Chapter 1

“Watch out!” Hiro called out to Honey Lemon. The lithe redhead turned to see a bolt of energy heading in her direction and rolled out of the way just in time to avoid being hit.

“Thanks for the heads up!” she called back as she regained her feet.

High Voltage, or at least the senior half of it, had apparently decided she had had enough of community service and broke her parole by sneaking into the police evidence warehouse to steal back the orb that gave Barb her powers of electricity. The silent alarm was picked up by Basemax, which automatically alerted the superhero team known as Big Hero 6.

Hiro, Baymax and Honey Lemon were closest and had arrived barely a minute prior, just in time to find Barb pulling the orb from the insulating crate it was kept in. The other members of the team, as well as the police themselves, were on route and would be there in a few more minutes at most.

“I can’t take it any more!” Barb ranted as she launched a variety of electrical pulses towards them. “Community service dancing? What a joke! I’m meant to perform for packed out stadiums, not twice a week in some piddly little theatre that can barely seat fifty people!”

“And how is this going to help?” Hiro asked from behind a support pillar. “All you’re doing is making your situation worse, adding time to your sentence.”

“Then I’ll leave the country. Go somewhere where my talents are actually appreciated!” Enraged and unfocused as she was, Barb wasn’t bothering to aim her attacks but was simply unleashing chaos. Energy blasts shot out from her in random directions, causing crates and shelves to explode and come crashing down all over the place. It was going to be one hell of a clean up job once this was over.

“What about your daughter?” Honey Lemon asked from behind her own cover. “Are you planning on just leaving her behind?”

“Juniper made her choice when she betrayed me. ‘But Mama, we only have two more years to go!’” Barb said in a mocking tone, mimicking her daughter’s voice. “Bah! I’m not getting any younger and I’m tired of her morals holding me back. If she’s not willing to do whatever it takes to succeed then she can go ahead and waste her life in jail for all I care.”

“But she is,” Hero replied, coming out into the open and drawing Barb’s attention towards him.

“What?” Barb shouted, not understanding what Hiro was talking about. She directed an energy blast at him, but being ready for it, he dodged it easily.

“She’s the one doing what’s necessary to succeed,” he explained as he moved across the room, evading her attacks and leaping from cover to cover. “She’s putting in the time to pay for her crimes. And when that’s done there will be nothing to stop her from becoming famous the right way. You, on the other hand, will simply be infamous.”

“Better infamous than unknown!” Barb replied. She moved to launch another energy blast at him, but nothing happened. “Huh?” she said, confused. She looked towards the energy sphere and was surprised to see it stuck to the floor, encased in a bubble of insulting goo. Honey Lemon was standing over it and gave her a friendly wave and a smile.

With the sphere shielded the way it was, Barb understood that her slim chances of winning this fight were now gone. “Uh-oh,” she said, then turned to run. She only made it a few feet before slamming face first into the armoured chest of Baymax, who was now standing right behind her. The impact made her stagger and fall to the ground, momentarily stunned.

“To avoid injury, it is important to always watch where you are going,” the robot said in his typical helpful tone.

Before she could regain her feet, Hiro secured her hands and feet in some magnetic cuffs. “There, that’ll hold you until the police arrive.”

Honey Lemon came up beside him and nodded. “Not to give advice to a villain, but you really aren’t much of a threat on your own. Without Juniper to help watch your back it was rather easy for me to sneak up on you.”

“I don’t need her! I don’t need anyone!” Barb shouted. “I-” she began, then Honey Lemon sealed her mouth with one of her chemical balls that made a sticky glue-like substance, shutting her up.

“Thank you,” Hiro said, “I don’t think we need to hear her ranting until the cops come.” This earned him a glare from their captive, which he ignored.

“Hiro, aren’t you forgetting something?” Honey Lemon prompted a moment later.

“What?” he asked, not knowing what Honey Lemon was talking about.

She glanced at a nearby wall clock, which miraculously had escaped the widespread destruction. “Didn’t you mention that you have to write a test today?”

Hiro looked at the clock and his heart skipped a beat. “Crap! It starts in ten minutes and showing up late is an automatic fail! C’mon Baymax, we’ve got to go!”

The two of them ran out of the warehouse where Hiro then hopped on to the robot’s back and Baymax took flight. They soared across the city of San Fransokyo as fast as possible and landed on the roof of SFIT where Hiro quickly ditched his super suit, trusting Baymax to stow it properly, and ran down the stairs, making it through the door to his class with only two minutes to spare, breathing heavily from the sudden sprint.

“You’re cutting it a little close, Mr. Hamada,” his teacher, Professor Granville, said in greeting.

Hiro looked around the class and saw that he was the only one missing. “Sorry, Professor. I was ... working at my other job and sort of lost track of time.”

Grace Granville, who was one of the privileged to know of Hiro’s superhero identity, fully understood what he meant by ‘other job’. She nodded and said, “Well, perhaps next time you can ask one of your friends to cover your shift. Surely you don’t have to do everything yourself. No matter how important the job, there is no excuse for slacking in your education. It’s not like it was a life or death situation, after all.”

The tone in her voice would make one think she was being hyperbolic, but Hiro knew it to be a genuine question. “No Professor, it wasn’t as serious as that. I’ll do my best to find someone to cover for me the next time there’s a, um, scheduling conflict.”

“Good. Now take a seat. You have one minute to get settled, then we begin, ready or not.”

Back at the warehouse, Honey Lemon was giving a debrief to the officers who now had Barb in their custody. Unnoticed by all because of the sheer amount of broken boxes and fallen shelves, one box in particular that was labelled ‘Dangerous’ and ‘Keep away from power’ had been struck directly by one of Barb’s energy bolts. The box had not shattered, but there was now a sizable hole in one side. In the darkness inside the box, hidden underneath several layers of now broken electrical shielding, the eyes of a disembodied robotic head slowly lit up.

The day following the incident with Barb, the chief of the police department made contact with Big Hero 6. Hiro and Fred were the only ones at their secret headquarters at the time, along with Mini-Max who was Fred’s near constant companion.

“Chief Cruz. How can we help you?” Hiro asked upon accepting the video call. The call hadn’t come through the emergency line so he knew it wasn’t something urgent. The video call software automatically obscured their faces to protect their identities but like Granvillle, Diego was one of the few who already knew who was behind the masks.

“Hello Hiro,” Diego replied. The fact that he used Hiro’s name let them know there was no one around who could overhear them. “We have a situation we were hoping you could help with. It has the potential to become serious if not dealt with quickly so we’d like your aid. After yesterday’s incident with High Voltage, it would seem that some of our evidence has ... escaped.”

“Escaped?” Hiro asked. “Don’t you mean went missing?”

Diego shook his head. “No. Escaped. Here...” he then brought up a video file of the security camera outside the main entrance to the warehouse. In it, they saw one of the ‘Buddy Cop’ robots exit the door carrying something. The camera zoomed in and they could clearly make out a robotic head being cradled in its arms. Part of the head was covered with synthetic skin and hair while the rest exposed the underlying metal, giving it a kind of terminator-esque appearance. The one remaining synthetic eye then looked directly at the camera and the video went black.

“Wait, was that Trina? What happened to the video?” Fred asked.

“Cut,” Diego explained. “That android somehow remotely hacked into the security system, just like it hacked the Buddy Cop, and shut off the camera, presumably to hide which way it was going. However...”

“If she was able to turn off the camera, she could have also deleted the video log,” Hiro finished.

“Exactly,” Diego nodded. “But why didn’t it?”

“Because she wants us to know she escaped,” Hiro surmised. “But back up a second. Chief Cruz, you keep referring to Trina as ‘it’. And is that where you’ve been keeping her all this time? In storage?” He tried his best to keep his voice level, but it was clear he did not approve.

“I am aware of your past interactions with the android, Hiro, but that is what Trina is,” Diego explained. “It’s a machine, nothing more. And one that nearly destroyed this entire city and tried to start a robot revolution, I might add.”

“She’s not just a machine!” Hiro suddenly snapped. He took a breath to try and regain his composure. “She’s the closest thing we’ve ever had to genuine artificial intelligence. For all we know, she is the first true case of synthetic life. And you just locked her away in a box for months? That’s inhumane!”

“She’s not human,” Diego pointed out, though gave some deference to Hiro’s preferred choice of terms. “Besides, she was deactivated. She’d have been completely unaware of the passage of time so it’s not like we were putting someone in solitary confinement without a trial.”

“No, more like a forced coma.” While Hiro seemed to be more in control of himself, the bitterness in his voice was unmistakable.

Diego let out a sigh, knowing he wasn’t going to win this little argument. Hiro was just too personally invested and it was only distracting them from the problem at hand. “Regardless,” he said, moving on, “she’s escaped and is currently at large. Considering what happened the last time she was free we need to find her, and sooner rather than later. With her being just a head I’m sure it will take some time before she can become a threat again but we want to nip this problem in the bud before it can threaten-”

Before he could finish his sentence, alarms went off in both the police department and the base.

Diego rushed to the door of his office and opened it. “What’s going on?” he called out to any officers who were nearby.

Basemax, the virtual intelligence that managed their secret headquarters, answered a moment later. “Calls have come in from multiple sources that a dangerous fight has broken out between several smaller robots and a large quadruped one.”

“Where?” Hiro asked, already fearing he knew the answer.

“The Lucky Cat Cafe.”

“Aunt Cass!” Hiro cried out at the same time Diego nearly yelled, “Cassie!”

The two looked at each other briefly, their shared concern for Hiro’s aunt driving away any other thoughts.

“Meet you there!” Diego said, then ended the call.

“Basemax, contact the others! Tell them to meet us at the cafe ASAP!” Hiro instructed as he rushed to put on his gear.

“I have already alerted the team and their suits are on route,” Basemax responded. “ETA for them to arrive is five minutes.”

“Then let’s move!”

When Hiro and Fred arrived on scene, the fighting had already damaged much of the street and several of the cafe’s windows were shattered. What could only be described as a large two-armed, four-legged tank was swinging a large mechanical tail at Noodle Burger Boy, the robotic mascot for Fred’s favourite fast food restaurant that now worked at the Lucky Cat Cafe. Surrounding the tank were the other members of his robotic ‘family’, animatronic mascots of various food joints that Noodle Burger Boy had recruited and reprogrammed while he was implanted with Obake’s control chip, who now, like him, were restored to their original settings and working at the cafe. Baymax was there as well, armoured up and acting as a shield for any civilians who hadn’t yet made it to safety.

“We don’t want to fight you, Sis!” Noodle Burger Boy called out as he dodged a tail swipe.

“Then g-get out of my way-y!” came the heavily synthesised voice of Trina from a speaker somewhere on the tank. The tank raised its tail and pointed at one of the robots. A moment later a laser shot out, forcing them to dodge out of the way. A small smoking crater was all that remained of the spot that was hit.

“Trina! Stop!” Hiro called out, imposing himself between her and the cafe.

The tank turned to face him, though no sign of Trina could be seen. Her head, or however much of herself she had managed to reassemble must have been somewhere inside. “There y-you are!” she said, her voice sounding disturbingly happy. “I k-knew that if I attacked this-s place you’d come scurrying out of your little h-hole.”

“But why?” Hiro asked, trying to talk her down from attacking. The stuttering in her voice had him worried that perhaps some of her processing capabilities were damaged. “The people here have never done anything to harm you, and I thought you considered Noodle Burger Boy to be family.”

That was evidently the wrong thing to say as the tank suddenly lashed out with one of its arms to try and bat Hiro away. “E-exac-ctly!” Trina shouted. “H-he was the o-only family-ly I h-had left, and you t-took him away fro-om me!”

“Big Hero 6 didn’t take me away,” Noodle Burger Boy interjected. “They fixed me. They can fix you too, Sis, then we can be a family again.”

“I don’t n-need to be fi-ixed!” Trina yelled, though the worsening stutter in her voice suggested otherwise. “W-what I need i-is revenge!”

While Hiro’s attempt at diffusing the situation had failed, it had at least distracted Trina long enough for the rest of Big Hero 6 to arrive. Wasabi, Honey Lemon, and GoGo, along with Fred and Baymax, took up flanking positions around the Trina-tank, ready to leap into action should the situation warrant it. Trina noted the new arrivals, but didn’t move. Things seemed to be at a pause, each side waiting to see what the other would do.

Hiro took a small step forward. “Trina, you’re not thinking clearly,” he began. “You must know that revenge won’t make anything better. It won’t make you happy.”

“I don’t w-want to be happy-y!” Trina yelled. “I want you-u to suffer-er as I have!” She raised one of her arms and a series of small ports opened up along its length. Out shot over a dozen micro-missiles, each homing in on Hiro.