Turn 27

--- Maya ---

“Mm, still got good enough.” Izzy grumbled.

“Wow, tell me how you really feel.” She snarked back, as she waited for her newest aches to fade.

Izzy rolled her eyes. “I wasn’t talking about you; you’re actually doing a lot better than you were a couple of weeks ago. Honestly, I’m a bit jealous about how fast you’re picking all of this up.”

“I may be a quick learner, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re still kicking my butt hermanita.” She assured her little sister (hopefully) before she could develop a complex.

“Yeah, but if you keep going at this pace, I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to.” Izzy admitted in a tone Maya did not like.

“And then when we’re the same size, you’ll start kicking my butt all over again.” She promised. “The only reason I’m giving you so much trouble is because I’m like four years older than you. Trust me when you’re in high school and I’m in college, you’ll be right back to wiping the floor with my face.”

Izzy gave her a snort of amusement before shaking her head. “Maybe. Either way, knuckle up, I’m sure you’ve got another round or two in you.”

“Uh, can we not and say we did?”

---

“Oh, there you are mija!” Her mamá called as she passed through the living room. “I was just looking for you.”

“Hmm, is something wrong?” She asked.

“No, nothing’s wrong but given how much time you’ve been spending on your games and projects the last few weeks I just wanted to make sure you haven’t forgotten about everything we have to do next week.”

“Uh…”

(Shit! We totally forgot!)

Her mother gave her an unimpressed look. “Next week we have both Izzy’s martial arts tournament, as well as the back to school festival Tommy’s band is playing at.”

“Oh, right!” That was the whole reason Izzy and Tommy had been so active the last few weeks.

(Actually, that explains why Izzy was so stressed this morning, she’s only got a couple days to get ready…)

“Sí, and that’s not including the fact that you’ll have to go back to school a few days after that.” Her mother made sure to remind her.

“Right, I won’t forget.” She promised.

“Sure, you won’t.” Her mother nodded. “Just don’t blame me when you get dragged out of bed with three hours of sleep.”

“I won’t.” She promised once more as she stepped out the front door.

(At least not verbally anyway.)

“Hush you.” She told herself. “We’re going to have to kick it into gear a bit, once school starts we’re not going to have as much time for all of our other stuff.”

(Ah, the problems of a high school hero.)

---

The first thing she did after getting back to the hospital was, pull out her face mask and began making some modifications to it.

After realizing just how off putting her blank mask was she’d decided it wouldn’t hurt to make the mask collapsible, for when she wanted to put a more friendly face on for others. Admittedly this would remove whatever protection her mask gave her secret identity, but it also meant that she didn’t have to worry about giving the wrong first impression to other heroes and anyone she was trying to calm down.

When her modifications were finished she put her headset on, noting how the retracted face guard was still slightly visible on the sides of her jaw just below her ears.

(I just want it on record that if this hurts, I told you so.)

“That’s not at all helpful.” She told her inner insanity.

(That said, we probably shouldn’t be testing if it works while wearing it.)

She couldn’t help but roll her eyes at herself. “I put a safety sensor in, if any of my skin gets in the way it’ll immediately retract. Besides I need to test to see if it works as intended.”

With that point established, she tensed a muscle in her jaw, allowing her to subtly press a button that sent her mask zipping shut in just a couple of seconds.

(Okay, that’s kind of cool.) Her inner child admitted, as she flexed her jaw once more retracting the mask and revealing the lower half of her face once more.

“Heh, it really is.”

---

Seeing as she still had a few more hours until she had to start making her way back home, she decided to go ahead and finish up the software project she’d started the day before as well.

On paper what she was doing to her Alchemy () program shouldn’t have been impossible, that is doing more with less plastic. At least until one realized that her initial method of using Alchemy () on an object rendered a fair portion of the plastic she was using had a tendency to turn into a too fluid mess of overly softened material that she had to remove if she used Alchemy () on it too many times. Something that was all too frequent with her general lack of art skills.

“Hey, that’s not true.” She whined, turning to where she kept her equipment. “I mean just look at my gear so far!”

(You mean the stuff that kind of looks like you took a bunch scrap metal and duct taped it together?)

“Hurtful.”

(Look Maya, we all have talents. Ours just don’t happen to be of the… artistic variety.)

“Tech and Coding are their own art forms!” She told herself. “And that’s not including the stuff we do with biology; I mean everyone is always saying how beautiful nature is!”

(Yeah, but the biology stuff we do is straight out of a sci-fi horror story.)

“No, it isn’t!” She argued, pointedly trying to ignore the fact that she nearly vomited after making her bio-pod.

(Actually, now that it’s been said our healing herbs kind of do look like the green herbs from resident evil.) Her inner logic pointed out in an attempt to stop the arguing before it got out of hand.

She paused before blinking as she turned to said plant. “Huh. It kind of does, doesn’t it?”

(How did we miss that?)

---

Now that her attention had been drawn towards the little green plant, she decided to go ahead and harvest it seeing as how it had technically been ready to gather for roughly a week now.

(You know we’re actually really lucky we installed a failsafe to keep these things from rotting once they’re done.)

(Quite… Though the fact that we’ve grown twice as much as intended does provide some interesting possibilities in our future bio-ware projects…)

“True. Too bad we don’t have enough Organics to try and grow something else though…” She’d mostly decided to collect it because she’d finally noticed how overgrown her little experiment had gotten.

(Well at the very least we know our bio-pod works, and that we can grow some plants of value.)

(Yeah, and since we know it works, we can start tweaking the plants DNA until it works even better!)

“That could work.” She admitted as she began storing the herbs in a container. “Though we might have to tweak our Biology Interface () a little bit if we want to control those mutations.”

(Pfft, you act like that’s going to be difficult.)