs.

"You had us worried to the core of our power centers," Gibson says, inspecting Chiro's appearance critically.

Otto agrees solemnly, "Yeah, we were scared."

"Are you hurt?" Nova asks.

Antauri observes Chiro's lassitude as he returns to the robot with satisfaction. The boy needs to know that, even if they're in a serious arrangement and suffer from time constraints in terms of luxury moments and breaks, the team is more than a simple, convenient order.

The black simian calmly approaches the boy as the other monkeys back away. Nova comments that she hates this cold. He says, "Chiro, I hope you know that we cannot allow you to sleep as frequently as you have been."

Chiro opens his mouth and then closes it. He wants to tell them everything. To confide in them about the boiling shame. He'll have to.

Antauri's right. They all are. He's been burying himself in these dreams, losing sight of the world around him. Everything's become dark. He looks outside and sees futility. If Skeleton King tormented them over and over again, what's stopping him from doing this for eternity? Chiro thought to himself once, If I die, will it really make that big of a difference for the world?

Nova will cry. Maybe Otto too. The jokes, the games. But he's the Chosen One. It's not like they wanted him around, anyway. They're stuck with him, the scraggly kid who tried to steal parts from the Super Robot and ended up waking up a team of super-powered monkeys. They operated fine without him. He's just Chiro. As if he's the only person who will ever be able to possess the Power Primate. Maybe they'll find someone better, more able. Then the young man thinks about what Sprx said about never losing another leader. Surely they'll outlive him, anyway. He'll just speed up—no, stop thinking that. How can you ever hurt them like that, Chiro?

"So," Sprx says, leaning against his transportation tube in the control center, "do you scrounge around for parts often?"

"Erm, I wasn't, uh, doing that." In truth, the boy is on his own. He ran away from the orphanage, started collecting spare parts from all sorts of places to get money. Shuggazoom isn't the worst place, and he'd been at it for about a week when he found—these things. Chiro waits to be mocked because of his stuttering, his nervousness.

"Then why were you here?"

"Uh, I just saw the robot and was interested."

"Do you explore big, looming metal structures all the time, or is this a new hobby?"

Why should he stay? For one, they're letting him reside in their big robot. At age thirteen, Chiro finds that providing for himself—without anyone to help—is a struggle. And also—what? This red one is cocky and suspicious, the green one is nice, but dimwitted, the blue one is snobbish, the yellow one just confuses him, and the black one acts all aloof and mysterious.

"Well, at least you're a worse liar than Mandarin," Sprx says dryly. "That's a start."