Excuse the short chapter. I'm just trying to keep the story updated. Enjoy.
Aelita was beginning to get worried. The group had made almost no progress, and there had been no new stuff on the news about the hospital on the local news channel responsible for initial coverage of the incident. Although, there was one upside. The avatar hadn't been as uncontrollable as Aelita had previously thought. Since Jeremie never was one for videogames, he had made the user interface as easy to navigate as possible. This helped, but it was still a little more difficult than Aelita had expected it would be. Then, all of a sudden, an idea popped into Aelita's head. "Hey, what if we go into Sector 5? We might be able to find something there that can help us understand what's going on here," she said. "Anything to get out of this mess," Yumi said, who was currently pinned down behind a rock. Ulrich was trying to get her out of there, and responded with a quick "Sure, let's do it." Odd was busy clearing the tower of Tarantulas and said, "Yeah, let's go. This was getting boring anyway."
Jeremie couldn't believe the mess he was in. He should've known this would happen. Especially with what was going on now, there was NO way this should've happened. He couldn't believe how much of an idiot he had been. For the love of God, forgetting to hit the walk button had to have been the worst possible thing he could've done. And now, because X.A.N.A was an opportunist, he had been captured. Great. He couldn't even sleep now because of it. The pain in his arm had been getting steadily worse since he had woken up too. He had a slight feeling in his stomach. It told him he probably wasn't going to make it through the night. He pushed the feeling aside. His friends would come through for him.
The Lyoko warriors had never been more overwhelmed. In Sector 5, after leaving the Arena, they had been attacked twice, and the rooms had changed 3 times in the course of their excursion there. Yumi and Ulrich were pinned down in the now cavernous room they were in. The avatar turned out to be ineffective, as it too had life points, as Aelita had figured out the hard way. Since the avatar had been deactivated, Aelita came to Lyoko, but was promptly devirtualized. X.A.N.A had remained silent since taking the hospital over. This scared everyone, because they now all thought that X.A.N.A had no intention of giving Jeremie back to them.
As they pushed on, the found that instead of just one, several towers had been activated; 7 to be precise. The only two they could currently assess were the two in Sector 5, however. It seemed like X.A.N.A was trying to focus energy to put a ghost inside a Lyoko warrior, but no one could really understand why, or tell for sure. But this was scary in it's own way. " X.A.N.A was never meant to improvise like this," Aelita said, "What could he possible want to do with putting a ghost inside Jeremie? He could already end him if he wanted to," she finished. She was talking to herself, and never really expected a response.
During her time at the factory, Aelita had tweaked the virtualization program to allow her to edit memory blocks of the supercomputer. The one's she targeted specifically were of course, her friend's life points. To the slight dismay of the other Lyoko warriors, this now meant that any one Lyoko warrior could stay in Lyoko as long was as necessary, as long as you had enough time and life points to wait for the "heal".
No one was thrilled when Aelita announced what time it was. It was 2 in the morning. Unfortunately, a return to the past would be necessary to avoid any and all questions about their absences. Aelita wasn't entirely sure if it was a good idea though, because she wasn't sure if X.A.N.A's power increase scaled with the amount of time that was turned back. She expected it to be a long trip, because everyone had agreed that they should return to the point prior to Jeremie's accident, which was 4 days ago. She really couldn't argue with that logic.
Suddenly, she hatched a plan. It involved a lot of risk, and opening a hole into the real world for X.A.N.A. Nothing like this had ever been attempted, and would likely blast a hole in modern physics. She would have to make preparations. Overcoming the Heisenberg uncertainty principle(again) and the aufbau principle would be nearly impossible. She had to find a way to get in contact with Jeremie. That was going to be a challenge in and of itself. However, it was a safe bet that X.A.N.A hadn't encrypted the data stream in Sector 5 (for obvious reasons) so they might be able to get in to the ghost which was currently holding Jeremie hostage. She couldn't let anyone else know about the plan either, or X.A.N.A might pick up what they were doing and try to break into their own data stream.
Yumi was getting close to being devirtualizd, and was healed. "Thanks Aelita," she said, "Odd needs a reload too," she finished. Aelita had found an old macro program, and had assigned the reloading and healing programs to their own keys. Things seemed to be going well, as far as pushing the one tower in Sector 5. "Time to being preparing, I suppose," she thought to herself. She spoke with a bit of hesitance, "Yumi, I have an idea on how to contact Jeremie. But you need to go to the Celestial Dome to collect some data for me. It's possible that we can control the ghost, as long as I can get Terran control of one tower," she finished, slightly out of breath. "Yeah, I can do that," Yumi agreed.