Chương 56: Charges

Kurisu woke to the sound of the door opening and wheels rolling across the tile. Zanshin extended, he sensed the other three boys were asleep in their beds, Kellevra's arm still held up by the ex-fix. They'd hopefully get that taken care of today, whatever today was. Charlotte and Gloria both slept as well, half-sitting in recliners positioned at opposite corners of the room.

To his left, still filing through the door, were several staff members pushing mobile food carts into the corner nearest him, each one laden with several potted plants.

"Good, yes. Right there is perfect. They shouldn't be there for too long." Krause's voice came through the door just ahead of her.

"Ah, you're awake. Then you can just consume these and I can have these guys bring in the next batch." She stopped short, her eyes on the plant still sitting next to Kurisu.

"And why is this one still here?"

"Doctor, I am afraid what you are hoping to witness will take tens of thousands of plants. Furthermore, I have no intention of restoring my youth. I am a danger to all, and this limits the damage I can do," Kurisu responded.

"That is foolish. Why would you choose illness over being well? You're scared of yourself? Do better. Be better," she lectured. With a sigh, Kurisu siphoned the Chi from the surrounding plants, and the ones waiting in the hall, just to expedite this farce. The ribbons of scarlet energy, thin and fleeting, made his breathing just a little bit easier.

This amount of vitality would never succeed in rejuvenating him, and his body would adjust accordingly, permanently settling into an elderly baseline without sufficient Saiki in a small enough window.

"Why?" The question drew him from his thoughts.

"Why?" he asked.

"Why will it take tens of thousands of these plants? What is this red stream made of?" Krause inquired.

"It is Chi—""No. Not your TV show words, what is it? It can't be blood, since you're leeching plants. Are you pulling the cells out of them? What happens if you only take half?" She sat in a chair she'd rolled next to his bed.

"I want to know how all this works. You're clearly not human, but the others, aside from some specific deviations, they present as human. Their hearts, for example, don't have six chambers like yours. Their densities, while significantly higher than normal people, and even movie characters, are still human-like. They wouldn't be alive in your condition, no human would, yet you hang on somehow." Kurisu studied the older woman's face. Older? Well, that was certainly subjective, now wasn't it? He examined her.

Her blue eyes, the blonde hair fading to gray, the lines on her face that formed her frown. He wondered, just how much of this was concern, or curiosity. Her version of caring was vastly different from Charlotte's; in some ways it was warmer, and in others it was colder, more distant. Both women reminded him just slightly of his own mother, that desire to protect. He missed her. Coughing, Kurisu shook his head. He was being naive, a child. She wanted science where there was none.

Then the sensation of the MRI tugged at his skin.

"What we practice is not sorcery, for that is to create without substance; rather, it is the direction of that which already exists." His mother's voice echoed in his mind.

"Substance," he mumbled.

"Sorry?" Krause craned her head to hear him better.

"I am uncertain, as I am not well versed in the topic of science here. Chi is 'substance', maybe cells? I could not understand my biology instructor well during the particular classes about them. But 'Chi is the measure of what we are within our vessel,'" he paraphrased the lesson from his mother.

"Would that not mean those with more cells?"

"Oh, there are many, many ways to interpret that statement. It could refer to how lean the mass of an individual is, the overall size, maybe even cellular density…" She snatched his chart from the foot of his bed.

"Your Phase Angle and Active Cell Mass do reflect the total cellular density and quality within your body, yes…" Tapping her pen against her chin, she paced the floor and continued to mutter.

"A reduction in these numbers would also indicate the degradation of your organ tissue, skin, and so on. So, you transferred your cellular mass—and quality, by the looks of these charts, and what you're telling me—to Ace Miller, and his body accepted it without issue?"

"Dr. Krause, forgive me, but English is not my first language."

"Nor mine, not an excuse," she replied absently, now holding the pen in her teeth as she continued flipping through charts.

"You're literally performing cellular transplantation, not only between human beings, but flora and fauna as well. This is remarkable—absurd as hell—but remarkable." Turning back, Krause took her seat next to Kurisu, crossing one leg over the other as she fidgeted with her pen, tapping it against her chin.

"Now, your heart, this is a beast and it tells us quite a few things. First of which is that as a cardiologist I'm only barely qualified to postulate about it." She laughed. Kurisu lay there, silently staring at her while he tried to parse everything she was telling him.

"Hm, not one for ironic humor, eh? It just means all my experience means virtually nothing when it comes to your cardiovascular tract, while also being the only chance you have—well and other cardios like me, but that's splitting hairs. The second thing it tells me is that you are not from Earth; your physiology is evolved to withstand significantly higher gravitational force. Which I feel is confirmed by the Arterial Bicuspid Valves found in your arteries. Do you know what those are?" Kurisu slowly shook his head.

He wasn't sure what any of this meant, aside from the gravity mention. Stifling a yawn, Charlotte's voice cut in.

"They're valves usually found in human veins to fight gravity as blood returns to the heart, right?"

"Yes, precisely. Since you have those in your arteries, and your heart already beats with such profound pressure. Your previous T-Scores and BIA also support this."

"You started the party without us?" Roland said as he and Steven entered the room, handfuls of paper in their hands.

"I assume you've got those test results you were so eager to pull? Are we going to discuss them as a committee, or do we still have our right to privacy?"

"You and yours are welcome to leave if a group discussion makes you uncomfortable, Mr. Tetsuya, and if the officers will let you. I was postulating with Mr. Nodaichi regarding his own physiology while everyone else present at the time was asleep. You're also in a communal recovery room under active federal guard.

"Furthermore, as per your explicit permission, I submitted unreadable, anonymized telemetry data to outside agencies—NASA and DHS—exactly once to interpret these unprecedented metrics, so your privacy remains uncompromised. I'll ask you to cram the attitude. Respectfully, of course." Krause smiled at Roland, much to Kenji's apparent humor, as he had begun laughing.

"Oh, whatever," Roland grumbled.

"As for the results, I do have them, yes. Would you all like to discuss them now?"

"Hold up," Kenji said, hopping out of bed and stepping beside Kurisu.

"Ace, you got Kel?"

"Yep!" the other boy called out from next to Kellevra, as they both crossed their index fingers.

"On Koro Koro Sendari Matougi Sowaka." Their voices merged as they both spoke in sync. Two mandala spun into being, identically blue, with the outlines trailing over Kurisu and Kellevra. While Ace finished Kellevra's elbow healing, punctuated by a crack, Kenji focused on Kurisu's arms. The upper arm, being the cleaner break, snapped once before the bruising subsided. Kurisu's left forearm took longer as the break ran from his wrist to his elbow, with the fall impact having crushed much of it.

Bone ground against bone along the tiny distance needed to align perfectly, accompanied by an uncomfortable tug under his skin as the fibers wove together. As pops sounded throughout the quiet room, Kurisu grunted, "That was unnecessary. You should have prioritized yourself before me." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

"Nah, you're too busy moping around like Eeyore. You wouldn't have healed yourself," Kenji replied.

"Oh, is this the 'localized cellular regeneration' I heard was performed on your foot?" Krause asked.

"Your chart mentioned you came in with severe orthopedic traumas that inexplicably vanished."

"Yeah, Kurisu used a mudra on him, basically a healing spell. We cast it and get lightheaded or tired depending on how much Shin, or MP, we burn," Ace answered. Brow knitted, Krause looked around the room.

"Any other magical powers you kids would like to tell your doctor about before we continue?"

"Well, there's Ki, but maybe you already knew about it since you had us squeezing our Tandens during the MRI?" Kellevra supplied, half shrugging.

"Yes, I knew about that one, that's what we thought was a paraganglioma. This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Look at you, Kellevra, you're still young enough, maybe you played in the back yard like you had powers last summer. Yet here you all are, four children who must have wished upon a star, and had all your dreams come true."

"Well, I don't know about dreams coming," Kenji snorted before Krause stared at him silently, lips pressed together in a thin line.

"... true," he finished.

"Dreams coming true."

"Cute." Doctor Krause stood from her seat next to Kurisu and made her way to the foot of Kellevra's bed.

"Kellevra Miller, originally presented with a shattered left elbow stabilized by an external fixator, until your peers rendered the hardware superfluous by healing you. Hypertensive blood pressure of one-thirty over eighty, which is probably perfectly healthy for you. Heart rate thirty-eight beats per minute—this is incredibly low, that of an elite athlete. Your skeletal resistance and density exceed normal human limits by at least four times."

Turning, Krause addressed Ace next, "Ace, you came in here a quadriplegic, likely never expecting to walk again. It's a miracle you were alive, let alone hopping out of bed to fix your brother's elbow. Your T-score is the highest of the group, sitting at a plus fifty. For reference, a normal human being has a score of one or two, with four being a concerning maximum involving bone-hardening diseases. In your case, it seems to serve as a baseline of your current physical resilience."

Now at Kenji's side, Krause checked his clavicle.

"You really should have listened to your friend. This needs attention, quickly. I'll send for ortho to check on you again. Active cellular mass of three hundred and eighty kilos means you'd better not jump upstairs. Your Cortical Firing Rate recorded by the EEG was three hundred and fifty hertz. Roughly enough to perceive Mach One." Finally back to Kurisu's bed, Krause tapped the chart with her pen.

"Some of your data has already been gone over, but we'll make sure anyway. Currently, you have a T-score of minus two point five. This is extremely osteoporotic as I'm sure you've all noticed. Yet, despite that physical degradation, your EEG recorded over eighteen hundred hertz, which is enough to perceive Mach Five. For context, a normal human brain peaks at about forty to one hundred hertz during high-level cognitive processing.

"Additionally, your cerebral metabolite concentration remains at five hundred millimoles, whereas standard human pools sit closer to ten. MRS revealed that there's a one hundred and seventy-six amp capacity in this secondary vasculatory system, and five thousand two hundred and eighty megajoules currently held within the mass we initially mistook for a paraganglioma.

"Which, by the way, all of you possess. Specifics for each of you are listed in your charts." Ace grabbed the chart from the foot of his bed before getting a pen from Steven and flipping one of the pages over and scribbling on the back.

"What are amps?" he asked.

"Amps are electrical current, how much electricity travels through a wire in a second; it's just like the Wi-Fi speed," Steven provided.

"Why?"

"So, if it's like the internet, that means that's how fast it can go, but I can download something super small and it won't take up the whole bandwidth? Like if I download an image from Reddit?"

"Not really," Steven dragged out.

"More or less, the speed is always the speed—at least it's supposed to be—so your picture file, being two megabytes, downloads in a fraction of a second, technically. You could download fifty of those in that second." Ace looked up from his notes to Kurisu.

"Can we do that? Use multiple abilities at once?" Frowning, Kurisu replied, "You already do. You circulate Ki through your body to reinforce it, you channel the energy to move faster, and you manifest your Kaki, all at once."

"Oh, so this is the bottleneck for us?"

"You are aware of all this already. This is simply the breadth of your Keiraku, which you have been expanding over the last several months," Kurisu stated.

"Oh, I get it now! So, what about 'cortical metabolite pool?' That seems maybe useful." When nobody else spoke up for several seconds, Doctor Krause answered, "I'm no neurologist, but that is usually the condition, the density and integrity, of your brain pathways. In your case, it also looks like the stored energy your brain uses for complex thought, such as a difficult mathematics problem, or perhaps that 'spell' you just used."

"Aha! So that's that…

'High-yield impact resistance.' What's this 'N' mean next to a big number on 'tissue tensile strength'? Is that my defense?"

"That's a newton, a small unit that measures the force exerted on an object," Krause provided.

"Dude, are you making a character sheet right now?" Kenji laughed.

"Uh-huh." Ace absently continued his scribbling. Frowning, he sat up.

"And then the tumor thingy. Energetic capacity, ten-twenty MJ isn't Mary Jane…" Chuckling, Steven said, "No, that's probably megajoules, the charge stored in a battery. Though, that's a shitload. Doc, are you sure about these numbers?"

"As certain as we can be given the circumstances. We performed multiple tests, and the data all comes out roughly identical where deviations are acceptable and exactly identical where they aren't. There is no concern regarding the raw numbers recorded; the concern comes from the fact that these numbers exist in data for human biologics."

"How does a human being survive with one thousand three hundred fifty megajoules in a stomach tumor?" Gloria asked, flipping through Kenji's chart and shaking her head.

"Honestly, I think 'magic' was easier to accept. I mean that's what, enough power to light up a city block?"

"More like an average home for about two weeks, or run a Tesla for about fourteen hundred miles," Steven corrected.

"Okay, how do you even know that off the top of your head?" she snapped.

"We adopted Raiden, remember? Who wouldn't look into it?"

"Change of heart, much?"

"What are you talking about? No, but I happened to check into a few things over the last year."

"Jesus, Mom, chill out," Kenji interrupted.

"Don't you dare talk to me like that—""Then stop bein' a 'B'!" Kenji flew from his bed.

"Kenji!" Roland snapped.

"Just chill!" Kenji's hands flung into the air.

"I'm sorry for 'being rude to my mom,' but what's done is done! I'm tired of hearing about it, of the snapping and the passive-aggressive bull! You aren't making things any better! Do you feel better? No? Didn't think so!" He stomped in between Ace and Kurisu, jutting his chin at the latter before turning to look over Ace's shoulder.

"So, what do you got?"

"Well, so far Ki is ten-twenty megajoules. Shin is sixty-five millimoles. Defense is two hundred seventy-two thousand newtons. Attack is thirty-three amps, I guess? Still need to workshop it a little more," Ace replied with a sigh, leaning back and groaning at the ceiling.

"I hate math, but we need it for our levels!" Reaching over the paper, Steven corrected, "Amps wouldn't be your attack, kiddo. They're part of how hard you can attack. You need the force behind it to finish figuring it out."

"Wait! But you said it was just like wifi!"

"Yeah, did you forget about the one big file versus the two meg images? That's kind of your force, your volts."

"Ugh! What a pain! I thought newtons were force. And I have no idea how to figure out Chi!" Krause stepped forward.

"For the Chi number, I actually have a hypothesis based on my conversation with Kurisu earlier. If you want a number representing the total quality and quantity of your cells that looks like a video game health pool, multiply the Active Cellular Mass by the Phase Angle. In your case, six thousand three hundred twenty-eight."

"Bro, just lay down," Kellevra cut in.

"Does it really matter?" Ace just glared at him and continued his scribbling.

"So what the heck is volts!? How do I get my attack power?"

"That would be the force exerted by your Tanden when you use your Ki. Which means it is not a constant value. Some strikes are heavy, while others are quick and light. We dash; we walk; we run. These all require differing amounts of effort. Thus the voltage will vary," Kurisu spoke up. Roughly scratching his head, Ace groaned.

"Why can't anything be just easy numbers that don't move?" Kellevra laughed.

"Because it's not an RPG, dude." The door flew open with enough force to rattle the forgotten pots as Agent Cox strolled into the hospital room, carrying a thick manila folder.

"I hope the hospital food is treating you well." He flashed a grin, all but tossing the file onto a rolling tray before shoving it with his foot into the center of the crowd.

"The U. S. Attorney's Office finished their review, and I have your extensive list of charges ready."