Hey everyone! Sooooo sorry for making you wait so long, but here is *finally!* the next chapter of "Waking Up Again"! Please enjoy, and thanks so much again for sticking with me!

0o0

"Wait?" Tadashi growls to the man on the other side of the door. "For what? You and your helpers to drag me back to the hospital and perform more experiments on me?"

"Please," the man pleads with him. "I know you must be scared and confused, but I promise you that I'm only here to help you! I have the answers to all of your questions if you'll just give me a chance to speak."

"Yeah, I'm sure you've got answers, but at what price?" Tadashi spits. "My freedom? The rest of my life? No thanks!"

"I swear to you, the last thing we want to do is keep you from being able to live your life to its fullest! Why do you think we reconstructed you after the fire-for the fun of it? We wanted to help you!"

Tadashi considers the little man's words. It's true, it wouldn't make much sense for the lab to have done what they did for no purpose. Was it possible that they'd really been trying to save his life just for the sake of saving it?

"So you don't want to drag me back to your lab and lock me up?" he asks, just to clarify.

"Absolutely not," the man agrees. "The last thing we want to do is see you back in the hospital now that you're up and about and able to function fine on your own."

"On my honor as a doctor and on the Hippocratic Oath I took when I entered this field."

Tadashi bites his lip, feeling conflicted. The stronger seemed to be telling the truth. His face was open and honest, and Tadashi wanted to be able to trust him. He needed someone who had answers to be able to tell him what was happening to him. But how did he know for sure that this man could be trusted?

"What sign can you give me beyond your word that you aren't going to stuff me in a bag the moment I let you in?"

The little man laughed. "Well, for one thing, I seriously doubt that I could manage to do that. We equipped you a little too well to be able to be taken down easily. But aside from that, maybe this will convince you." He reached over and, to Tadashi's amazement, disengaged his left arm from its socket. Tadashi could see the loose wires coming from it and the man held it out so the boy could inspect it before putting it back into place. "You're not the only one whose ever lost a limb and lived to tell the tale," the man says with a soft smile as he articulated the fingers on the prosthetic to prove his point.

Tadashi, not knowing what to say, wordlessly opens the door to allow him in.

"Ah, thank you." The man smiles at him as he comes inside. Once Tadashi's closed the door, that man turns around and says, "I don't believe I properly introduced myself yet. I'm Doctor Elephun."

"Tadashi," Tadashi responds, taking the hand that the doctor offers him and shaking it. "Tadashi Hamada."

"Tadashi Hamada?" The doctor's eyes go wide. "You mean the same Tadashi Hamada who had his work published in the Los Angeles Medical Journal for his work on creating a robotic nurse?"

"Y-yeah," Tadashi agrees, surprised to know that anyone knew or even cared about that.

"Splendid! I still have that article. In my office—I was very impressed by it. "

Tadashi finds himself blushing from the praise. "Oh, it's nothing that special…" he protests.

"Well, all the same, it's very nice to finally get to officially meet you," Dr. Elephun says with a friendly grin. "I may have been working on you for the past six months, but it's nice to finally have a name to go with the face." He takes a seat on the wall worn-recliner and Tadashi sits across from him on the couch. Once they'd settled, he tells Tadashi, "Well, I'm sure your bursting with questions, so fire away."

Tadashi nods. He does have a lot of things that he's been wanting to know, but suddenly trying to grasp one solid question. Trying to catch one is like trying to catch a butterfly with your bare hands. Finally, one comes to him. "Why?" he asks. "Why, out of all the other hundreds and thousands of people in this city, did you pick me to rebuild? I mean, I know that must have been pretty expensive and time consuming. What made me special?"

"Well, a lot of things went into it," Dr. Elephun admits, folding his hands together as he considers the question. "For one thing, how badly you were injured actually made you a prime candidate. My assistants and I have been working for quite some time on creating artificial robotic body parts to help those who have lost their own to be able to continue living a fairly normal life. But up until then, while we'd had some applicants to be test subjects, for the most part they only had one or two body parts which needed to be replaced. It would have taken a very long time to test our devices out on a case by case basis. But with you, well, we could test out quite a number of our systems all at once. On top of that, you were in such dire straits that we were allowed to work on you without having to go through all of the legal red tape. We and you had nothing to lose and everything to gain."

"So basically I was just the right person coming along at the right time?"

"To an extent. But on top of that, I could just tell there was something special about you the minute I hear about you. I said to myself, Elephun, if that boy has managed to survive even after everything he'd been through, it means at least one of two things: one, that your time here on Earth wasn't meant to be up yet, and two, that you must have had something or someone that you were trying to hold on for. SO I figured either way I'd be furthering Providence and I asked to take your case."

Tadashi nods. He hadn't really thought of everything that way, but it makes sense. "So," he begins slowly once he's taken a minute to process through the information, "exactly how much of me is robotic?"

"Quite a lot, I'm afraid," Doctor Elephun admits with a slight sigh. "There wasn't much of left of you to work with, so we had to build a good bit of it from scratch or else add in parts so that you could function properly. Your arm and both of your legs, of course, had to be replaced. A good bit of your digestive tract and your lungs, as well. Oh, and I'll warrant you've noticed that you now have exceptionally good vision in your right eye."

"Yeah," Tadashi agrees. "Except for this little red dot that keeps showing up in my field of vision. It lead me here last night, but now—well, I don't want to sound like a stalker or anything, but I think it's keeps wanting to lead me to wherever my girlfriend is."

"Really?" The doctors brow wrinkles up in confusion. That should have warn is off after that first time. Perhaps the programming is having some unexpected side effects…"

"Beg pardon?" Tadashi blinks his eyes rapidly, wondering if he'd just heard the doctor correctly.

Dr. Elephun gave him a slightly sheepish smile. "I guess I've got a bit of a confession to make. Partly because there was already damage done to it, apparently from having something hard fall on your head at some point, and partially because you needed to be able to have the connection in place to be able to control all of your new robotic limbs, we had to recreate part of the frontal lobe of your cranium."
"Cranium?" Tadashi asks, although has a pretty good idea of what the doctor's referring too.

"Sorry, I meant brain," Dr. Elephun responds with a slight chuckle. "Sorry, my assistants make fun of me for my old fashioned words too."

Tadashi nods, but honestly he's more concerned with what exactly they'd done with his brain than what words were used to describe it. "So what exactly does this have to do with a little red dot that's keeping track of my girlfriend?"

"Well, you could say I built a sort of safety feature." Dr. Elephun answers, now looking slightly nervous. "I knew that when you woke up, there was a chance that your memory might not be the best after being in a coma for so long, so I created a way to make sure that you'd be able to be reconnected with your loved ones. So when I found the remains of a picture in your wallet—or what was left of it—of the young lady, I programmed it in so that once you were well enough to leave the hospital, your first instinct would be to seek her out."

"I see." Tadashi didn't know how he felt about someone else messing with his head like that. The word 'programming' especially perturbed him—programming was something you did to robots, not people. It certainly wasn't helping his semi-identity crisis any.

"I'm so sorry if I overstepped my bounds," the doctor tells him, mistaking Tadashi's silence for anger.

"No, it's fine," Tadashi responds, trying to smile and not let on just how freaked out this conversation is making him. "It's just—how exactly did I know where to find her? I was completely lost when I left the hospital, but the dot led me right here."

"That was probably the gps system," Doctor Elephun answers, looking proud. "You had only to think of her location and it would lead you to her."

"A gps. Of course they put in a gps," Tadashi thinks, his hopes of normalcy declining by the second. But what he said was, "I didn't actually know where she was, though. In fact, I was led here even though I thought she was somewhere completely different. How can you explain that?"

Dr. Elephun strokes his beard, as if deep in thought. "I can't quite explain that, to be honest. "I can't quite explain that, to be honest. But then, the inner workings of the humans brain are still a mystery, even to someone who's spent as many years studying it as I have. I can only guess that whatever emotional connection you have with the young lady has someone manifested itself in a way that none of us could have predicted."

As the doctor becomes more and more excited as he ramble on, Tadashi's feeling more and more dead inside. Finally, not able to stand any more talk about the vast mysteries of the human body, he cuts in, "All right, I'm sorry, as fascinating as all this is, could you maybe simplify it and just tell me everything else I need to know about being a robot?"

The doctor's eyes flashed slightly at that, as if picking up on something in Tadashi's tone of voice, but he merely answers, "Oh, of course. Forgive me, sometimes my excitement just runs away with me. All right, so basic things you need to know—you're going to have to nourish both your physical and mechanized parts. You can go back to eating regular food as soon as you've readjusted—I'd start slow, though, since you've been on a feeding tube for the past six months and your new system isn't used to solid food yet. Fluids only, and then eventually work your way back up to solids."

"Right." Tadashi nods, brightening as he remembers learning about recovering coma patients in one of his own medical classed and glad that he can put the knowledge to good use.

"As for the rest of you—well, I assume you already know, it runs on electricity."

"Yeah," Tadashi agrees, his mood quickly sinking back down.

"You can usually compensate for that by spending about a good half an hour out in the sun a day," Dr. Elephun continues. "We wanted you to be able to gain power from solar energy. However, from time to time, if you expend a large amount of energy all at once or don't happen to get outside that day, you can charge using regular electricity." The doctor reaches into coat and pulled out a clear plastic bag which contained a coil of black wire and four white square pads. "We made the charger look and work like electrodes, and there are instructions in the bag if you need them."

"Right." Tadashi accepts the bag from the doctor, feeling slightly better about the whole charging process now that he won't need to do anything too out of the ordinary. "Anything else?"

"Well…" The doctor takes off his glasses and polishes then as he thinks. "Not really—except that you may like to know that the parts of you which we rebuilt are pretty much indestructible. They'll be stronger than the ones you're used to, and you won't experience fatigue in them like you would with regular limbs, so you'll probably find that you can lift more, go faster, and travel further than you could before."

"So any crazy hidden weaponry I should know about?" Tadashi asks, part joking and part because he was afraid that maybe they actually had.

"No my dear boy," Dr. Elephun chuckles. "Aside from a few nonvisible improvements, we tried to make everything as close to normal as possible for you."

"Okay." Tadashi feeling somewhat relieved about that fact.

But Dr. Elephun stares him down for a moment. "Somehow, I feel that everything isn't quite 'okay'. Let me guess—you're still having a hard time with all of this, aren't you?"

Tadashi ducks his head, feeling somewhat exposed form having the doctor so quickly guess his true feelings, and also slightly embarrassed. "I know that I should be grateful," he finally gets out. "I mean, I got a second chance at life. I survived what's probably one of the worst things a person can go through and thanks to you, I'll be able to live a fairly normal life. But…"

Dr. Elephun nods his head sagely. "I understand completely. I felt exactly the same way when I lost my arm."

"If you don't mind my asking," Tadashi begins tentatively. "How—"

"Did I lose it?" Dr. Elephun doesn't seem at all offended by the question. "I was stationed overseas in the last war as a medical officer. One day I was attending to a poor soul on the battlefield when an AED went off. I managed to push the soldier out of the way—even save his life. But as for me, I woke up hours later in the medical tent, missing an arm and half of my face. They told me that I was lucky to be alive. They patched me up and then sent me home, but all I could think of was what I was missing, not what I had left. I wouldn't see my family or friends because I didn't want anyone to see me the way that I was, even after I'd undergone reconstructive surgery and gotten a prosthetic limb. And then one morning, I woke up and realized that I was tired of hiding, and that if I wanted thing to changer, I should do something about it. That's when I started my research into robotic limb replacement, so I could help other who were like me. Sure, I got a lot of funny looks from people when I first started going out into public with my first prototypes. But you know what I learned from those experiments.

Tadashi shakes his head, too wrapped up in the story to give a real answer.

"That it really doesn't matter what most people think of you. What matters is what you think of you, and the people who are really worth your time and emotions will love and care about you no matter what you look like."

Tadashi feels a smile spread across his face at these words. The Doctor is right—he can't spend the rest of his life hiding out in Honey Lemon's apartment, and if he was honest, he didn't want to. He had a lot of things he still wanted to do with his life and he was just going to have to get past his fears. It still wouldn't be easy, but it would be a lot better facing the changes with his friends and family by his side than on his own.

Dr. Elephun seems to understand Tadashi's silence as taking his time to think things over because he waits a moment before speaking again. "You know, Tadashi, being the first person that we know of to have undergone this type of procedure, you're sort of pioneer—a symbol, if you will, for anyone who's going to come after. I think there's a lot of good you could do. Now, I know that you're not big on the idea of going back to the lab, and I certainly don't want to have your cooped up in there either, but I do have a proposition for you."

Tadashi raises his eyebrows, his curiosity piqued. "What sort of proposition?"

"Well, for one thing, you know as much as I do that new technology always has some bugs in it, including probably yours. I also know from what I've read of your work that you have an interest in using robotics in the medical field to help people, correct?"

"Yeah," Tadashi agrees. "I do."

Dr. Elephun smiles. "Well, here's what I'm proposing. My program still has a good deal of funding left to it—more probably to come if we can prove that our research is actually working. How would you fell about coming on as a paid intern? We'd of course do some observations of you, but you could actually have a hand in helping actually designing the technology which is going to be the future of the medical field!"

Tadashi feels his hear race as he considers this offer. Him, getting to actually pave the way to whole new era in both robotic engineering and healthcare? It almost sounded too good to be true! It was everything he'd dreamed of and more. "I'm not out of college yet," he tells Dr. Elephun, just to make sure that everything was out in the open.

"Not a problem." The doctor waves his concerns aside. "It said in the journal that you go to the San Fransokyo Institute of Technology, right?"

"Well, I did before the fire," Tadashi replies.

"I have a lot of connections there," Dr. Elephun says with a smile. "I think we could get a lot of your work in the lab to count towards your degree plan, and any courses that you still have to take I'm sure we could find a scholarship for."

"And you wouldn't mind if I kept on with my own research project, Baymax?" Tadashi queries.

"The robotic nurse bot that you wrote about?" Dr. Elephun practically beams. "Not at all! In fact, I think the idea of robotic healthcare facilitators would go hand in hand with what we're doing. Quite a lot of applications that robot of yours could have."

"In that case, yes! I accept your offer more gratefully than I can express," Tadashi tells him with a grin of own.

"Splendid!" Dr. Elephun claps his hands together, and then stands up as if to go. "I'll make all of the arrangements. I'll send all of the necessary paperwork around to your house, all right?"

"Absolutely." Tadashi rises and shakes the doctor's hand enthusiastically. "Thank you so much again for—well, for everything."

"My dear boy, it has been a pleasure," Dr. Elephun says with a smile.

As she and the apartment and down the steps, a sudden thought comes to Tadashi. "Wait!" he calls over the banister. "How are you supposed to find me if you don't know where I live?"

"Oh, don't worry, I'll be able to find you," Dr. Elephun chuckles, looking up at the boy. "Just don't take off the hospital bracelet!" Then he disappeared around the corner and was gone.

Tadashi stares down at the strip of plastic that had been around his wrist since entering the hospital and then twists it inside out.

"A tracking chip," he realizes as he sees the tiny green square of metal, and then shakes his head with amusement. He'll let the doctor have his eccentricities for the moment—although he promises himself that, as soon as Doctor Elephun knows his actual address, he's getting rid of this thing.

He heads back inside, his head spinning with everything that had happened so far that afternoon. It's a lot to take in, but in the end he's left feeling a whole lot better about things than he had when he'd woken up that morning. Sinking onto the couch cushions, he wishes that Honey was around to hear the good news. He promises himself that as soon as she gets home, he's going to tell her everything, and then maybe the tow of them can go see the others together—

"Aiyee!"

A quiet scream interrupts Tadshi's train of thought. He instantly recognizes the voice as Honey Lemon's, and his eyes fly open as he tries to figure out where it's coming from. His initial reaction is to check outside in case she's met some sort of trouble in the parking lot. But then he realizes that the sound is coming from the TV, which he'd forgotten to turn off. It takes a moment for him to process through what he's seeing—a blond girl dressed in some sort of orange and pink armored dress is clinging for dear life to a flagpole at the top of the burning building he'd seen on the news earlier. For a moment he wondered if he'd only imagined it-if maybe this stranger's voice only sounded similar to his girlfriend's. But then the camera pans in closer, and he gasps as he suddenly makes the connection—she is Honey Lemon!