The three of them sat, still and focused, on GoGo's couch, staring intently at Baymax's screen. A frozen image of Fred's ecstatic face in front of the camera displayed, waiting to start. Hiro was uneasy. He knew GoGo and Wasabi were, too. So soon after his death came Honey's and, now, so soon after the mystery began, they stood before what could be an opportunity to find out what could have possibly caused the incidents. What created the nightmare that bore into GoGo's eyes? What crept underneath Wasabi's skin? What worms crawled from the ground under Hiro's feet? All of it might be explained if Fred knew what he was going into before he died.
"Are you ready?" Hiro asked the two of them after almost an hour of mental preparation.
"Yeah," Wasabi said softly. GoGo simply nodded.
"Baymax," Hiro took a deep breath and let it out through his nose. "Play Fred's Viary."
The video instantly began with Fred waving his hands in front of the camera with an enormous grin. He bounced out of the frame and came back with blueprints that he had doodled all over, white pencil displaying a tube like structure with a flat ball on top surrounded by monsters and stick figures. He pointed at the diagram to isolate what he was talking about.
"Remember in the UnderTown, how the monster would just turn off everything in the mine shafts by planting its little alien babies in the ground above it and their electromagnetic connection with each other would interfere with the lights?" Fred recalled it as if he was talking to them and not to a camera. It made Wasabi hurt more inside to hear it. "Well, you can totally do that with stuff! Take an old metal slinky toy and run electricity through it with some battery wires and you can make an electron interference tunnel! I used to break my dad's watches by dropping them through it and ruining the current inside."
He laughed. GoGo missed that laugh.
"I've been thinking about the Phantom and how Callaghan could only use the nanobots you made, Hiro, with the brainwave signal device in his mask and I thought, well, like, everything runs on watch batteries, right? So I'm going to make little electromagnetic babies for my costume!"
The three remained utterly silent even as Fred waved goodbye to the camera and the next video started up. This time, it was weeks later. The pole he was working on in Honey's videos was complete with a small ball of spinning grey fluid inside. He stood from the desk and smiled goofily. "I should have shown you guys the worms I found last week! I thought, like, for certain that San Fransokyo pest control would be all up on that but my dad's house is littered with them!"
He jumped off screen and came back with two metal balls attached to a single rod. "I've been shocking them with the therapeutic rod to forcefully adapt them to conduct electricity. Like the hyperactive evolution in the new Lizard King movie! That one wasn't the best, though." He clicked the button on the rod and a small stream of electric current flickered between the two bulbs. He put the welding mask on his face and raised the node to the ball, jolting it for a moment and watching as the top of the pole shook a little. The fluid inside started to resemble the worms GoGo had seen before, and her breath caught in her chest.
The third video was different from the others.
Fred was already in his costume, the head lifted off so the camera could see his face. He didn't look so goofy or happy as in the other vlogs. His brows pinched at the middle of his forehead and he remained almost as still as the three viewers were. Honey could be heard in the background, making the same priming noises for the gun that they had heard in her Viary.
"I fucked up, Wasabi…" he swallowed and looked pleadingly into the camera. "The, uh, pole I made for Tess had a low level magnetic field to keep Tess on it so she couldn't escape but…" he ran a hand down his face. "After some experiments gone wrong, she got bigger and stronger and now I can't stop her. She's capable of some dangerous shit, guys. I fucked up really bad."
He looked over his shoulder at Honey and, then, back at the camera.
"Me and Honey are going to take care of it and, I swear to God, that'll be the last of it," Fred shook his head. "Wasabi, man, I am so sorry. I promise, this will be the last time I fuck up. We've planted a weak electromagnetic pulse in the High Time apartments on South Minami and it's headed there now. We're gonna kill the worms and make sure nobody gets hurt in the process. That'll be the end of it."
He turned his head as Honey called to him and together, they darted out of the nerd lab. After about a half hour, the camera automatically shut off and left Baymax standing before three patients with accelerated heart rates.
Hiro sat back and put his hands over his mouth in stunned shock. Wasabi covered his eyes with his palm and GoGo took deep, heavy breaths through her nose. In utter silence, the three of them processed just what new knowledge they had all acquired. It was Fred, after all. Or, rather, not him but something he made in order to perfect his suit's abilities. He and Honey set the apartment complex on fire to kill it and it found Fred and killed him, found Honey and killed her. It was like the plotline of one of Fred's movies.
"We have to stop it," GoGo stood and crossed her arms over her chest. "We owe it to Honey and Fred and it's our responsibility to make sure that thing doesn't hurt anyone else."
"But how?" Wasabi looked up. His eyes were red and it was audible that he was attempting to fight the cracks in his voice. "You said so yourself, you can't cut that damn thing. Fred said it has some electromagnetic bond to itself."
"That's just it, though," GoGo grabbed a pack of gum and flipped it over in her hand, "if it's electromagnetics that keep it together, it's going to keep coming after me. It wanted my discs so it'll find me easiest. We lure it somewhere, capture it, and get rid of it."
Wasabi stood and barked across the table. "I'm not losing any more of my friends! There has to be some way to kill it, dammit!"
Hiro looked up from his feet. "You're both right."
The two stopped fighting with each other and turned to him.
"We're going to lure it, capture it, and get rid of it," Hiro nodded as plans spiraled in his head. "And we're not going to lose any more friends."
Wasabi looked at GoGo and put his hands on his hips, the way GoGo did sometimes when she wanted to know the answer to some loophole in the group's attack plan. GoGo started towards putting her hands on her hips as well but stopped at the sight of Wasabi's mirroring her, deciding instead to play cool and tuck her hands behind her back as she blew a bubble with her gum.
"So how are we supposed to do this?" Wasabi asked.
Hiro thought back to the days after Tadashi's death, when the Phantom first attacked him and he mindlessly attempted to trace Callaghan. Baymax stopped him from nearly falling off of the boardwalk and into the water below just because he was so hell-bent upon finding out where the nanobots were trying to reconnect. He stood and nodded.
"The docks."