When Wasabi lifted the garage door the next morning after Hiro had texted the gang to come over, they all pretty much expected to see Hiro running tests, maybe, or working on a program on his computer, and Aria with something comically stuck to her again. But what they were greeted with was much crazier.
The whiteboard was absolutely full to the brim with calculations. Both sides were covered in seemingly random and nonsensical numbers and symbols. Cords ran every which way, some dangling haphazardly from the rafters. Two of the four monitors were blank or fizzing out with short bursts of static, and the printer near the corner as constantly churning out print outs of readings from one of the two working computers. Aria sat on the couch holding a smartphone to her chest, and was crying inconsolably as Hiro tried his best to dislodge the various metal items that had stuck themselves to not just Aria's head, but the rest of her body as well. They both paused briefly as the garage door was opened.
"Hey guys," Hiro said weakly, not expecting them so soon. Aria tried to contain her crying, but choking back the sobs was proving difficult.
"…Whatever's going on here," Fred spoke up, "I'm totally digging it! Chaos, man, it's sweet!" He was promptly smacked by Gogo.
"Oh, Aria, what's wrong?" Honey Lemon said, tuttering over to sit beside the dark-haired girl.
"It's…it's…these kittens…they were thrown in a river and then they got rescued and they all found ho-o-omes!" Aria broke down again, overemotional from the youtube video Hiro had handed her to watch. Another one of the screens went dark, before fizzing into static.
"There goes another one," Hiro sighed, scratching his head. He leaned on one arm on the nearest desk, pinning down the keyboard that was threatening to lift from the surface and attach itself to Aria.
"Okay, I have to once again be the voice of reason, but what the heck is going on here?" Wasabi blurted out, a look of incredulous confusion on his features. "This place looks like a tornado hit it, Hiro looks like he hasn't slept in a week, Aria's inconsolable, and…and I don't like chaos!"
"Yeah, Hiro, start talking, this is weird." Gogo paused, picking up a nearby cord that lay lifeless on the ground, "even for you."
"I couldn't sleep," Hiro said, using his other hand to hold down the monitor of the nearest computer. "I kept thinking about the formula. I had to come down and finish it, and before I knew it, it was already morning. But look!" He nodded towards the white board, as Honey Lemon stood to try and make sense of it all. "I finished it!"
"…This is...Gogo, come take a look at this," the tall blonde said, lifting her glasses to squint at it. Gogo crossed her arms as she walked over, but slowly, her face morphed from vague annoyance, to surprise, to awe.
"No way…" she whispered, looking up at Hiro. "This is-"
"It didn't have a name," he said, smiling wide. He stretched, kicking the corner of the white board with the tip of his shoe, and it swung around to the other side. "So I went ahead and named it. It's not Gamma radiation, but it's more powerful than that. It almost…sort of…like, splinters off from the electromagnetic spectrum, and then runs concurrently to it. And so if we're gonna stick to Greek letters here, I chose Sigma Radiation. You know. Can't break the pattern."
"Hiro," Honey Lemon gasped, "This is amazing! I can't believe you did this!"
"…I'm speechless," Gogo said, shaking her head. "So you really didn't get any sleep last night. But that still doesn't explain why Aria's bawling her eyes out over there."
"Oh! I wanted to get some data on the link between her emotional state and the power of the electromagnetic pulses. So I had to make her cry."
"Very gentlemanly of you." Gogo rolled her eyes, and walked over, snatching the phone out of Aria's hands. "That's enough of that." Aria was surprised by then, but she did begin to calm down after that, the things that were stuck to her slowly getting unstuck. Once Hiro didn't have to hold down his appliances any longer, he began rebooting each computer, reloading the backed up harddrives.
"So, this is all great and everything," Fred said, plucking a computer mouse from Aria's upper arm, "But what are you gonna, like, DO with all this stuff?"
"Already on it," Hiro answered, connecting the 3D printer to the network once more, and hitting 'resume project'. Instantly, the large appliance jumped to life, and resumed the printing of a small object. It was just the carbon fiber skeleton of the device, but once it was done, Hiro began tinkering with it, attaching it to his main processor by some thin cords. "I'm gonna need you guys to bring up another sad video on that phone here in a minute, I wanna test this thing out." He uploaded a specially made program into the device, which he'd just threaded with the proper hardware, and then unplugged it. "Moment of truth; catch, Aria!" Tossing it, Aria was only just able to catch it, and she slipped it on her head. It was almost a complete circle, and it sat over her forehead snuggly.
"Here, watch this one about orphans in Sri Lanka," Fred said, handing the phone to Aria. Honey Lemon and Wasabi sat on either side of her on the small couch, and before long, the three of them were teary eyed. "Yup," Fred said, rather proudly. "Sri Lankan orphans. Gets 'em every time."
But as tears started to slip past Aria's cheeks, nothing in the workshop rattles. Nothing lifted. Nothing came crashing towards her head. The only indication that the magnetic radiation was oscillating was the faint, brief flicker of each screen in the room, and the insane readout scrolling across the screen of Hiro's computer. Aria was still hooked up to the electrodes, and Hiro could monitor levels of radiation, and they were slowly climbing. But nothing. Nothing was happening.
"Yes!" he cheered, smiling wide again, and once Aria noticed, her chest tightened up, and more tears spilled down her face. Not because of the plight of the orphans on the screen this time, but because, for the first time in a long while, she wasn't having various metal objects fly towards her head. She was normal. Or as close to normal as possible at the moment, and for her, that was good enough.