Wits
Jeremie plays a game against an unlikely opponent and learns more about him along the way. Episode 3 of The Reset Arc.
Disclaimer: Code Lyoko was created by Tania Palumbo and Thomas Romain. It was produced by Antefilms and then by MoonScoop. It is aired in France by France 3 and in America by Cartoon Network. The author is neither employed by or affiliated with any of the above companies or entities.
Jeremie Belpois looked over at the clock on his monitor. 12:25am. He got up from his chair, exited his room, went to the bathroom, then re-entered his room and retreated back to the safety of his leather work chair. The computer prodigy then cracked his knuckles and placed his focus once again on the large computer monitor sitting on his desk.
During this time of night, most students were either asleep or getting ready to get a good night's sleep. Their beds were vessels of safety where they could go to and feel protected while they dreamed about anything from love to adventure to what surprises the next twenty-four hours would bring to them. Sleep was always their friend and waking up every morning at a designated time to prepare for the day's lessons was something most students did not look forward to.
Jeremie was different. Ever since discovering the factory and the digital world of Lyoko, the concept of a good night's sleep was foreign to him now. The bed became a piece of furniture that was used as a makeshift chair instead of a portal to dreamland. Sleep was now an enemy as he tried to fight it off every night in order to help his causes. He enjoyed spending every waking moment that was not essential in front of his computer. First it was to save Aelita. Now it was to save William. Soon, all of these sleepless nights accompanied by nothing but the warm glow of a screen would be used to save the world.
The monitor was a screen filled with graphs, maps, charts and endless lines of code. Every single pixel of space was used to display something that was related in one way or another to the virtual world his friends fought in any time something went wrong. At this moment, everything looked nominal. No towers were activated and the graphs didn't show any monster activity. Jeremie focused his cursor on his notepad window and began to type away at more experimental code, this one designed to try and examine William's code signatures left behind during the last battle. Despite what Yumi had said, he still believed that William was not in complete control of himself. He figured that examining the code was going to be the first large step in freeing William from the grasp of the supercomputer. As Jeremie typed away, a message box popped up at the bottom of the screen.
"Shall we play a game?" it asked. Jeremie dismissed it as a random pop-up and closed it without thinking twice about it. After a few more lines of code were written, the message box popped up again.
"I would like to play a friendly game. Wouldn't you?"
Jeremie got slightly annoyed by this. "Next time, I need to monitor what sites Odd looks at," he thought to himself as he closed the window once more. As he began to run his anti-virus program, the message box appeared once more.
"Please don't make me ask again. Let us play a friendly game together."
Jeremie's annoyance grew to it's limit. He had very important work to do and this person was obviously impeding his progress. He started to run his IP scanner and readied up his own viral program. He figured that this script kiddie should learn a lesson the hard way for bothering random strangers. "Give me one good reason to do that," he typed out. Suddenly his scanner picked up activity. A tower in the forest region had just been activated. It would look like punishing the wannabe hacker would have to wait for another night. Jeremie accessed his alert program and sent out the message to everyone to get to the factory as quickly as possible. As soon as the send button was hit, however, the program crashed immediately. "Great," he thought to himself. "Time to do this the hard way." He whipped out his cellphone and began to speed dial Yumi since she would be the closest one to the factory amongst the group. Once the key was hit the phone had died. Knowing that he had just charged the device a few hours ago, he fetched his power adapter and plugged it in.
Nothing.
Realizing that things were falling apart around him, he turned around to his monitor. A new message box had appeared.
"Convinced?"