Hell to the fucking no.
Those had been his first words when Ben had handed him the ancient laptop-
Like, seriously-
Ancient.
Like older than his Chibi-chan ancient.
Almost as old as Lilo.
Maybe even him.
Like fuck, he was amazed it still worked, ancient.
And they were asking him to pull up files on it?
There had even been a hysterical laugh at the prospect of touching the thing in fear of the viruses it had to be crawling in it.
But when the kid explained the why of it.
Explained who the ancient tech belonged to…
The council.
The council responsible for keeping his Chibi-chan and all his friends imprisoned on an Isle of evil.
It infuriated him.
Cameras!?
The stupid fucking counsel had cameras.
God damned fuck-
The whole fucking time!?
He takes a deep breath.
No need to break another keyboard.
Or mouse.
Or monitor.
Lilo had threatened to take away his Adderall if he broke anything else.
The hypocrite.
He was still covered in paint from telling her what his new project was.
Like he had the time for a change of clothes and shower.
He needed this decrepit piece of shit to reveal its fucking secrets yesterday.
He wasn't usually a violent person but-
He turns to glare at the shattered laptop that belonged in a god damn museum.
It had taken a whole fucking day to download its contents and access codes to retrieve the camera data.
Data streaming from an Isle that was supposedly cut off from all tech.
No data.
No wifi.
No phones.
Fucking nothing.
Nothing except god damned hidden fucking cameras wirelessly transmitting to a stupid outdated laptop that needed to be put out of his misery.
What would the bitch's excuse be this time?
She didn't know?
Fucking please, he could prove the damn thing had been turned on at least once a day.
Everyday.
For the last twenty years.
He couldn't prove the cameras were checked, but he had the activity log.
He'd never hit a woman before- He usually left that to Gogo.
Or Lilo.
And honestly, once she saw what he'd found-
Nani.
That was to say if that bitch wasn't so completely untouchable.
Even so, he was so, so, so very tempted to backhand a bitch. Consequences be damned.
What was the worst they could do?
Throw him in jail?
He exhales deeply as his gaze slides over every monitor that was playing footage from the Isle.
Three cameras.
That's all that was left.
Three of the seventy-fucking-five originally installed.
He might only have a month of 'saved' video, but he knew how to read a damn data download log.
Seventy-five cameras was full output.
Now there were only three.
Fucking. Three.
That was fucking four percent of the original fucking footage.
He swallows a growl.
Four.
Fucking.
Percent.
It was bullshit.
Pure and utter bullshit.
Looking over the timeline, he could see exactly when the others were taken out or ended.
And one date, in particular, made him queasy.
The day of Ben's oath ceremony.
Before that, the camera count had been a slow dwindle.
Seventy-five to twenty-seven over almost twenty years.
But on that day?
Twenty-seven dropped to eight.
Eight.
Whatever happened on the Isle, it had been enough to take out almost twenty cameras in the span of an hour.
Another gone the day after.
Six to four a couple of weeks after that.
And then there were three.
Three cameras still uploading data.
Useless data.
He lets his head drop back over his chair.
What the fuck was he supposed to do with a month of useless data?
He grimaces as he spins in his chair.
Stupid.
Useless.
Brain.
He smacks his cheeks and thumps his head.
Come on!
He could figure this puzzle out.
He groans as he continues to spin in his seat.
He just had to find-
He presses his foot to the floor as he straightens in his seat.
Another angle!
Come on, use that big brain of yours!
He smiles at the whisper of Tadashi's voice.
Fuck yeah, he could use his brain!
He punches in several commands on his computer.
Just because it was removed from the cloud bank didn't mean it was erased.
Fragments of data were still better than no data.
And fragments from twenty-seven cameras had to be more useful than the ruble he was currently looking at.
"Baymax!" He calls over his shoulder as he hacks into the cloud program.
"Yes, Hiro?"
"Overclock your system buddy, I need your help locating every last byte of information we can find on the program I'm currently accessing."
"Understood, Hiro."
He didn't even want to know how long that took.
Though, judging by the pile-up of monsters and cups of coffee-
And the empty pill bottle-
Nope, just better to not think about it.
Baymax was overclocking his programming to cut down his workload, editing out footage, images, and audio that didn't have anything of interest in it.
There was a lot in the past month of deleted footage, but the further back he went, the more corrupted the data became.
And unfortunately, he had to chalk that up to deletion degradation and not anything Queen Leah could have accomplished, aids or no.
He was only interested in Chibi-chan, his pack, and the kids Ben had pictures of.
Thank fucking Kami for facial recognition.
It got him the footage he needed the fastest.
Except when it was useless.
He glances towards the screen with an image of a shadowed figure.
Then it took an algorithm to narrow in on people in hoodies.
Black hoodies.
Which he'd had to sort through himself.
There had been several dozen, but he'd narrowed it down to four.
Over six hours of combing through data fragments.
Just to find the four people dressed in black hoodies.
He was seriously hoping his Chibi-chan and friends could confirm who they were.
He grimaces, not that he wanted any of them to watch what footage he'd salvaged.
Or see some of the images.
Well, at least not all of it.
His eyes drift to a screenshot of the figure in a black oversized hoodie with a crude spider on the back of it.
That one…
His lips pull in a snarl as he leans back in his chair, spinning in it to eye the pile of destroyed tech.
Especially the keyboard he'd picked up and thrown across the room in frustration.
It had taken forever to clean and enhance the footage, but he had to know what the hell he was watching.
Had to edit, trim, and clip the audio until only Maleficent's voice was ringing over the crowd.
It was strange.
The whole damn thing.
For starters, Mal never mentioned a brother.
But Maleficent proclaimed 'the Spider' was her son right before-
Yeah, his jaw tenses. There was no way in fuck Leah had seen that clip.
Or understood what she was looking at.
Because 'the Spider' was obviously a teen.
A teen that cut down three men in front of an audience.
A public execution.
Was that what the Isle was like?
People hurting kids-
He takes a deep breath.
Hurting kids was putting it so fucking lightly.
Child rings? Fucking Seriously?
But why did that mean a fucking teen had to step up to punish those involved?
Had his Chibi-
No!
Nope!
He bangs his head against his desk.
He didn't want to think about the Isle using kids like that.
Didn't want to think about the scars on Carlos's back.
Just no.
No. no. No. no.
He punctuates every denial with a bang of his head.
Get out.
Get out.
Get out.
He had brain cells for days, but he was willing to let them all die if it meant getting that thought out of his head.
He roughly drags a hand down his face as he sits up before he turns to the three other hoodie-clad figures.
Focus on the task at hand.
Face the rest later.
The other three teens or kids wearing black hoodies.
Two were nearly the same height, which was close to the same height as 'the Spider'.
In fact, he might have believed the two were just the same person if they weren't in so many shots together.
The third one was much too short to be one of the three.
He was still sifting through the data as it came in, but so far that was all he had on the three.
He sighs, so the only way to be sure who 'the Spider' was, and if one of the two was also 'the Spider', was to bring in one of the kids.
He shakes his head, later him problems.
There were still months of fragments to sort through, and even having it play at three times the speed, it was going to take a while.
His eyes drop to the progress bar, frowning when he sees it's only at forty-three percent before his eyes flicker to the wall of monitors again.
And every second more data was being uploaded from the Isle.
Useless footage, unless something major happened to change that.
Two were completely blocked by rubble.
The other one only showed a strange angle on a crumbling stone monument of some kind.
He'd run a recognition program on the architecture later, but Greek-influenced was high on the list.
Still, to go from seventy-five cameras to three in the span of twenty years.
He leans back in his seat as he steepled his fingers.
Even if the tech was woefully out of date, that was ridiculous.
Seventy-five...
He sighs. Malgon alone seemed to have taken thirteen out herself.
Colors were so easy to detect when working quickly, especially when the Isle seemed so drab comparatively.
Luck or coincidence?
He snorts derisively.
It was going to be a shit show either way when she found out what her art had done.
"I have analyzed the new footage that is available."
He spins in his chair as he looks up at Baymax and nods, "Add it to the files, please."
"Understood, Hiro."
He turns to watch the screen as he uploads the data before pulling up the latest footage.
His eyes bounce from one image to another curiously.
But when a whole clip of audio and video plays, he slaps his hands over his ears.
It's still not enough to keep the resounding ring of a gong from rattling his head.
A gong in surround sound.
And it certainly wasn't enough to mute the screams of terror that followed it.
It didn't block his vision of the cameras violently shaking as buildings started to crumble.
He watches in horror as debris rains down on the people racing nowhere in their panic.
His stomach churns at the disconcerting green light flashing across all feeds, shutting several of them off instantly.
The very earth rips from the ground with an unnerving groan, sending chunks of jagged cement and asphalt into the air.
Shifts in the ground bar people from escaping the collapsing buildings.
Screams of agony and suffering.
People vanish under debris.
And as if to rub salt in his very open wounds, or maybe to help him regain his sense of self, sheets of violent rain obscure the lenses.
Rubble starts to pile up.
More cameras go dark.
Audio stops on most of them.
But it doesn't stop the screams that resonate deep within his soul.
And then the noises become muffled-
Muffled but still distinct.
Some cameras show water crashing on them.
As if a wave had somehow made it onto the Isle.
A big wave.
A monstrous wave.
A kami damn fucking tsunami.
The screens with water slamming into them go black.
"Hiro, your heart rate is elevated even higher than the average of the spikes you've had over the past month."
He doesn't respond as he turns and storms out of the ship.
Past the school.
Past the stables.
Past the tree line.
He walks until he hits the range.
He needed to fucking shoot something.
Or smoke something.
Both.
He needed both and then some.
He needed a break.
A breather.
He needed to not be the one to tell the others what he'd found.
He was beyond talking.
First, he needed to breathe.
But then he was drawing up the plans to recon the fucking Isle.
Fuck waiting until December.
Fuck November.
Fuck October.
Or fucking September.
He had to do something.
Fuck it.
He had to do something today.
He picks up a shotgun and pumps it, satisfied at the 'cha chu' before he aims at a target and watches as it's torn to shreds.
This month.
He'd been content to have Chibi-chan and the others.
To wait for them to talk about the Isle.
Kami fucking dammit, he'd been wrong.
So fucking wrong.
In the back of his head, where he let logic hide while he was enraged, he knew he had to be careful.
Not for himself, but for the kids on the Isle.
He shoots again before he throws it hard enough to ricochet halfway across the room and picks up the magnum.
He had to be careful for his Chibi-Chan, who would never forgive himself if he got caught.
But dammit, he had to do something.
"Hiro."
"Bubbles." He destroys another target.
"You found a lot on the cameras."
It wasn't even a fucking question.
"Just shit."
Cobra nods as he muses over the gun selection, "I figured, since it was the guns you went for first."
He shoots until the gun clicks empty before it also eats the wall.
He cracks his stiff neck.
"Someone knew." He picks up a desert eagle.
Cobra takes a careful breath as he also selects a firearm, something that would have been comically small in the man's huge hands if he had been in the mood to care.
"Have you gotten everything?"
"No."
"Allow me to assist when you're ready to go back." Cobra states before he unloads six shots into a paper target, neatly cutting out the inner circle of the bullseye.
"You do you." He shreds through another target with a lot less finesse.
"I have an idea I would like your assistance with."
"Listening."
"If it helps, it's to get supplies to the kids on the Isle, though I know we will have to ensure it's not intercepted, either by Auradon or the villains on the Isle."
"Sharks." He sends the gun flying with all his might.
Schools of sharks.
All the fucking sharks.
"Shall we go back and discuss?" Cobra asks before he reloads the gun and sets it back in its holder.
He spits on the ground before he turns and shoves his hands in his pockets. "I should've already fucking started. Should've fucking done it the fucking kami fucking minute I fucking met these fucking kids."
Cobra ruffles his hair, much like he does Carlos's, "The point is, we're doing it now that we know."
Yeah, he slams his fist into the door so hard the metal shakes as pain radiates up his arm. "If there are any fucking left to fucking get it."
Cobra's eyes narrow before his hand grips his shoulder, "Show me."
Like legit, Sharks.
This scene was so fucking intense Dark got a nose bleed.
Though to be fair, it's not uncommon.
Still.
Fucking. Sharks.
Dark did her damndest to punch this shit up.
Could you feel Hiro's tension?
Seriously could you?
Dark put a lot of work into that shit.
We haven't fucked with other chapters like she fucked with this one, we originally made finding out the info way too easy for Hiro, and gave him too much of the footage.
Fuck tho.
Do you guys remember where Deez and Gil were?
Uma and Harry?
T?
Fuck man, just fuck.
How the hell is the Sea Six coping with that shit?
How many of their friends…
Shitz gotta be intense for them.
Too bad the next book isn't hitting for another few months.
Are you guys biting at the bit?
Anyone want to hit us yet?
What do you think Hiro means by sharks?
Damn there was so much shit rolled into this chapter with so little answers.
Is it driving you nutz to know what's going on?
I mean, yeah, I know obviously- most of it anyways, cause guess who has to go and pretty much rewrite Burden because of this?
LoLz, for the scen, right guys?
Much love and appreciation,
-Twisted