A-WHAT UP?: CHAPTER A-SEVEN!

(A/N: Scyphozoa, it looks to me like a skinny Tentacruel. Might not to you. By the way, still have no ownership of Code Lyoko or my chapter intro phrases. Or Pokémon for that Matter)

We arrive at the tower without much trouble, until the big jellyfish turned up. It vaguely resembled a skinny version of the Pokémon Tentacruel. Only with far fewer tentacles, and the eye logo thing. Being un-armed as I was, there wasn't much I could do. Odd was almost out of lazer arrows, and with no-one there to reload for him, he'd become as useless as me soon enough. Then again, I'm never useless.

The skinny Tentacruel wraps one of it's tentacles around Aelita and lifts her into the air, placing other tentacles at her temples and the centre of her forehead. I look over to Ulrich, a plan forming in my head.

"Ulrich, throw me one of your swords!" I yell.

Ulrich, thankfully, obliges and now I have a weapon again.

"Odd, you arrow its face off, Ulrich, you go at it from the left, and I'll take the right," I say, directing traffic.

Odd fires about fifty lazer arrows at the Skinny Pokémon look-alike's face thing, whilst Ulrich and I slice the bejesus out of its sides, or ribs, had the jellyfish had any.

I felt a small bump on my right shin. I cast an eye down and found that a thumb was head butting my leg. Huh, that was rather amusing. I kick the thumb away and slice off the tentacle holding Aelita.

I slide Ulrich's sword back to him and catch Aelita as the Scyphozoa drops her. I cradle her in my arms for a few moments, temporarily losing sight of the objective of the whole mission, getting lost in her partially open eyes. They were a perfect shade of emerald, as if someone had put the actual gems inside her eye sockets.

"Tai…" She says. "I have a tower to de-activate,"
"W-what?" I say, snapping out of my trance. "Oh, right, before Dom and his girlfriend get squashed by metal, concrete or glass, or, if they're unlucky, plastic,"

I set Aelita back on her feet and she runs into the tower. She punches in the code and this time, it thankfully works. The tower's aura fades from red to white and the silvery bubble starts up in the bowels of the supercomputer hard-drive. Soon the bubble envelops the factory, then Kadic, and then the base and eventually the entire planet as time reversed itself.

(Back in time)

"Well, we're out of school again, anyone want to do some stuff this time?" Dom asks.
"Ulrich and I are going to have to re-do our plans now," Yumi says.

Dom nods at Odd, their plans already mapped out.

"Well, we never saw the ending of Zombie Raiders 3," Odd says.
"You're right, maybe we will this time," Dom says to his bunkmate.

I turn to Aelita, smiling at her. She turns away from me.

'Talk about mixed signals,' I think, putting my arm around Aelita, pulling her against me. She decides to lean into the half embrace. Mixed signals again.

"So Dom, when are we gonna be properly introduced to your girlfriend?" I ask.
"Girl-what?" Dom shouts. "Oh, you mean Lyra, right?"
"That would be who I'm talking about, yes," I answer.
"When I do," He says.
"That's pretty vague," I tell Dom.
"Too bad, Tai," Dom retorts.

I laugh at that, elbowing him in the ribs, like normal, before he and Odd head away to go see the movie. Ulrich and Yumi head off towards the banks of the River Seine, the river our factory was on, though they would be a few miles upstream of it.

"Aelita, are you OK?" I ask her.
"I don't know Tai," She answers. "I have a lot of different feelings conflicting with each other at the moment,"
"Well, how about you start by telling me," I say to her. "But first, lets go somewhere more private to talk, walk with me,"
We walk together, and end up in the forest. We sit down against the trunk of a rather large and by extension, old tree.

"So Princess, tell me what's up," I say.
"Well Tai," She begins. "To start off, I really like you, but I feel the same about Jeremie, so I feel guilty for kissing you, but I want to kiss you more,"
"Anything else?" I ask, putting an arm around her again.
"Yes. I get angry at Jeremie easily because, well, how can I put this tactfully?" She says, leaning in towards me.
"He has the emotional understanding capacity of a thimble?" I offer.
"Exactly," She says gratefully. "But you Tai, you have a lot more understanding for feelings,"
"That's quite strange, considering that I've felt for while that emotions are a lost cause," I say.
"Just remember, you don't HAVE to be with me OR Jeremie," I tell her. "I'd be fine with being just your friend,"
"Thank you Tai," She says, kissing me lightly. "You've helped me out a lot,"

I move my arm from around her shoulder to around her head and pull her lips up to mine. I break off quickly, however.

I pick up my phone and look through the photos stored on it. Most of them were of parts of my Native New Zealand. Be it a big fish head in the tavern in Moeraki, or the shaped hedges in two separate locations between Christchurch and Invercargill, or even a simple shot of the front of my school in Christchurch. I eventually came across my favourite picture of all.

It was a picture of what I referred to as my Wolf Pack There was a full range of person size in the group of five, one small, one tall, one small-medium, Dom, perfectly medium and me, the large-medium. We covered the whole spectrum of person size, to say the least. We each wore Aviator sunglasses, with our names on them, though the image made this difficult to see, they were masking our eyes and making us look rather badass.

"Who are they?" I hear Aelita's soft, sweet voice asking, I had forgotten she was there.
"My friends back home, and me," I say.
"Who's who?" She asks.
"That's Alex," I say, pointing to the shortest one.
"André," I point to the skinny one, standing next to Alex.
"Dom," I point to Dom, he was in the middle.
"Me," I point to the long haired, tall-ish boy.
"And Liam," I don't bother to point, it's obvious he's the tall one.
"They look nice," Aelita says.
"They are, I miss them," I say, a hint of sadness in my voice, and slight tears welling in my eyelids.
"It's fine Tai, I understand," She says.
"It's my turn to thank you Princess, you're honestly the most amazing girl I could ever have dreamed of,"

She blushes amazingly obviously at that statement. I chuckle and lightly embrace her. I move away, close the image viewer and check the time. 3:00 pm. I stand up, pocket my phone, and fix my jacket.

"Well Princess, I've got stuff to do, you should
head home, I'll be there in half an hour or so," I say.

I walk off before she could answer me, and walk into "The Base."

It was one of the newer designed shopping centres, not disaster proofed, because of the ignorance of everybody. People think that disasters, natural or otherwise would never happen to them. I thought that too, until Christchurch got the Earthquakes.

I walked past a display of Justin Bieber merchandise. It took every fibre of my being to keep myself from kicking the cut-out over and burning the books. I swing around a large concrete pillar into a music shop.

"Next level parkour maneuver," I whisper to myself, dismounting the swing with a front flip, landing in front of the rock music section. With a substantial value of Euros in my bank, I could buy all the music I wanted. I grabbed some Metallica, Pantera, Disturbed, Anthrax, Megadeth, Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, 12 Stones, Avenged Sevenfold and Subdigitals CD's.

I pay and head back to Kadic. Not bothering to pay attention to where I was walking, I walked right into the person I was thinking of: Aelita.

"Aelita!" I exclaim.
"Tai?" She questions.
"Yes," I say.

We walk into the dorm buildings, no one, not even Jim was in sight. So we walk into room 234.

I throw my bag of CD's onto my bed and sit down on the couch. Aelita sits next to me, resting her head on my shoulder. I quickly check the time 4:57 pm, Dom and Odd would be back in little over 30 minutes, and Ulrich would be back in about an hour. So I had a while where it was just me and Aelita.

"Princess," I begin. "I want to know something,"
"Yes?" She asks.
"Do you really have that strong of feelings for me?" I ask her.
"You know, I'm pretty confused right now, but I think I might," She answers.
"True," I say.

I get up off the couch. I jump onto my bed and pull out my laptop. I had a history assignment that my teacher from Christchurch insisted I email to him. Strange thing, considering I didn't go to that school anymore. It may be because I left halfway through the assignment.

I finished the assignment, making a vague effort, and emailed it off to my teacher. He'd better appreciate that I decided to do his work, when I was in my own sea of work in France. But with a 103 GPA, it can't be too bad. I'd be done by Monday. Coincidentally, on Monday we had an optional trip to some islands in the upper Seine, forty miles from the factory. I had signed up, as had Aelita and to my surprise, Odd, Ulrich and Dom had too. That was something I didn't expect. Though I noticed that Lyra was going too, so that could have been the draw card for Dom. I WAS planning to write some more new songs, but I decided I had ages to write music.

I clambered back down and walked over to the couch.

"Aelita, are you OK?" I ask.
"Yes, Tai, I'm just going to go to bed," She answers.
"Ok,"
"Thanks for everything,"

I pull some refill pad from my desk and draw up the bars for the new song I decided to work on. I was just about finished with the epic guitar solo that would conclude the song when Dominic staggered in and dropped face first onto Odd's bed.

I decided I'd follow his lead and head to sleep. I jumped back onto my bunk, slipped into the covers, lay down my head, and thought.

My thoughts were scattered, I first thought about Aelita, but then my mind drifted to Curse of Anarchy productions; The company I ran back home that produced all my music, me and Dom's wrestling federation's DVDs and so much more. Then I drifted to my actual music, before I finally nodded off to sleep.