Watching Hiro's fingers fly across his keyboard and manipulate the projections on the 3D screen was almost like trying to count how many times a hummingbird beat it's wings. It was nearly impossible to keep up! His eyes darted across the screen at a similarly untraceable speed, and almost before she knew what was happening, he was up, feeding cord behind him to several electrodes.
"I'll need these on each temple," he said, approaching her and coming to the end of the cord. The tiny pads he offered her ran all the way across the driveway and back into the computer. "And one on the inside of your dominant wrist. I'm gonna do a few quick scans of my own, to try and pick up any mechanical signals."
"There's no machines in me generating the magnetic radiation," Aria said, sticking the tiny circles to the sides of her head, "there's not going to be any mechanical signals."
"True, but if this is electromagnetic, as I suspect, it's gonna read out into my computer like a flashdrive. I mean," he shrugged, taking hold of her hand, and turning it over, exposing her wrist. He stuck the electrode on, but didn't let go yet. "It's not like it'll spit coherent data out. It'll most likely just be a huge jumble of radiowaves. But it'll be easier to figure out what to do if I get that data." He smiled reassuringly at her, before quickly retreating to his computer. Tapping a few keys and bringing up a program, he initialized it, and started recording the signal.
"Are you able to pass on your magnet powers to other people?" Fred asked, poking at the electrode on one of her temples.
"Trust me," she replied, brushing his hand away, "you don't want to be magnetic."
"Uh, she-yeah I do! Can you imagine how awesome that would be!?"
"Yes. I can. And it isn't." She rolled her eyes at the blonde, but her attention was drawn back to Hiro and his computer, and he let out a shout of surprise. Aria desperately wanted to move closer to see what he was looking at, but she knew if she got too close, she would be a danger to the hard drive.
"Is there any way to, I dunno, turn it up?" Hiro asked her, tearing his eyes away from the scrolling list of signals popping up in the program window. They were all relatively weak signals, but they sure as hell weren't radiowaves.
"Turn it up?" she asked, "like, make myself…more magnetic?"
"Yes! Can you do that?" He looked positively thrilled at the information flooding in, and Aria wished she could be that thrilled about all of this. Of course, Hiro didn't have to live with it.
"I…can try." She knew the more emotional she was, the worse she could control the force of the magnetism. But she didn't know if she could force herself to let go. Maybe if she just concentrated harder.
At first, she just thought really hard about it. Maybe it was mind controlled, and she just had to achieve a higher level of focus to tap into it? But when that proved fruitless, she attempted to let her emotions go. She thought about anything and everything that would make her cry; sick puppies, orphans, needles, airplane crashes, but it still didn't seem to work. Hiro's smile slowly deflated, as he realized his request would have to go unanswered for now.
"Don't hurt yourself," he said, chuckling slightly. "It's fine, this is enough right here. Man." He paused and leaned back, gazing at the scrolling lines of seemingly random numbers and letters. To Aria, they meant next to nothing, but they made perfect sense to Hiro. "This is just…wow."
"What does all that mean?" Honey Lemon asked, walking up behind him and peering over his shoulder. "It doesn't really look like anything to me."
"It's…not microwave readings," Gogo said, leaning against the back of Hiro's chair, as she resumed popping her gum. "It looks more like gamma readings, but…that's impossible. She'd be fried to a crisp if it was gamma radiation, not to mention the rest of us, and this half of the globe."
"It's not gamma radiation," Hiro said, bringing up another window on the display. This one contained a generic body silhouette, with several sections of the brain lit up, as well as weak signals from several other parts of the body. "It's something else, it's not really on the spectrum. Look." He pointed at the lit up regions of the figure's brain, before tapping it, and enlarging the area. A 3D model was immediately shown on the display. "These lit up areas? Clusters of mutated cells, that's where the radiation seems to be coming from. I'd bet these are the areas that had tumors, and were targeted with DNA flagged radiation. That's why none of the dark areas are shown, they didn't get irradiated, so they're not causing the magnetism."
"Okay, back up," Gogo said, spinning Hiro around in his chair. "I know electromag. That's sort of my thing. What do you mean it's not on the spectrum?"
"I don't know," he admitted, though the excitement didn't melt from his features. "But that's what were gotta find out, isn't it?"
While all of this was going on, Aria stood in frustration just out of earshot. All she could do was take Hiro's animated excitement as a good sign, and as she tried to squint and read their lips, Baymax stood silently by her side. He was a robot, and usually didn't speak unless spoken to, but as the silence between them stretched on, Baymax scanned her neurological activity, taking note.
"You seem to emit less radiation when your emotional state is steady," he remarked, surprising Aria, who hadn't been expecting him to speak.
"Oh! Yeah, that's pretty much what I have figured out so far," she said, scratching at one of the electrodes.
"This would indicate that the electromagnetic radiation pulses are directly controlled by electrical impulses fired between neurotransmitters." His processor was running concurrently with Hiro's computer's, searching data bases for research on this topic. His search came up with nothing. "No research on a link between nueroelectric impulses and electromagnetivity has been conducted."
"Whoa whoa, wait!" Both heads snapped up as Hiro called out, nearly falling out of his chair as he scrambled to get out of it and run over. "Baymax, say that again? The think about the radiation being controlled by neurons?"
"I merely observed that her emotional state seems to directly influence the force behind her magnetic charge, indicating that the electromagnetic radiation pulses are directly controlled by electrical impulses fired between neurotransmitters." Hiro's face lit up at this.
"Baymax, you're a genius!" he said, running back into the garage, and erasing several long calculations that were written on a white erase board that dominated the back wall. He started scribbling things down, mumbling to himself, and from where Aria stood, she could just barely make out the calculations he was writing.
"Aaaaand…we've lost 'im," Wasabi sighed, smiling as he rolled his eyes. Shoving Fred's shoulder lightly, he stood. "C'mon, there's no way we're gonna be able to hold a conversation with him again tonight, not till he's got whatever's in his brain down on paper."
"I've got some calculations of my own to run, Honey Lemon put in, following as Wasabi started down the driveway.
"Well, I might as well go resmooth my blades," Gogo said, and as the crew left, all giving half-hearted farewells towards Hiro, who couldn't really hear them anyway, Aria watched on helplessly. What was she supposed to do? Stay here? Should she go now too? Did Hiro still need to run more tests on her?
"Uh..." she said, trying to catch the boy's attention. When he finally looked up, he seemed to realize for the first time that his friends had left, and he looked rather surprised.
"Oh!" he said, setting the dry erase marker down. "Huh, I guess they left."
"Yeah…should I go too?" Aria didn't know what time it was, but it had to be past five already, the sun was going to set soon.
"Well, where are you staying?" he asked, walking over to retrieve the electrodes. "Do you have family here in San Fransokyo or something? Me and Baymax will walk you."
"Oh! Well, I was just going to stay at one of the hostels," she said, pointing vaguely over her shoulder, towards the thick of the city. "All my family lives in Los Angelosaka, and I don't really have the cash for a hotel." Her cheeks heated up slightly as she rambled, knowing it sounded silly to someone she'd just met. "Uh, point is, I was just going to wander, you know? Till I found somewhere."
"Um, no," Hiro replied, cocking and eyebrow and giving her one of 'those' looks. "Are you crazy? Walk around San Fransokyo alone? At night? There are some real nutjobs in this city, it's crazy dangerous!"
"I could always commit a petty crime and spend the night in jail?" she joked, but when Hiro didn't laugh, her smile dropped, and her cheeks flushed harder. "This is the part where laughing usually happens, you know, when someone tells a joke…"
"Aunt Cass will have my hide if I let you leave to wander the city alone. C'mon, you can crash on our couch." As he plucked the little circles from her head, he motioned for her to follow. "And don't worry," he reiterated, upon seeing her hesitance to get too close to the workshop garage. "You won't wipe my hard drives, I promise! And even if you do, they're all backed up too."
"I'm not gonna be imposing on you and your Aunt?" she asked, taking small, slow steps after him. She tried her hardest to be an emotional blank slate, so as not to ruin any of his equipment.
"Please; Fred's over literally ALL the time," he said, waiting for her at the foot of the stairs leading from the garage to the flat. "And he stinks most of the time. You don't stink, it'll be much better than having Fred over."
"This is all very freakin' cliché," she muttered under her breath, too quiet for Hiro to hear. As she inched her way forward, her eyes were trained on the various screens around the workshop. She remembered vividly the first day she'd wiped a computer clean at the hospital. She really hoped this wouldn't be a repeat.
But to her great surprise, the screens and monitors didn't even static; she was able to cross the thresh hold just find, and when she came to stand next to Hiro at the foot of the small set of stairs, she turned, smiling at all the still working equipment. Sure, she'd rattled a few mice, and more than one flashdrive had rolled off the desk and tried to follow her, but that was so mild in comparison to what she was expected.
"I did it!" she gasped, surprised at her own emotional restraint. But when she pumped a fist in the air in victory, finally letting herself feel happy for not screwing something up, the nearest screen waivered, before going black. And then the next. And the next. And then the 3D printer went offline. Until finally the workshop was just a room full of empty computers.
"…like I said, they're all backed up."