Chiron Academy

Chapter 32.3 Return of the Professor's Daughter

Wyatt tried his best to focus on his classes that morning, but he could barely keep still. The thought that the key to bringing down Palmer Valdez's plans, maybe his whole operation, was located on a phone in his school supplied blue and yellow backpack. The teachers kept droning on and on about how anaphase differed from prophase or how vectors worked, but he was sitting on actual superhero stuff. He didn't need more useless knowledge, he was here to become a superhero and at the moment, he had more actual superheroing right there in this bag than the entire school of students. 

Finally, he wait no longer. At the end of his second class of day, he high tailed it to the lab. 

He didn't know exactly where it was; it hadn't really been important for him to know up to this point, but a map he'd gotten from the front desk said it was on the faculty side of the building, one of the few rooms on the schools tiny second floor. Wyatt tried to calm his excitement as he climbed the stairs to the second floor. It seemed like his stomach was full of different butterflies.

Glancing again at the map in his hands, he saw the lab. Room 205. He didn't need to look, he already had the number memorized, but it calmed him a bit, reassured him that he was in the right place. 

The stairs rose from the ground in the middle of a room that must have been yet another lounge before the school had been refitted. A few sleek black leather classes had been moved in but a dusty old vending machine that looked straight out of the 1970's, complete with dark wood panelling, with its thick black power chord tossed over the top was pushed against up against the wall. Wyatt wondered idly if any of the old snacks inside would still be able to be eaten.

He walked up the stairs in the middle of the room. The stairs were kind of fancy. The steps had no backing connecting each step to the one above, just the step itself. There was a hand rail on each side but if he put his foot wrong, he could slip through and break his leg. That's how you knew it was fancy. 

Reaching the top of the stairs, he found himself in a small but wide hallway. Glancing at the map again (still room 205), he walked down the hall to the big double doored room marked '205' and knocked. There was no response.

Wyatt wondered if the Cassie would even be in the lab at this time. It wasn't like she had to use class time to be in there. She didn't need to be in class at all. She probably wasn't required to be anywhere. He was jealous to be honest. Still he'd come all this way, he might as well check.

Pulling one of the the heavy doors open, he peeked inside. The room was about the same size was small all things considered, lined with counters along the each wall. He was struck immediately by the sheer number of machines inside the room. They seemed to fill the room, small ones, big ones, some with chrome, others with a sterile white exterior. He didn't have a clue what any of them did. The only ones he recognized were a sleek all-in-one computer with a curved monitor on a table in the corner and a refrigerator. 

Standing on the other side of the room, looking at reading a paper readout, was Cassie.

He was struck for a moment by the similarities between her and her father. He was a much larger man with brown hair help worn in a ponytail and a scruffy beard, and she was much smaller but best that she had the same way of squinting into the distance and pursing her lips when solving a problem that appeared she was now. Also like her father, she hadn't noticed him come in. 

"Hello," Wyatt said.

She looked up from her paper, her fitted white lab coat shuffling from the sudden movement. 

Her father, Professor Lawton, was a large man, wide if not tall, whereas Cassie was rather slim. Her facial features were sharper than her father's as well; his face resembled almost a teddy bear. And yet now that he was really looking, he could see the same brow and strong jaw.