Chapter 15

"Basemax, run an analysis on Baymax's scan of the second person." Hiro said as he stuck a thumb drive into the conference table's data port.

"Analyzing scan," Basemax replied as a progress bar appeared on the large screen at the secret hideout. It was early morning after the failed attempt to capture Sirque in the act. A mysterious second person had somehow teleported into the jewelry shop and then used the same method to escape, frustrating the heroes. Worse yet, Hiro and Go Go had school in a few hours. The speedster in question drummed her finger impatiently as the progress bar slowly filled up as Basemax ran dozens of different calculations on the scan that Baymax had managed to get before the second culprit had simply vanished.

"How long is this going to take?" Go Go huffed, annoyed.

"A few minutes, Basemax is running a complex algorithm to see if we can figure out anything from Baymax's partial scan." Hiro said. "So, we wait."

"Well while we wait, do we have any clue as to how Sirque is back? Last I checked she had been imprisoned elsewhere." Wasabi said.

"Let me check," Honey Lemon said as she pulled out her phone and did a quick news search. Her eyebrows rose in surprise a moment later as she pulled up a news article. "This says Sirque broke out of jail a month ago following a botched robbery in Toronto by contorting herself and escaping via the prison's vent system."

"Eww, contortionists." Wasabi shuddered. Go Go gave him an odd look.

"Don't you do yoga?" she asked.

"That is not the same thing!" Wasabi stated loudly. "Yoga is about naturally stretching your body and getting it to relax while contortionism is all about stretching it to its limit and is unnatural and… ugh. Gives me the heeby geebies."

"So, what I'm hearing is that it's basically like the Black Magic of body bending." Fred speculated.

"I mean… I guess so? Black Magic is bad, right?"

"Oh, absolutely. In Professor Peculiar issue 378, his arch-nemesis Baron-" Fred was interrupted as Basemax's analysis of Baymax's scan finished with a ding. Lots of data appeared on screen, most of it incomplete due to the partial nature of the scan, but it at least gave them something to go on.

"Gender: Female. Age: Mid to late twenties. Height: Five feet eight inches…" Hiro read off from the screen. "Basemax, does this narrow down our search parameters any?"

"There are approximately two hundred thousand eight hundred and sixty-three individuals in San Fransokyo that meet those parameters."

"Great. Dead end there. What about her teleportation tech? Can you trace that?"

"This individual did not have any detectable technology on them aside from a stopwatch."

"What? That shouldn't be possible. How'd they teleport, then?"

"Maybe a machine off-site locked onto her coordinates?" Wasabi theorized.

"If that's the case, then it'd probably draw lost of power. Basemax, pull up records from the local power grid from two hours ago. Search for anomalies."

"Searching." A circular loading bar spun briefly on Basemax's screen. Finally, a red X replaced the spinning circle. "No anomalies detected."

"Maybe they were operating outside the city." Honey Lemon offered.

"If they are, then their tech is way more advanced than anything Krei Tech had. I've studied all the Project Silent Sparrow files, the beta rings they were utilizing had to be within a certain distance of one another or they wouldn't work. No more than half a mile apart or the return magnetic containment field wouldn't open. You could get in, but not out."

"I have a theory…" Fred said as a big grin appeared on his face. Go Go put her head in her hands and placed her forehead on the table.

"Oh boy, here we go," Go Go's muffled voice said.

"In the comic series Miraculous Mutants, you've got all sorts of genetic anomalies that give people powers," Fred started. "Laser eyes, mind control, telekinesis, etc. But a fan favorite has always been the Fantastic Dark Stalker. This guy can teleport at will without the need of fancy tech. He just thinks about where he wants to go and POOF. He's there. As long as he's not anywhere near silver. Kinda his weakness."

"Are you seriously suggesting that this new person has teleportation powers?" Go Go asked.

"Why not? We're in Phase 4 of our superhero journey, Go Go. We've faced people with powers before. Globby, Orso Knox, slimy High Voltage, even scarier Momakase, Di Amara's other genetic experiments."

"Exactly. Di Amara experimented on most of those people. There's a basis in science for all of those, not random mutations."

"Orso Knox suffered from a genetic mutation. Di Amara only learned how to control it." Baymax piped up.

"And I'm not saying that it's exactly like the comic, I'm just saying that it could be similar." Fred defended.

"Fair enough." Go Go sighed. Hiro mulled over the conversation and looked at the data presented on-screen.

"Basemax, bring up the scan of the unidentified female's DNA and compare it to a regular human sample."

"The scan is not conclusive for identification, but the DNA strands have been altered significantly." The two strands of DNA that Basemax had pulled up were similar, but the woman's was significantly different.

"Alright fine, I'll admit it. She's got teleportation powers." Go Go relented.

"Yes! Score one for Fred!" The man in the lizard costume stood up in his chair and did a victory dance, the repulsor lifts hovering him around in circles until Honey Lemon reached out to stop him from flying out of control.

"Okay, so that's one question answered," Wasabi said as he scratched his chin. "The next is, how did they end up with these powers?"

"We haven't seen Di Amara since the breakout," Honey Lemon said. "Could she be responsible?"

"Di Amara is crazy and brilliant, but I think manipulating genes to allow someone to teleport at will is a little outside her reach," Hiro mused. "Besides, she'd need a genetics lab and tons of power. Nothing like that has tripped our sensors yet, and she nor Chris have been spotted by the Buddy Guards."

After the breakout, Krei Tech struck a new deal with the police department to loan out Buddy Guards for surveillance purposes. Certain individuals that might be potential targets for revenge-driven supervillains were offered official protection in the form of an invisible floating buddy. If a supervillain should attack a potential target, the Buddy Guard would alert police and Big Hero 6 to the danger so they could swoop in and save the day. Certain locations around the city had been offered similar treatment to cut down on response time, while other Buddy Guards patrolled the city in shifts on the lookout for the escaped villains.

"Trina didn't get caught by them," Go Go mentioned.

"I didn't anticipate the new body, but that's been corrected. Still, we won't rule Di out completely." Hiro stifled a yawn as he tapped at the holographic keyboard on the table. "The Buddy Guards are now on the lookout for Sirque as well. If she pops up again via the normal way or by teleport, we'll know about it. Same for our mystery girl."

"Good, we've got school in the morning. I don't want to be late… again."

"I've got the day off tomorrow, Hiro. Fred and I will keep watch while you and Go Go are at school." Wasabi said as he stretched.

"I can too!" Honey Lemon chimed in.

"Aren't you still house searching?" Wasabi countered.

"Well… maybe."

"Focus on that, Honey Lemon. If we need backup, we'll give you a call."

"Ok, Wasabi. Just don't hesitate to call. Ok?"

"We won't." Fred assured her. Baymax beeped suddenly, a power percentage bar appearing on his chest.

"Hiro, I am now at twenty five percent power."

"Let's get you home, then. Don't want to have to sneak low battery Baymax passed Aunt Cass again for the eighteenth time. We'll talk to you guys tomorrow. Keep us updated." Hiro said as he and Baymax started moving for the door.

"Pay attention in class!" Wasabi called after as everyone went their separate ways.

Sirque looked through the blueprints she'd stolen from Krei Tech. When she'd broken in months earlier and downloaded their mainframe onto a flash drive, she was really only after the teleportation tech that they'd developed. But having access to everything gave her… options. Sirque was a thief. She liked stealing. She liked the money that came from it and the knowledge that she could pull off what very few in the world could. It annoyed her that she hadn't gotten her tech perfected in time to go after the Ruby Sapphire of San Fransokyo, but there were still other juicy targets all over the city.

So now she was looking through Krei Tech's stuff, eager to find something to help her out. Most of what the company made was useless to her (although the slippery phones could be decent projectiles to use to ward off Big Hero 6), but it was the stuff the company didn't make that was the more intriguing. Cancelled projects, shelved projects, complete and utter failure projects. Krei Tech had dumped the teleportation idea after one little accident. Their CEO didn't have a spine, or else he would've continued the project and realized his mistake with the containment field failure. Sirque had figured it out. It took time, yes, and lots of stolen materials, yes, but she'd figured it out. So, what else did they have that could be lucrative?

A few more scrolls and something interesting caught her eye. Design schematics for a sonic cannon. A brief look at the notes on the page and she discovered that it had been rejected after a group of malicious robotic mascots had tried to abscond with the cannon to use it for supposedly nefarious purposes. Of course, Krei would use sonic technology for something as brutish as a cannon. There were much better ways to use sonic pulses… and Sirque turned on the lamp above her to search for a pencil as an idea popped into her head. A few equations and a rough design sketch later, she had her next project in mind. Now all she needed to do was collect the parts…

Abigail walked through the doors into her workspace at Krei Tech, eager to do something to distract herself for a few hours. This "Sirque" seemed to have an MO of operating at night, which gave her time to rest and prepare. But after ditching work the day prior, it would probably be good to at least go into the office for a few hours. Krei's R&D lab was always sending her new blueprints and the like to approve, so even taking a… personal day gave her quite the backlog of work to sort though.

She sat down at her desk and got to work, sorting through PDFs and holographic schematics. The advanced holo tech had taken some getting used to, but now with a few weeks of work under her belt, she was able to easily work the manipulatable holograms. The distraction was just what she'd needed. A few hours flew by and she didn't realize it was nearly noon until there was a knock at her door.

"Come in," she answered. The door opened and Krei walked into the room, a surprisingly genuine smile on his face.

"Abigail, how are you today? Judy told me you called in sick yesterday."

"I'm fine. Just a little 24-hour bug, nothing to worry about."

"Good, good. I just thought I'd check up on you. After the… conversation you had with the intern the other day, I just wanted to make sure you were okay."

"Oh…" Abigail's stomach did a familiar flip-flop at the mention of the conversation. Despite it being a catalyst for the last day or so, she'd been so preoccupied getting used to her new-found powers that she hadn't thought much of it until now. "I'm… I'm fine, Mr. Krei. Really."

"In any case, I wanted to apologize. It wasn't my intention to bring you two together and dig up harsh memories."

"I know, Mr. Krei." She sighed. "But I'm fine. Really."

"Ok, well, I'll leave you to it." Krei did his best to smile warmly at her and left, hands stuffed in his blazer to keep them from fidgeting. Abigail checked the time as the doors closed. She should probably take a break for lunch, but she was almost done looking over the current blueprint. She'd finish that and then eat. It'd take ten minutes maximum.

Only a half-hour later she was still at it. She'd become distracted from her distraction. She'd mainly been successful in pushing the thoughts of her father out of her mind over the past day once she'd focused in on her powers, but Krei had brought those thoughts crashing back to the forefront of her mind. She couldn't get the loving father in her memory to reconcile with the hateful monster she saw on the news. A year's worth of repressed emotions came spilling out at once, leaving her mind a wreck and unable to focus on her task.

Abigail quickly stood up from her desk, sending her office chair rolling backward into the wall with a loud thump. She put her hands over her burning eyes and forced herself to take a deep breath, attempting to banish all thoughts of her father from her mind. It didn't work. All she could see in her mind was a black cloud of microbots demolishing Krei Tech. Every news article she'd read about the fire at SFIT. The evil look in her father's eyes as the news cameras caught the moment he held Krei in his grasp…

It was too much. She couldn't do this, not here. If only she'd done something else with her life, declined the chance to test experimental aircraft for the Air Force, done anything different. Maybe then her father wouldn't be a murderer locked in a prison cell.

Suddenly the temperature in the room changed. Despite having powers for only a short time, Abigail knew what it felt like when she teleported. Her emotional state had caused her to go somewhere, but she still had her hands over her eyes. Slowly she lowered her hands, taking in her surroundings. The walls around her were a gunmetal grey color, with lines of empty cells sitting in front of her. She was at a prison. Not good. A loud snore caused her to jump, and she whirled around. A prisoner in an orange jumpsuit was fast asleep behind energy bars. She recognized him from the news as the Mexican mech-wrestler guy that Big Hero 6 had taken down over the weekend. El Diablo or something? So, if he was in there, that meant that she was at the supervillain prison near the harbor.

This was bad. This was VERY bad. She looked for a door, panicking. End of the hallway, large EXIT sign illuminated above the door, bingo. She quickly but quietly began to move in that direction, passing by empty cell after empty cell. Just as she reached the door though, the final cell was occupied.

"Patrol time already?"

She froze. She knew the voice in an instant. Sitting in the final cell was her father. He was facing the rear wall of his cell, his back to the energy bars. She willed herself away, but for whatever reason it didn't work, and her feet remained exactly where they were. Panic continuing to build inside her, Abigail finally muttered a "Uh-huh."

Her father didn't recognize her voice, thankfully. He simply matched a playing card on the deck he had scattered on his bed and sighed. "It's been a few days. Has Big Hero 6 had any more luck tracking down the escaped inmates?"

"Nm-mm."

"Well, I hope they do soon. Sometimes I wonder… if I started all of this. If I emboldened the other super criminals that had been laying low for so long to come out of the woodwork."

Abigail didn't say anything.

"I'm scared of what they might do. I was hurt, I was in pain, I tried to justify my actions and look at what I did. But some of these others… they don't try to justify their actions. They just do what they do because they want to. I'd hope that they can be reasoned with, but I couldn't be. Big Hero 6 tried, and I almost killed them. It's no wonder my daughter hasn't been to see me. If my father had done half the things I did… I wouldn't go see him either."

He may have kept talking, or that may have been the end of it. Abigail didn't know. Suddenly she was back in her apartment, legs buckling underneath her. She caught herself on the arm of the couch and fell the rest of the way into its leathery embrace. The tears finally flowed freely, staining her shirt and the pillow her head was resting on. Seeing her father had finally broken her, completely shattering the emotional wall she'd built up. Krei had unintentionally taken the first swing into the structure, and that small leak had finally caused the dam to burst. As she laid there crying, she couldn't shake the thought that this was all her fault.

Hiro woke to feeling a tapping on the back of his head. He grumbled and opened his eyes, spotting the sun hanging low in the sky out the window of his private lab as Baymax charged in his port. He sat up and looked around, a piece of notebook paper sticking to his cheek from where he'd been laying down face-first on his desk. Whatever drowsiness was in his system left when Karmi's laughter filled his ears. He turned in his seat, the bio-tech major clutching her sides as she laughed. Hiro peeled the sheet of paper with now-smudged math equations on it off his cheek and rubbed his eyes.

"Hey, Karmi."

"Aww, was somewon tie-oord?" Karmi teased.

"Yeah… long day." Hiro lied. The day itself had been fine. It was the long night the previous evening that had been taxing on him. Karmi dug around in her purse as the laughter subsided.

"Here, you left this in my lab earlier." She found what she'd been digging around for and withdrew Hiro's phone. The teen genius silently gulped, thinking of several incriminating things on there that could blow his secret identity. Karmi simply smiled as he took it. "Go Go was texting you, asked if you were ready for tonight. What's tonight?"

"Uh… Krei Tech! It's Wednesday, got the internship again today. Takes a lot out of me sometimes, so the guys usually check up on me."

"That's really nice of them."

"Yeah, it is. Well, thanks for the phone and waking me up. Much longer and I would have been late."

"No problem. Bye, Hiro!"

Karmi walked out of the lab and down the hall as Hiro scrambled to get his stuff together. So much for getting a jump-start on homework. Hiro scrolled through his notifications, some of them from earlier being updates from Basemax showing zero new teleportation hotspots. Thankfully, it had been long enough ago that Karmi hadn't seen those notifications. That would have been difficult to explain. And in all honesty Hiro had totally forgotten about Krei Tech with the ongoing search for Sirque. But she didn't usually come out until well after sundown, so he had some time to spend at the internship. Thankfully he left SFIT just in time and walked into Krei's office just when he needed to be there, Baymax trailing behind him.

"Intern, good to see you. I've got some ideas I want to bounce off you."

"Ideas are intangible objects that cannot be thrown." Baymax pointed out. Krei shook his head.

"Why did I know he was going to say that?"

"Means you're getting used to him." Hiro said as he pulled out a notepad and a pen. "So, what do you have for me?"

"Well, I was thinking about our failed venture into public transportation and our new venture into the next generation of cars, so why not combine the two and make mag-lev busses?!"

"Wouldn't the size of the busses defeat the purpose of switching to mag-lev in the first place? They'd be too heavy to work."

"And that's where you and your big brain come in. I was thinking-" Krei was cut off as something on his computer blipped. "Uh oh."

Hiro looked up from his notepad as Krei investigated the notification. "Was that a security alert?"

"It was…"

"And?"

"And that acrobat lady that hacked into my mainframe is in the junk basement."

"What?!" Hiro ran over and looked at the security feed on Krei's computer. Sure enough, Sirque was in one of the sublevels, scrounging through lots of broken or burned prototypes of various abandoned projects. "Wait, junk basement?"

"It's the sublevel where we keep abandoned projects that can't be thrown away or recycled because potential nuclear material is 'dangerous'. Well, the ones that can fit down there anyway."

Hiro groaned as he pulled up his phone and sent a message off to the team. "Evacuate the building but do it quietly. Sirque is still using the portal tech and we both know how unstable it can be. Better if she doesn't know that we've spotted her yet."

"Assistant!" Krei yelled. Judy walked through the double doors a moment later tapping on her tablet.

"What?"

"Send an e-mail to everyone working in the building right now. Tell them it's officially been five months since my birthday and I'm feeling generous. Everyone gets the night off starting now!" Judy raised an eyebrow in confusion. Krei rolled his eyes and pointed towards Hiro. "We're about to have a Big Hero 6 situation."

"Why didn't you just say so? Alright, everyone gets the night off." Judy began typing on her tablet and turned to walk away.

"Oh, except you, we're probably going to have to do interviews with the police when this is over."

"I know the drill…" the doors shut behind her. Hiro hit the button on his phone to signal Skymax and turned to Krei with an outstretched hand.

"I'll need your keycard so we can get down to the basement." Krei fished around in his pocket until he found it and handed it to Hiro. The boy and his robot turned to leave so they could meet up with their teammates.

"Just be careful, there's a lot of expensive junk down there!" Krei called after them.

Abigail hadn't bothered returning to work after the glitchy teleporting earlier in the day. Now she was really behind. With a sigh she'd dried her bloodshot eyes and had taken the tram back to the office. She could've teleported there, but she didn't feel like it, preferring to walk, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other to keep her mind busy. As she got there, basically the entire building was leaving. She spotted Jeff exiting and grabbed him by the arm before he could leave.

"Hey what's going on?" Jeff looked her up and down in surprise as she stopped him.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

"I'm not feeling well, jerk. Now answer the question."

"Krei gave us the night off. You should probably do the same."

"Can't. Got too much to do." Abigail let go of his arm and walked inside, taking the elevator up to her floor and walking into her office. Everything was where she'd left it earlier in the day, the chair still against the wall. She grabbed it and pulled it forward, sitting down and moving the mouse around on her computer to wake it up from sleep mode. Might as well burn the midnight oil.

Hiro laced up his boot and pressed his back against Baymax's final armor piece, clicking it into place. With everyone gone, Skymax had landed in the courtyard, allowing Hiro and Baymax to armor up in the shadow of the large building. Hiro looked at his phone to check his messages, hoping to find confirmation that the team was on their way.

"C'mon guys, where are you?" A minute or so later, the rest of the group ran towards the building, getting out of a taxi.

"Sorry we're late, Hiro." Honey Lemon apologized.

"No one wanted to pick us up in a taxi because they thought we were cosplayers, and the limo is in the shop!" Fred complained from inside Fredmelion.

"It's fine, let's hurry before Sirque finds whatever it is she's looking for."

Hiro led the team inside and to the elevators. Stepping inside (which was a squeeze with Baymax with them), Hiro scanned Krei's keycard, granting them access to the lower levels. Hiro punched the appropriate button and the elevator sent them down into the bowels of the building. The elevator passed various sublevels before landing on the "junk basement" floor. With a ding, the door opened, and the team carefully stepped out, looking around the darkened storage floor.

"Keep your eyes peeled, she could be anywhere." Hiro advised.

"Bonjour, Big Hero 6!" Sirque said as she jumped on top of a pile of something that had once been expensive. The team went into a defensive stance, eyeing her warily.

"Give it up, Sirque. You can't keep using the portal tech."

"Why not? It has been perfectionne."

"That is French for 'perfected'." Baymax translated.

"Yeah, I think we got that." Go Go muttered.

"A whole team of scientists couldn't perfect it. What makes you think you can?" Hiro asked.

"Because I am better than those scientists." Sirque said with a shrug of her shoulders. "Krei Tech goes after the easy science. Anything that is difficult or doesn't work they throw down here. But I am a true visionnaire, I know who to properly utilize science. Observe."

Sirque held up a device and tossed it at the group. Not able to move in time, they took cover as the device unfolded and expanded over them into a disk. It then hovered above them and didn't do anything else. Fred wasn't impressed.

"Ok, nice self-floating frisbee. Now, why don't you surrender and we can-" Fred took one too many steps forward and the invisible barrier surrounding the team suddenly became visible as Fred impacted with it. The barrier sent Fred flying backward and into the rest of the group as an awful screeching noise sounded from the device. Hiro looked up at the "frisbee" above them and it clicked into place.

"The sonic cannon! You repurposed it!"

"Sonic cannon, such an obvious but inelegant use for sonic technology. I have brought out the true potential in the technology, creating an impenetrable barrier that could run for years on just a double-a battery!" The smug smirk on Sirque's face was more than Go Go could handle.

"Impenetrable, huh? We'll see about that." Go Go flung one of her disks, but it was easily deflected by the barrier, bouncing around the small space fast enough that the heroes could barely dodge in time. Wasabi activated his plasma blades to shield himself as the disk came straight for him, disintegrating it. "Ok, fine, it seems pretty impenetrable."

"What do you want, Sirque?" Hiro asked.

"Je ne sais pas. It's tough to decide on. Maybe some jewels, maybe some cash. But one thing is now for certain, I won't have to worry about you six getting in my way again. Another feature of this device is that I can increase the frequency of the sonic pulses. Do you want a demonstration?"

"I've already had enough of a demonstration, thanks." Fred mumbled.

"Well, you'll like this one." Sirque pressed a button on her armored gauntlet that held her beads and the device above the heroes began to hum. The heroes looked up at it, trying to determine what it was doing, when an ear-splitting noise emitted from the device, sending the heroes to their knees in pain as they held their hands over their ears. After a moment it dissipated and everyone slumped over, catching their breath. "And that was just the lowest setting. Let's see if we can go higher!"

Sirque dialed the setting on the device up and turned it on again, enjoying the screams of pain that came from it. The frequency was so high that it even began to crack the ground around the now very visible barrier.

"Magnifique," Sirque whispered to herself.

Abigail had managed to get through a couple more blueprints when she heard an odd high-pitched whine and felt a slight tremble in the building. She stopped her work and listened. Whatever it was, it was coming from somewhere below her. A perk of her position at Krei Tech meant that she had access to the security system, so Abigail switched a few tabs and began cycling through the security feeds to find out what was going on. She gasped as she got to one of the sub-level cams. The acrobat criminal lady was in the building, torturing Big Hero 6 with some sort of device. They were trapped and needed help. This time, it was her turn to save them.

The noise mercifully came to a stop, sending the heroes falling to the ground in pain. The frequency had short-circuited Baymax as well, causing the robot to shut down and stand there uselessly. Sirque smiled vengefully at them and deactivated the device. They weren't in any position to fight back now, and they'd probably think twice before stopping her little thieving sprees again as well. She aimed her hand and fired off her metallic beads, her exit portal opening in front of her.

"No… don't." Hiro mumbled, trying to get up. Sirque turned to look at him and chuckled.

"Oh, petit homme, there's nothing to fear. As I said, I perfected the tech, it will not become unstable again. Teleportation is meant for speed, so as long as the magnetic field closes within two minutes, there's no danger of the portal becoming unstable. And as an added contingency, my beads follow me back into the portal and force it closed when I leave. It's perfectly safe. Now, as you Americans say, see ya!"

Sirque turned to leap into the portal, but before she could, a fist came out of nowhere and sucker-punched her, sending her tumbling down the small hill of debris she'd been standing on. The heroes looked up in surprise, their savior standing in a white suit and matching helmet, illuminated by the light of the portal. Hiro's mouth opened in shock as he immediately recognized the person.

"Abigail?!"

Abigail slid down the junkpile and helped Hiro to his feet. "Yeah, hi. Good to formally meet you. Thanks for saving my life and all. Oh, and sorry about last night. I haven't quite figured out the whole 'super-hero-look' quite yet."

"I can help with that!" Fred offered.

"Wait, that was you last night?" Wasabi asked.

"Yeah, again, sorry. I was just trying to help. Just figured out I had these powers recently."

"Where'd they even come from?" Go Go questioned as she helped Honey Lemon stand up.

"We can figure all that out later," Hiro said. "Right now, we need to deal with Sirque."

The group turned to watch as Sirque got back to her feet, holding her jaw where she got punched. She spotted Abigail and narrowed her eyes. "The test pilot from Silent Sparrow? You were the interloper last night?"

"Yes. I know how dangerous that technology can be. Please, shut it down."

Sirque rolled her eyes in response. "Naïve."

The sonic desk flew out of Sirque's hands and again flew over the team of heroes, Abigail included. Content with having trapped her foes, Sirque turned and began walking back to the portal, until Abigail suddenly materialized in front of her. Sirque took a step back in surprise and looked the test pilot up and down.

"How did you do that without a portal?!"

"Y'know, the pod was supposed to protect me from background radiation, but I don't think it was built to last in the void for eleven continuous months. So now you see me, now you don't."

Abigail disappeared again, this time appearing above the sonic device and crashing down on top of it. The device fell to the floor, breaking into several pieces and allowing the team to escape again. Hiro pointed at Sirque, who had taken the moment to try and escape through her still open portal.

"Stop her!"

Fredmelion's tongue shot out of the costume's mouth, flying toward Sirque and grabbing her by the foot. The acrobat slipped and fell, being pulled backward by the synthetic tongue. Fred dragged her until the group was able to surround her, each of them glaring at her menacingly.

"Turn it off. Now." Hiro growled.

"Fine." Sirque huffed. She lifted her finger to her wrist controls, but as her finger was a millimeter away from the button, the portal sputtered and began glowing an ugly shade of pink as opposed to the blue it was supposed to be. "You idiots! You forced me to leave it open for too long, now the containment field has lost its integrity!"

"This is why you shouldn't be playing with tech like this!" Hiro yelled over the slowly growing noise of the open portal. "I'll just stabilize it like last time."

"That will not work! This is a different model from last time, the only way it can close now is if the beads go inside. It will cause the containment field to harmlessly collapse in on itself."

"And if that doesn't happen?" Wasabi asked.

"Well, you Americans do like your explosions." Sirque answered.

"Sorry I asked."

"Alright, I'll go in and close it. Sirque, where's the exit location?" The acrobat began furiously messing with the controls on her wrist. "Sirque!"

"There isn't one anymore! I have lost all control over the portal. It may send you somewhere, but if it does, we won't know where. And it may even keep you in the void for good!"

"What about the robot? Do you have his drives backed up?" Abigail asked.

"We do… yeah." Hiro answered, understanding where Abigail was coming from. Sending a person in was potentially suicide, but with Hiro's constant memory backups of Baymax's programming, the bot could be totally decimated and be rebuilt… as unsettling as that was emotionally for Hiro. He tapped on Baymax's power button, trying to get the robot to turn back on after he'd short circuited. "C'mon, wake up, pal."

"Hello, I am Bay-Bay-Bay-Bay-Bay-SYSTEM ERROR. FULL REBOOT REQUIRED." Baymax slumped over, his hard drive locking up. A light on his HUD showed that a full reboot and diagnostics routine was running. Hiro beat on Baymax's chest.

"No! Not now!" The team looked from Hiro and Baymax back to the slowly growing portal. A few small objects began sliding across the ground, getting caught in the vortex.

"What do we do now?!" Honey Lemon yelled.

"One of us has to go in there and stop it from swallowing Krei Tech!" Wasabi answered as something flew by him into the portal.

"I vote Sirque!" Go Go said as she pointed. "She made this mess; she cleans it up!"

"We can't make her do that!" Hiro argued.

The whole team broke out into an argument as the portal kept growing. If it wasn't for the lizard tongue wrapped around her leg, Sirque would've been booking it to a safe distance. Abigail looked away from the team and stared transfixed at the growing portal. She'd survived a portal once before and mostly gotten out unscathed, powers notwithstanding. If anyone could go in there and survive, it was her… or at least that's what she was telling herself in the moment. She turned to the team; determination set in her eyes.

"Send me." She said. Big Hero 6 stopped their bickering and looked at her.

"What?" Hiro asked.

"Send me. I failed my mission the first time I went into one of these things. This time I'll succeed."

"Abigail, we can't ask you to do that." Wasabi said.

"I'm not asking you to ask me. I'm asking you to let me."

"No, it's too dangerous." Hiro said. "One of us will do it."

"How is it anymore safe for one of you?"

"It's not! But we're superheroes, we signed up for this."

"Yeah, well what about your families? Purple guy, I don't even want to know how young you are. You really want to go in there and leave us to tell your parents what happened to you? I don't have anyone! My father is in jail because of me. Someone's brother is dead because of me! For too long I've sat by and watched things happen around me without any control, but that ends now. I am doing this because I'm responsible and I can help."

"No, you're not responsible-" Hiro started.

"Yes, I am! If I hadn't joined the test pilot program none of this would be happening! You don't know what it's like to know something like that!"

"I know exactly what that feels like!" Hiro stepped forward and ripped off his helmet, ignoring the calls to stop from the rest of the team. "If I hadn't been such a loser and listened to my brother sooner whenever he tried to get me into SFIT, we wouldn't have been at the open house that night with my microbots and your dad wouldn't have started a fire to steal them. If you're at fault for what happened, then I am too!"

Abigail stood in shock as she watched Hiro take a breath, shocked that Krei's intern was the leader of Big Hero 6.

"But there comes a point when we have to accept that other people's actions are their own and that we can't do anything about it." Hiro continued. "Trust me, I know how that feels. And that's why I'm going to let you do this."

Hiro held out his gauntlets and fired magnets from them, each one connecting to one of Sirque's beads. He clicked a button and the magnets all activated, connecting back to Hiro's gauntlet in a magnetic lasso. He pulled the magnetic strings tight and then removed the magnet from the palm of the gauntlet. He held it out for Abigail to take, giving her the reigns.

"I wish every day that I could've done something to save my brother. That's why I do this. To make sure that doesn't happen to anyone else. People call us heroes, but I just want to help people."

Abigail took the magnet and looked at the growing vortex as larger pieces of junk began moving. "Thanks, kid. Wish me luck. And tell my dad… I love him, despite what he did."

"I will." Hiro nodded. Abigail took a deep breath and ran towards the portal, sprinting up the scrap heap and into the waiting abyss beyond. Once she was through, the magnetic lassos went taunt and began pulling in the beads one by one. The portal began stabilizing and shrinking to a normal size, the color of the magnetic containment field turning back to a blue. Finally, without so much as a pop, the portal closed. The silence that followed as deafening as the team caught their breath. Hiro turned to Sirque.

"Can you detect any new portal openings?"

The acrobat looked at her wrist controls, briefly scanning through something before she lowered her arm and looked away. "No. I am sorry."

"She was a hero…" Go Go said, looking at where the portal had been. Fred lifted the head off of his suit, tears burning his eyes and snot running down his nose. He wiped his nose with his sleeve as Wasabi put a hand on his lizard-arm.

"We didn't even get a chance to give her a cool superhero name…"

"Who's going to tell her father?" Honey Lemon asked.

"I will." Hiro answered. "It won't be easy, but-"

Hiro was interrupted as Abigail appeared next to them, causing everyone to jump back in surprise. Abigail ripped her helmet off and plunked down on the ground, a smile etched on her face. "I did it!"

"You survived! How?!" Hiro asked.

"I just thought it'd be nice to be back at Krei Tech, and… well, here we are!" Abigail reached her hand out and offered Hiro his magnet. "Here's your thing, kid."

"Because of Abigail's changed biology, she must use whatever energy makes up the void to travel instantaneously…" Wasabi theorized. "So, if she was in the void, then she'd be able to easily use that same energy to travel back!"

"We can work out the science later, Wasabi." Go Go said as she took off her own helmet. "For now, job well done, Abigail."

Honey Lemon clapped vigorously, jumping up and down as she did so. "Yay, Abigail!"

"Dibs on coming up with her superhero name!" Fred exclaimed as fresh tears started rolling down his face. The team laughed, the nervous post-fight energy leaving their bodies as Hiro put in a call to Krei to bring the police around.

Chief Cruz led Sirque down the hall of mostly empty cells in PrisonMax. She hadn't been high priority, but Cruz was happy that she was off the streets nonetheless, although he wasn't exactly thrilled by the supposed new super person in town. Big Hero 6 said they'd remain anonymous for now, and he begrudgingly went along with it. He stopped at the cell next to El Fuego and motioned for Sirque to step inside. The orange jumpsuit and lack of face paint made the woman look small and unimposing.

"I like to call this the 'themed' cells." Cruz said as he turned on the energy bars. "Now that I've got you two, maybe I'll end up with the whole circus back one of these days."

Sirque glared at him, but Cruz was used to that look from villains at this point. He tipped his hat and walked through towards the processing room, stopping himself at Callaghan's cell. The man inside looked up. "Big Hero 6 manage to catch another one?"

"They did. Although I hear they had help."

"Good. The more heroes around means that the other people like me will be locked up again."

"Let's hope so. As for right now, something to look forward to. You have a visitor coming on Saturday."

Callaghan raised an eyebrow. "The boy?"

"No. Your daughter." Cruz smiled warmly as he walked away. He'd read the report on Yokai's actions and had spoken to the man several times. What he'd done was wrong, but unlike the other villains he had locked up or would like to see locked up, he knew the former SFIT dean was truly sorry for what had happened. So, his daughter finally wanting to come visit him… left the chief with a good feeling in his heart. As the doors closed, Robert Callaghan sat back on his bed in surprise.

"Abigail…" he whispered. And for the first time in months… he cracked a smile.

Notes

BIG HERO 6 PERSONEL UPDATE:

Name: Abigail Callaghan

Codename: Sparrow

Powers: Teleportation

Skills: Engineering/Test Pilot

Everyone, welcome Abigail to the team! When I got the idea to do this and to change up the roster, continuing the idea of the SFIT graduates moving on from Season 3, I spent a lot of time thinking about who might be able to fill those soon to be vacant positions. There were some obvious choices, and we might be seeing them soon, but I also wanted to go with less than obvious choices. So I scoured through the list of BH6 characters to see who might work. Reformed villains were certainly on the list such as Momakase or High Voltage, but I think Momakase will always be that inbetween good and evil category and so doesn't fit. And having High Voltage join the team wouldn't work as there'd be two people on the team with the same power set. Part of what helps BH6 succeed is everyone's unique abilities, they're all well rounded. So then I started considering some out-of-the-box ideas, and I finally landed on Abigail. In terms of the story of BH6 in general, she's very important, being a catalyst for Callaghan's fall from grace that kicks the movie into gear. However with as important as she is, she has very little screentime, I think under two minutes.

We also never got a follow-up with her in the series, and I was intrigued by how she would react to what her father had done in her absence, and how maybe getting to know the team better would affect Hiro. Choosing her powers was pretty easy, she was a test pilot for a teleportation device, give her teleportation powers! I feel like my explanation that she was mutated by the long-term exposure to the void works, and the only trick was making sure she wasn't OP. So at least for now, she can't just teleport willy-nilly, or else she'll exhaust herself. She also needs to know exactly where she wants to go, which means she can't accidentally discover the bad guy's lair by thinking "take me to the bad guy's lair". And for her debut, she needed a formidable opponent to face off against, and who better than Sirque? I feel like Sirque was another casualty of the S3 format change, as her exit from her only episode in S2 promised a return and then in "Go Go The Wowaroo" she's mentioned as being in jail, presumably elsewhere. Felt like one of the many unfortunately abandoned plot threads, so with that in mind I was eager to take a crack at it. Given her skills, I feel like an escape from a non-max security prison would be pretty easy, allowing her to return to San Fransokyo and cause havoc. And so now our teleporting hero gets a teleporting villain to go up against. This was one of the ideas that made me greenlight this project in the first place and made me really excited to start writing this story. And as I said ages ago, there's little that was in the first few chapters that wasn't a set-up for something later on. As you can see, it's taken awhile to get to some of those things, but oh boy do I have lots of good stuff for you all coming up.

NEXT WEEK: The girls get a little spotlight as Honey Lemon and Go Go receive their own focus chapters.

TOMORROW: New Patch Notes chapter to serve as an epilogue to this arc. This chapter is my longest yet at approx. 7K words, so I finally had to say enough is enough. So instead of a 12K chapter, you'll get a sizable Patch Notes chapter to focus on the clean up and Abigail's official induction onto the team. Hope to see you there!