Episode Three : Necessary Crimes

Soundtrack: Supertramp's "From Now On" (Just 'cause it fits…)

Chapter One: Conspiracy

Welcome, again, to the cafeteria, where oblivious students are enjoying Sunday afternoon for the third time. A blonde-haired journalist finished her notes with a flourish, tucking her pen behind her ear and rubbing her head before wandering off, trailing two junior reporters in her wake. She looked… distant. Her pink shirted interviewee stared after her for a moment, then gestured to her cronies and also headed out, looking equally distant and vaguely furious. The sussurus rose and fell, hundreds of students blissfully unaware of how many times this day had been relived discussing absolutely nothing, blanketing the cafeteria…

…But never touching a knot of three students sitting at the end of one long, white table, eating their lunches with some caution. The only one enjoying his almost-certainly-food was a purple clad boy with improbably spiked blonde hair; the serious looking boy next to him was pushing something that might have been meat around with his fork, and the pink-haired girl across the table, having already donated her food to the cause of her friend's stomach, sat staring into space.

Gradually, her eyes focused on the blonde who was rapidly shoveling food into his mouth, and she smiled. "Well, the download worked – I remember everything about you, Odd."

He looked up, swallowed, and asked with melodramatic horror: "Everything? Oh no! Don't tell Ulrich about the time when…" he glanced at the brown-haired boy next to him, ostentatiously put a finger to his lips.

The pink haired girl giggled. "Well, as much as I knew in the first place. I'm sure there are things I don't want to know. But I can't believe I thought Sissi was one of us!" She rose and walked with her empty tray to a garbage can; the two boys followed.

"Mistakes happen to everyone," Odd reassured her. "Believe it or not, Her Royal Pinkness wound up being helpful for once. What made Jeremie decide to return to the past so quickly?" The group began walking towards the exit.

"Sissi, what else?" Ulrich replied with some scorn, "but Yumi was the one who pushed the button. Aelita and I had just come up from the scanner rooms."

Aelita pushed open the cafeteria doors. A crisp autumnal breeze hit her face, and she breathed deeply, relishing the feel and scent after a bout in the largely sensationless world of Lyoko. "I'm not a member of Sissi's fan club either," Odd was saying in his nasal voice, "But why did she do that?"

"Because the debate was pointless," Ulrich explained, "We depend completely on trust, and Sissi doesn't know the meaning of the word. She's nice enough when she's trying to get… something, and she's helpful when it saves her own skin, but she can never be friends with anyone. She would call in the authorities to shut down the supercomputer even if it meant killing Aelita. The only thing Sissi care about is Sissi."

On a park bench just within earshot, a girl with long, shiny black hair and a pink shirt sat listening, growing redder and redder with each word.

"Wow, Ulrich," Odd was saying as the trio rounded a large metal structure, "You really have a deep understanding of Yumi's psyche."

The girl gritted her teeth and clenched her hands into fists. "Is that what they think? Ooo, I hate them!"

The boy sitting next to her, orange-haired and thuggish, grunted. "Want me to…"

"No. I'll find out what they're up to – they can't keep me out forever!"

"Tell me about it," said a cynical voice behind her. A blonde-haired girl with a slim black choker and a pen behind one ear was leaning on the back of the bench. Oh, that annoying reporter – Kloe something.

"What are you doing here?" Sissi accused.

"Same as you. Trying to crack the code of Mystery Group over there," Kloe something replied, pointing vaguely towards where the three had last been visible. "Seems to me they shut everyone out."

Sissi shook her head. "Only people who aren't losers," she responded shrilly. "That Aelita got in five minutes after she transferred from Canada. They know I'm too good for them-" she preened "-but you should fit right in."

Kloe had just conducted an entire interview with Sissi and was beginning to realize you had to take anything the principal's daughter said with a grain of salt. "Interesting… I just feel like there's something I should know about them!"

Sissi pouted. "I know they're hiding something."

"I think we should try to find out what," the reporter said firmly. The two girls looked at each other with the intensity of a staring contest. Kloe blinked first; Sissi stuck out a hand to shake.

"Deal."

- - - -

Aelita, Ulrich, and Odd entered the neatly manicured woods near the school in silence, but Odd wasn't one to let that state persist. "So, I had a novel idea. Provided XANA's finally gonna give us a break, maybe I'll do my homework."

"You? Do your homework? I think I'm going to faint from the shock," Ulrich deadpanned.

"What, Odd didn't do his homework?" Offered a new voice. It belonged to a bespectacled blond boy walking towards them. "Why am I not surprised?"

"Nice to see you too, Jeremie," said Odd, crossing his arms over the dog logo on his shirt. "How go things at the secret lab?"

"Well, I was trying to figure out why the scipazoa got part of Aelita's memory, since it's never done anything like that before. I thought maybe it had an isolating program fragment allowing partial file retrieval, but when I ran my XMP scan I found some weird programming ghosts on the return to the past…" He broke off at a trio of blank stares.

"English, please?" Begged Odd, "We don't speak technobabble."

"Uh…" Jeremie marshaled his resources. "Well, when you have a dynamic program – that's one that changes itself – sometimes you start getting artifacts. Little mistakes. In the code. But if enough of those build up, it starts looking like a personality. A ghost."

"Like XANA?" Ulrich ventured boldly.

"Well, that might explain how XANA went bad. But more importantly, our back in time program has gone temperamental on us. Theoretically, the only thing that should be returned to the past is our memory and anything within Lyoko. To the rest of the world, it never happened," Jeremie lectured. He had begun to walk back towards the school at this point: his friends trailed behind him with various degrees of puzzlement. "But until I clean out the ghosts, it might not work that way."

The dormitories reared up before them. Standing by the entrance was a tall, blocky woman in the uniform of a police officer; the strolling quartet failed to notice. "What does that mean for us?" Asked Ulrich.

"Well," Jeremie began, "I don't know whether it's becoming more or less discriminating, but given Aelita's experience, I'm going to assume less. Some effects might eventually include injuries not healing, other people working closely with us retaining some memory, objects we effect staying affected… I'm not sure how long it's been going on, but the corruption is progressive. It's going to take me days to straighten out."

"Oh." The four walked in glum silence towards the school.

"Maybe I should-" Ulrich began, but was cut off by the crisp, militant voice of the hitherto unnoticed police officer.

"Excuse me, is any of you Ulrich Stern?"

The brown haired boy looked at her with a surly expression. It took a brave person to look at this particular officer with defiance: she was tall and impressively built, with a cap of tightly curled hair and a tight-lipped, baleful expression. However, Ulrich recognized her – he had fought her when she was possessed by XANA, and if he could face down a policewoman with murderous intent and superhuman strength, he could certainly face the same policewoman when she was mostly indifferent and armed with only a glare.

"Yeah, I'm Ulrich," he told her.

She nodded. "I need to have a word with you at the precinct."