Hiro felt the chill of the place and knew something was wrong. Wind blowing against him and the smell of dirt and metal.
Sure enough, he was not in any kind of new Chi universe. He was back in Delta—the plateau and the camp in the valley, H and N sitting on the edge with binoculars pressed to their eyes. As they turned to glance back at him, unsurprised, he sighed, kicking at the turf. "This is really getting annoying," he informed them.
"Yeah," N said, mildly apologetic. "It's an eddy in the—"
"An eddy in the space-time continuum," Hiro interrupted. "Yeah, I get it, I remember. It's still annoying."
He closed his eyes and threw himself again, teleporting through the gray-matter betweenspace. Wrong. Wrong again. His annoyance skyrocketed into full-blown anger as he opened his eyes on Delta yet again.
"Damn it!" swore loudly. "Damn it, this is getting ridiculous!"
H and N were finally paying more attention to him than to their binoculars, turning around to stare at him as if they found him a mildly interesting sort of puzzle. "I agree," H said with disdain. "It's very distracting, you popping in and out of here all the time."
"Oh, I am so sorry," Hiro snapped. "Is the disastrous malfunctioning of my ability and possible warping of the entire universe bothering you?"
"Yes, it is," H said coolly. "Go away."
Hiro considered getting into it with this condescending, serious still-life of a man, but he really had nothing to argue—he wantedto go away, they could both agree on that. So he closed his eyes and tried again.
Success. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew—the vague death-smell was gone, replaced by the warm, muzzy scent of sandalwood. The sound of classical music: Mozart's Eine Klein Natchmusik. He recognized it from when he used to be the kid whose father listened to classical music. When he opened his eyes there were other familiar things, all his senses telling him he was back where he'd come from. Fact: he was in the house of someone rich. Fact: that someone was his father. He recognized the room—it was his father's library, with the mile-high ceiling and the bay window, all class and old books. That was the thing that had changed, actually—there were more books than he remembered, shelves stacked on top of shelves like they never meant to end.
He dragged himself bodily out of half-pleasant nostalgia and got to business. Newspaper, he thought to himself, scanning the room for some news source he could snatch. He couldn't see any papers on the sleek mahogany tabletops, but there were books, hundreds and hundreds of books. There's got to be something, he thought, moving toward the bookshelves, a history, an almanac, even a freaking yearbook would work. He began pulling books out of the shelf at random, with a latent hysteria brought on by the possibility that his father might walk in any moment. Sun Zhu's Art of War, not helpful. Collected Haikus of Basho, good but not helpful. Now here was something interesting—a shelf full of comic books, plastic-covered and neatly filed. The Kaito Nakamurahe'd known would never have allowed it, not in his library.
Behind him, he heard the door open, and he froze against the bookshelf, but it wasn't his father walking into the room. It was him—Hiro Nakamura in a smoking jacket and square glasses, hair in a sleek ponytail and face in a mask of surprise.
Hiro thought of any number of things to say, hundreds of explanations for being in this house, for bending time and coming face-to-face with himself. He didn't have to use any of them—the other Hiro spoke first.
He stared at Hiro with the look of a man whose mind has been irreversibly blown, frozen halfway into the room with his hand still on the doorknob, looking as if he might not ever move again. "Whoa," he said.
---
"Let me get this straight," Chi-Hiro said, straightening his glasses. "You just—think about another dimension, and you're able to travel there? Like, when you want to go home, you just think about your Loft and you're just—there?"
"Yes," Hiro confirmed. "It's not complicated, it's just that it occur to people and, let's face it—who else can teleport?" He spoke slowly, carefully—it had been awhile since he'd had a conversation in Japanese.
"Whoa," Chi-Hiro said, leaning forward on the couch, eyes lit up with discovery and geek excitement. "Whoa. And you said you've mapped out almost all twenty-six of them? You know what all of them are, how to get to them? That's incredible!"
"Thanks," Hiro said modestly. Now that he thought about it, it was pretty incredible, and it was nice to get feedback from someone who could actually understand; he was glad the reaction was admiration and not concern for the universe. He had three dimensions left to go, and at this point, he didn't care about the space-time continuum—soon things would be straight and whole, coalesced into one perfect dimension. He would fix everything. "So, tell me about this world. I know this as my father's house—how did it end up being yours?"
"He died two years ago," Chi-Hiro said soberly. "He left the house to me—Kimiko already has her own stainless-steel castle in downtown Tokyo, she certainly didn't need it."
"So, is she the CEO of Yamagato Industries, or are you?" Hiro asked curiously—he'd always wondered how that would have worked out.
"Oh, she is," Chi-Hiro said breezily. "I'm the head of the scientific and experimental divisions. I never wanted it—I don't know how you are in your universe, but I'm very mild-mannered, not ambitious."
Hiro raised an eyebrow at the wording, but didn't ask. "I noticed your collection of comic books over there," he said, nodding to the shelves. "Very impressive."
"Thank you," Chi-Hiro said proudly, standing and walking over to the books, running his hand across the edges of the comics. "But that's not the best of it." He smiled suddenly, beckoning Hiro to as he strode to the piano in the corner of the room. "Want to see something cool?"
"Yeah, sure," Hiro said, interest piqued, glancing over the piano for anything that could be classified as 'cool'.
Still grinning, Chi-Hiro bent over the piano and played a series of chords. As he finished the last one, there was a sudden creaking noise and, as Hiro watched, one of the bookshelves shuddered and then—popped open, the shelf swinging outward like a door.
"Oh my God," Hiro said, gaping. "It's a secret room. You have a secret room."
"Not just a secret room," Chi-Hiro said gleefully, sliding through the entrance to the other side of the bookshelf. Hiro followed him through, and saw—there was no other word for it—"A secret laboratory."
In the room behind the bookshelf, there were tables full of tubes and beakers, stacks of books, swords hanging one wall, video surveillance on the other, a police radio in the corner. Hiro had never seen anything like it outside of the pages of his old comic books, and all he could do was stare, stunned. "God," he said, unmoving. "It's like a freaking Batcave! This is incredible!"
"It's nice, isn't it?" Chi-Hiro said modestly, pulling the bookshelf-door shut. "It took a long time to make—I had to be discreet, you know?"
"No, seriously," Hiro said. "This is incredible. I always wanted to be some kind of caped crusader, back when—I always wanted to be a comic-book superhero."
"Really?" Chi-Hiro said from behind him. "That's funny. I always wanted to be a comic-book supervillain."
Hiro barely had time to react to the statement, to think that's a weird thing to say, before he felt something slam against the back of his head, shattering his vision to instant black. He crumpled to the floor, unconscious, and Chi-Hiro dropped the to the floor beside him.
"See ya, Hiro," he smirked, filled with the adrenalin of a new and truly evil Master Plan. "Thanks for the idea."
He closed his eyes and concentrated, filling his mind with Hiro's descriptions—an artist's loft in SoHo, a man named Peter Petrelli and a woman named Audrey Hanson, a crisscrossed string map. New universe—Alpha universe. All he had to do was concentrate.
He disappeared and was gone, leaving Hiro lying unconscious on the floor of the room behind the bookshelf.
---
The first thing Peter did when he got home was check for Hiro. He'd been quick—he was sure he'd beaten his friend home. He didn't see him anywhere in the Loft, but just to be sure, he yelled, "Hiro! Hey, Hiro, are you here?"
To his disappointment, Hiro walked out of the other room, buttoning up a black shirt, fixing his cuffs. "Oh," Peter said. "Damn. You beat me. Did you just change?"
"Yeah," Hiro said shortly. "Got something on my shirt."
Peter looked at him for a minute, trying to pinpoint something—he wasn't sure what. Hiro looked different somehow, but he couldn't think of how. Same round face, same black ponytail, same borderline-depressive black clothes. Nothing was different. He was being silly. "How did you do two universes so fast?" he demanded. "I can't believe you beat me!"
"I only did one," Hiro explained. "Like I said, I got something on my shirt—I wanted to come home."
"Ha!" Peter said. "So I did win!"
"Sure, Peter," Hiro said, wandering over to the map in the main room. "You win." He walked up until he was close enough to touch the strings, sliding his fingers down the connected lines. "We've got what, twenty-one universes mapped?" he asked casually. "Interesting."
There it was again—the vague feeling that something was different. Still no justification for it, just an annoying prickle. "Hiro, are you okay?" he asked, just to make sure.
"I'm fine," Hiro said, grinning suddenly, his fingers still wrapped around the string. "It's just—interesting."
---
Hiro woke up with a headache like a hurricane, threatening to take the top of his head straight off like a flimsy house roof. Hangover? No, I remember—the room behind the bookshelf, Chi-Hiro saying something vaguely threatening about supervillains, then a sharp pain in his head and blackness. It was obvious what had happened here. A Hiro growing up in the same circumstances of him, with the same influences and obsession with comic books, but with one slight course deviation—instead of being lured by the world of superheroes, he had instead idolized their enemies, the villains, with their grand-scale plans and capes and dramatic laughter. He'd gone the other direction, and he'd taken in to a dangerous extreme.
And now he's loose in twenty-six worlds, Hiro thought with horror, struggling to his feet. Good one, Hiro, really good. Way to give him exactly the information he needed to actually become a threat. He rushed to the bookshelf-wall, checking for a handle, a keyhole, any way to get out. It's probably a secret lever disguised as a bust of Mozart, he thought ironically, carefully checking every inch of the wall. Then he stopped—and swore.
"What the hell am I doing?" he yelled out loud. "I can teleport! What the hell?"
Quickly, he closed his eyes and thought of his home universe, throwing himself as forcefully as possible toward it—he had to get there before Chi-Hiro screwed things up too badly, found a way to make an Ultimate Annihilation Machine or any of the other random acts of destruction supervillains were prone to.
He felt the ground under his feet, and there was a smell of dirt and metal. He opened his eyes just to be sure, and there was H and N on the edge of the plateau, just as he'd left them. "Damn it!" he yelled. "Damn it, damn it, damn it!"
"Keep it down, would you?" H said dryly, not even bothering to turn around.
"Damn it!" Hiro screamed one last time, and teleported again, Alpha universe firmly in mind. The rush of the jump, the airless time-frozen teleportation—and he opened his eyes on Delta universe.
He didn't say anything this time, just brought his hands up to his head and rubbed his eyes, trying to focus himself, trying to keep himself from exploding all to bits like shrapnel, snapping and losing it entirely when he so badly needed it together, needed to have control of his ability like he'd never needed it before.
He closed his eyes and threw himself, putting everything he could behind the jump, shoving himself as hard as he could.
He didn't even move. The ground stayed beneath his feet, the world unwilling to let go of him, catching him in its eddy like spider's-web-flypaper. Stuck.
He turned slowly to face H and N, head back in his hands like he was trying to hold everything in. "This," he told them calmly, "is a problem.