The sound of the late afternoon downpour against the window sill is deafening, and Aelita wakes with a start. Her left arm is numb from being between her body and the cold tile floor. Sitting up and stretching her arm out, she looks around at the state she left the kitchen when she had dozed off. All of the cabinets are wide open, as are all of the drawers beneath them. What was formerly in disarray is neat and tidy, and much more suitable for a home.

Aelita takes a deep breath as she hoists herself up from the ground, inhaling the smell of the old wood of the Hermitage, now tinged with the scent of Pine Sol. It is always bittersweet to be in her old childhood home, filled with memories of love and laughter. Of course, the negative memories will always remain—the hours of silence to avoid detection from the government, the shame of being unable to tell her friends why she couldn't invite them over for playdates or sleepovers.

But what would she have told them anyway? Her father and mother never did divulge any details back then, for she was only a little girl. Anytime she had asked, she had gotten the exact same response: "It's just not safe, honey."

No matter. That is a thing of the past, she tells herself. No time to lament what happened sixteen years ago when I can barely make it through the present, she further scolds herself.

She isn't wrong in her thinking. The summer vacation is over in one more day, and tomorrow she will be at the relatively new collegiate level of Kadic Academy, which means the cost of tuition will go up, not to mention the cost of room and board. After forcibly cutting herself off from Jeremie's financial charity, she is finding it hard to stay afloat while getting paid only a little bit over the minimum wage at her meager job. She figured she would rather live in the Hermitage than in the dormitories again anyway.

The process of tidying up the house has been quite a grueling one. She started from the top, where the bedrooms and bathrooms are located, because she knows for sure that she will spend most of her time up there anyway. She rearranged furniture to create a study room of sorts, swept, mopped, and vacuumed the entire level of the house, and then proceeded to do the very same thing with the main level. That was when she dozed off on the kitchen floor, just after polishing it.

With a sigh, Aelita glances at her wristwatch. 16:49. Soon the sun will begin to set, forcing her to retire upstairs for the night because there is no electricity yet.

Closing cupboards and drawers along the way, she walks toward a door that has remained untouched throughout the entire spring-cleaning process. It is the door to the basement of the Hermitage, a place Aelita has dreaded for the past three years. Memories still too poignant for her to come to terms with lay behind that nondescript door and down the carpeted stairs. Her hands tremble and her breath catches in her throat as she twists the dusty doorknob and slowly swings open the creaky old door. It takes a whole lots of courage for her to descend the damp staircase, and her hand grips the railing so hard that her knuckles ache and her palm becomes filled with splinters from the aging wood. And then it all hits her.

The memory of the men in black suits storming through the basement door and marching down the very same steps fills her mind. She hears her mother's protests when they grabbed her and dragged her up the stairs. She feels the terror building up in her chest again, almost like she's experiencing the event for the first time. Unable to breathe and unable to continue any further into the basement, Aelita slowly sits down and put her head on her knees, her fingers tangling in her long pink hair. She is acutely aware of something poking at her lower back, but she is unsure whether or not the sensation is a figment of her hyperactive imagination. Tentatively, she reaches behind and scratches the back of her hand against metal. Realizing that it is not a gun like she imagined it to be, she twists her torso to take a look at what she is dealing with. To her surprise, there is a hole in the step just above the one she is sitting on. The hole is large, too large to have been created by termites or rodents; it was definitely created on purpose.

Even more shocking than the gaping hole in the staircase is what is in it: a large black spiral notebook. One of the spirals had come undone and that is what was poking into her back. Aelita reaches into the hole and retrieves the book, unsure of what to think.

Maybe it's a diary left behind by one of my parents, she muses.

Flipping through the notebook yields no answers; the writing is mostly unintelligible but for a few choice words and phrases. She is able to see the word "X.A.N.A." scrawled down in her father's characteristic handwriting, written down far too many times throughout the notebook.

XANA. Now there is a name she never thought she would hear again. After shutting down the Supercomputer, the Lyoko Warriors had vowed never to talk about anything having to do with the virtual world ever again. With the discovery of this notebook comes a frenzy of confusing choices for Aelita: hide it away forever, and never uncover what it holds? Keep it for herself as a sort of keepsake to remind her of her father's peculiarity? Or give it to Jeremie and risk having another argument?

I would rather find out more about my father, even if it means risking what little I have left with Jeremie, she inwardly convinces herself.


"Man, I hate school."

"Odd, we haven't even had our first day of classes yet. Chill." Ulrich picks at the sleeves of his jacket as he says this, rolling his eyes at the dramatic blonde.

Odd whines. "But I don't want to. I have Dr. Fumet as my history teacher. Am I even going to learn anything before one day before the final exam? Why do I even have to take history if it isn't art history? I'm going to die."

"You'll be fine, Odd. Just use the class time as nap time instead!"

The whole group bursts out laughing at Jeremie's word, because they are so true. Dr. Fumet has a tendency to go off on tangents during his lectures, and sometimes it gets so bad that some students fall in such a deep sleep that they experience REM.

Aelita forces a smile onto her face. It isn't that she's not enjoying herself, but she just is not feeling the mirth like she used to before. Not with the notebook in her bag, waiting to be revealed.

"Hey, Aelita, are you going to eat that?"

"What kind of a stupid ass question is that, Odd? She's a vegetarian; of course she isn't going to eat it!" Sissi retorts, poking her boyfriend in the shoulder and making a face at him. That coaxes a chuckle from Aelita.

It has been almost a year since Odd and Sissi started dating. When they officially announced that they were couple, it was campus-wide news. How had the headmaster's daughter managed to land the ultimate Casanova of the school, the breaker of all hearts? The truth is, they always were interested in one another but were stuck in a perpetually never-ending love-hate relationship. Even now, there are remnants of that dynamic between the two of them.

As for "Stone-Faced Stern," as all the ladies refer to him, all these years later and he is still adamant against publicly pursuing Yumi's affections, and still just as oblivious when it comes to acknowledging his growing fanbase among the younger girls of the school.

As Odd wolfs down the bacon on the tray, Aelita takes a sip of her tea and glances over at Jeremie. She nearly chokes at what she sees—he's already looking right at her and frowning, eyebrows furrowed as though he wants to say something. Clearly, he is still confused and hurt by the way things ended between the two of them last semester. She quickly averts her eyes from his.

"I'm going to head to class now. I'll see you," she says abruptly, pushing her tray closer to Odd and standing up. Before she leaves, however, she reaches into her bag and plops the notebook down in front of Jeremie, right onto his laptop—she is well aware that this is one of Jeremie's pet peeves, and he hisses in response. Before anyone can have time to protest, she's out of the cafeteria and on her way across the campus grounds. Confusion flickers across Jeremie's features as he stares at the offending notebook in front of him.

"Whaz tha' 'bout?" Odd questions him with a mouth full of bacon, earning him a non-verbal scolding from Sissi.

"Not really sure," he answers. Realizing that Odd might actually be referring to Aelita's behavior and not the notebook, he looks up to interpret Odd's facial expression but finds no sign of suspicion on his face.

On the other hand, Sissi is well aware of just what is going on between Aelita and Jeremie, even if Jeremie himself doesn't seem to know. "You should open the notebook," she ventures. She thinks it may be a letter.

Jeremie opens it. His eyes widen in surprise as he takes in its contents. "Is this what I think it is?"

"What?" Odd, Ulrich, and Sissi look at each other, not having expected such a unanimous interest in this simple black notebook.

"Writings on Lyo—" Jeremie stops himself. Not only is he not willing to be the one to bring up the forbidden topic, he can't. Not while Sissi is around, at least.

"On what?" asks Sissi.

""On… on an online game that we used to play together." He fumbles over his words, but the lie is convincing enough for Sissi. Ulrich and Odd share a look, but say nothing more.


Mathematics is a bore, as usual. Jeremie groans and lays his head down on his desk. It has been just over a half hour of his two-hour long business calculus class. It is one of those courses that everybody is required to take at some point in their college career. Not even a student as gifted as he is can be permitted to skip the class. So there he sits, finished in thirty minutes what it will take some other in the room two hours to complete. Diagnostic tests be damned.

He recalls the notebook given to him earlier by Aelita. I suppose I can skim through it now, while I have some time, he thinks. "…Lyoko…Replika…what? None of this makes any sense," he mumbles.

Indeed, the shorthand is dated, and many of the sentences do not make proper grammatical sense, as if the writer was rushing to get everything written down.

"Climb the leaf to the stripes beside the metallic sunset and honeycombs," he mutters under his breath. What the hell is this? It's characteristic of manual encryption… but I've never heard of this method before.

Jeremie spends an hour "reading" through the nonsense in an attempt to sort through it, until he reaches the end of the notebook. What he sees chills him to the bone. Written down in plain, unencrypted, capital letters are the words:

IN SHORT, X.A.N.A. CAN NOT BE

TRULY DEFEATED WITHOUT

THE RECALCITRANCE CODE!

And just beneath it are two signatures, one of which very obviously belongs to the late Franz Hopper, the genius behind Lyoko's existence. The other signature is unfamiliar and not legible.

The second signature means one of two things: either it belongs to Aelita's mother, which is unlikely, or someone else in France is just as aware of the Supercomputer as the Lyoko Warriors are.