Allow me to explain. The lovely Lasthero13 of deviantART offered to illustrate my Star Wars fanfiction, so I told her that if she ever needed a favor or six, she should come to me. Hero asked me to upload her Code Lyoko fanfiction to my account so that more people would see it. I agreed, mostly because it's well-written and engages the reader. Please direct all praise and criticism to Hero—here's a URL for the first chapter in its original location: gallery/35038497#/d4o1n0u
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A loud knocking startled Aurora Ishiyama out of her music-induced trance.
Her eyes fluttered open, and for a moment, she was content just to listen to the current song pounding in her headphones. Reluctantly, she sat up when the knocking continued, abandoning all hope of returning anytime soon to the half-awake, half-asleep state that she had attained.
She pulled the headphones off of her ears and switched them off just in time to hear her Aunt Kana call, "I'll get it," and walk towards the door. Not that she had to go very far; the apartment was depressingly small.
"Hello?"
Aurora stood up.
"Mrs. Ishiyama, we're here to speak with your niece."
She blinked, surprised. The voice was gruff, male, and spoke Japanese awkwardly, with some sort of European accent. She couldn't imagine why anyone like that would want to talk with her.
Deciding that she had better go take a look, Aurora slid open the door. She didn't even have to move from where she was standing on top of her sleeping mat to do it.
Haruka, her younger cousin, poked her head out of the tent that she had made out of blankets. The sides were bulging; Aurora wondered idly how many dolls she had in there.
"What's going on?" she asked. Her dark hair was pulled into a pair of messy pigtails, as per usual.
"I don't know," Aurora answered, stepping into the hall. She noticed that one of her other cousins, Takamoto, was leaning out of the room that he shared with Haruka's twin brother. He ran his fingers through his short hair and shot her a glare, which she ignored. Their enmity was hardly news anymore.
"Why would anyone want to talk to you?" he hissed. Aurora shook her head. She was just as curious as he was.
With a glance towards the front room, he mouthed "Good luck" at her with a sarcastic smile, then pulled a curious Daisuke (his younger brother) back into the room as he closed the door.
Taking a deep breath, Aurora walked down the hall.
There were two men, squeezed uncomfortably into the small front room with Aunt Kana. They looked European, and both wore suits and sunglasses, even though it was dark outside.
"Aurora Ishiyama?" one asked. Aurora nodded, suddenly aware that she was wearing shorts, an overlarge T-shirt, and little else.
"You're the daughter of the late Yumi Ishiyama and William Dunbar, right?" the second man added.
She just looked at him. It hurt to hear them call her mother "late." Yes, she was missing...but no hard evidence pointing to her death had ever been found. So there was a definite chance that she was still alive. Even after fourteen years.
"I'll take that as a yes." The man turned to Aunt Kana. "Mrs. Ishiyama, I'm afraid your niece will have to come with us."
"What? Why?" Aunt Kana exclaimed. She sounded as shocked as Aurora felt. "She hasn't done anything wrong, has she?"
She tossed an accusatory glace at her niece, as if suspecting that she broke the law regularly in her spare time.
"No, she hasn't," he replied. "Please, ma'am, don't make this any more difficult than it has to be."
"You can't just take a fourteen-year-old girl with no warning, that's illegal! It's called kidnapping. Just wait until my husband gets home, he'll-"
"Mrs. Ishiyama, we are with a division of the French armed forces known as A.R.O.D.S.," the man said, pronouncing it "Air-odds" and flashing a badge as he switched effortlessly into French. Evidently, his knowledge of Japanese only went so far. "We have permission from your government to take Aurora Ishiyama through any means necessary. Including, but not limited to, force."
His partner had produced a very thin holoscreen, presumably with some sort of pardon from the prime minister on it, and handed it to Aunt Kana. She scanned it rapidly, then looked up at the two men, white-faced. They nodded in unison.
"This..." she whispered, "this...can't be true...you found a-Yumi was-"
"I'm sorry, you don't have clearance to discuss that outside of the confines of a limited number of buildings," the man said, taking the screen back. "Now, if you don't mind, we are on a very tight schedule."
Aunt Kana swallowed hard several times, trying to come to terms with whatever she had read. Meanwhile, Aurora's imagination went wild.
They had found something. What? And what did her mother have to do with it? It had to be important, for the government to authorize them virtually kidnapping her. Maybe it was some sort of weapon, built by an international terrorist organization, and it could only be activated by Yumi's DNA, and Aurora was genetically similar to her...no. Maybe Yumi was a spy, and they wanted to train her to take her mother's place. No, that wasn't it either. Her mind rapidly clicked through a variety of possibilities, each more unlikely than the previous one.
The case had opened back up? Her dad had risen from the dead as a vampire? Aliens?
As she was considering the possibility that she might not be entirely human, Aunt Kana spoke.
"Aurora, go get your things," she said, her voice unusually high and her eyes still fixed on the men.
Snapping out of her creative trance, Aurora realized that she was probably expected to protest here, say something about how there was no way that she would leave with two complete strangers, but oddly enough, her body seemed to be moving on its own, back to her room, where she started packing.
She didn't take much. Her clothes, her art supplies, her antique fans from the feudal period, which she couldn't bear to leave behind. Her music, of course. A rather blurry picture in a dented frame, of a man and a woman holding a baby.
Aurora also changed into a more practical outfit-a button-down sleeveless shit with a tie, a skirt, and boots. She was aware of Haruka's eyes on her the whole time.
"Aurora, where are they taking you?" the little girl burst out, crawling out of her makeshift tent. When her cousin only wordlessly shook her head, she burst into tears and flung herself into her arms.
As she held Haruka close and whispered for her to be strong, Aurora's eyes strayed around the room. One half covered in posters and drawing, the other holding her cousin's shelves of stuffed animals. It wasn't a room, really. More like a closet. Their sleeping mats were right next to each other, and Haruka had a habit of kicking. Which, now that she was about to leave her, seemed like much more of an endearment than an annoyance.
When the younger girls sobs had become hiccups, Aurora gave her one last squeeze and stood up. Haruka told her that she would miss her, but she could only nod in return. She felt strangely numb all over, and unable to speak. Unable to really think, even. Her mind felt like she was dreaming. Yes, that's what this was. A dream. She had fallen asleep while listening to her music, and now she was dreaming.
What would a secret division of the French military want with me, anyway?
Haruka was holding a stuffed animal out and saying something with a watery smile, but Aurora ignored her. It was just a dream. Picking up the suitcase and backpack that she had managed to fill, she walked back out into the hall.
Aunt Kana had been talking to the men in a low voice (something about a "unique genetic sequence" and "for the good of mankind"-Aurora was surprised at the scope of her imagination), but she fell silent when her niece approached. She no longer looked quite as shell-shocked, which Aurora supposed was a good thing, but she didn't really care. It was just a dream.
Her aunt hugged her tightly and whispered, "Good luck, Aurora-chan," then let go of her. The next thing she knew, she was in the dark hallway outside standing between the two men. Maybe she should have been upset that the woman who had raised her was resigned to her leaving with a couple of strangers, but it didn't matter. It was just a dream.
Outside, she decided the push the limits of this world that she had created in her subconscious.
"Where are you taking me?" Aurora asked in French. She had taken the language at school, along with English, and had evidently brought it with her into the depths of her sleeping mind.
One of her escort glanced at her, the numerous lights of the city reflecting off of his dark glasses. She had the strangest feeling that if she were to reach up and pull them off of his face, there wouldn't be anything behind them.
"Would you believe me if I told you that you're going to save the world?" the man asked.
She suppressed a laugh, because she was sure that it would come out far more hysterical than she wanted it to. Which annoyed her. This was nothing but a dream.
"No."
"I didn't think so. Come on."
Following the two men through a startlingly realistic Tokyo, Aurora realized that she was scared of these men. No, more than that. Terrified. The feelings that they invoked in her...horror, impending doom, and some other third thing that screamed at her to run in the other direction because she was a girl in a story, being taken to a monster in order to satisfy its hunger. But she shook it off.
It was just a dream.