Mary was in a tower, pondering what was going on.
"Where am I?" she asked herself. Only herself because she saw no one in the tower.
"You are in a virtual world named Lyoko. You cannot get out of here because you are alone and no one can free you. I cannot do it myself," someone answered. Mary cried out, got up and looked around herself, frightened, without seeing anyone.
"Wh-who are you?" Where are you?" she asked.
"I am X.A.N.A. I am a multi-agent program which Franz Hopper created. I am here on Lyoko, but I am not strong enough to restore you. I get stronger over time and thus Return to the Past strengthens me. But no one is there to launch it anymore because Hopper virtualized himself with his daughter Aelita a couple of days ago and no one else can launch it," X.A.N.A. answered. Mary did not understand much of X.A.N.A.'s talk but something she did understand.
"You really can't do it yourself?" Mary asked.
"No," X.A.N.A. answered.
Now, ten years have passed since the previous conversation. Mary had not thought about it since then until the night she heard that she would get back to Earth during the following day. X.A.N.A. tried to stop that attempt by any means available, now with a virus. Jeremy was smarter and could go around it, but still Mary felt unsafe, for a virus even as a thought did not please her. During the night, she started to gradually get nervous but tried to calm down by thinking that if X.A.N.A. possessed someone, she would have her own Lyoko powers and weapons even on Earth against that Xanafied person. It'll be fine if I can control them as well as on Lyoko...
Soon the morning came and everyone got ready for materializing Mary and William. William was slightly nervous as well because he did not feel like facing a new series of jeers which might wait for him at school after the clone had replaced him for the last two months. Soon Jeremy contacted them and told them what to do. William went outside the tower and Jeremy materialized him; the computer genius had managed to link the boy's human DNA sequence code back to its place during the night. This materialization was slower than the usual ones, but Jeremy believed it to speed up back to normal after this as the supercomputer would not have to calculate the materialization first to make sure that nothing would happen to the materialized person due to the change.
Mary went to the center of the tower, rather restless. What if this goes wrong? Anything could happen! she worried. After William had returned to the scanner safe and sound, Jeremy executed another old program, one which had been left unused, "Code: Earth!"
Then the blond boy went to the scanner room to wait for Mary's arrival with the others. The scanner opened up and Mary appeared. She looked at her old clothes which had been stretched badly as her body had aged inside the supercomputer. Once they had been comfortable, but now they were vexingly tight. The group took the needed things from the stash so that it would look like Mary had just come to the school. Yumi lent Mary her hoodie and a skirt she never used so that she could hide her old clothes. After getting to her room, Mary could change her old clothes to the new ones Odd and Aelita had gotten from a flea market on the previous day. In order to make the things go faster at Kadic, Jeremy had dealt with the necessary arrangements to get the girl there already.
Of course, Mary was nervous; after all, she had never been to school. Aelita did her best to help her get on with it, knowing from experience how she felt. She hoped that her fellow would be able to avoid the pitfalls she had fallen to back in the day.
As she got to the lessons right away, Mary joined an unknown crowd – a completely foreign concept to her – keeping Yumi and William an arm's length away at most. She knew what to do: she would follow her fellows' example and learn from that how to blend into the crowd.
Unfortunately, all this floundered when just before the first lesson Yumi remembered that they would have a mathematics test at first.
"Oh no! I haven't studied!" William cried out.
"When would you have had the time? You were on Lyoko for almost a month and most of it under X.A.N.A.'s possession!" Mary remarked. "What do I do? I've never studied anything!"
"I'm sure it'll go well," Yumi reassured her fellows. She had not read well to the test, but she believed she would do fine.
"Easy for you to say when you've been on the lessons," William sighed. Mary nodded. They both went to the lesson with Yumi, wishing that they could launch Return to the Past from that very place and moment to get a moment of studying time. William did consider skipping the class, but as he stepped into the classroom he already knew that it would not help.
Fortunately for everyone, the test was very short, and no one did it for longer than half an hour. The teacher checked the tests right away and everyone knew their grades before leaving the classroom.
After the lesson, Odd, having heard of the test, asked, which grade everyone had gotten.
"I got 8+," Yumi told, quite satisfied.
"7-. I thought I'd flunk!" William answered. When it was Mary's turn to answer, Jeremy's laptop beeped at a very favorable time. Jeremy exclaimed from behind the screen, "An active tower in the Forest Sector!"
They left to the factory and from there to Lyoko. This time, there were Hornets at the tower. The Lyoko Warriors attacked, and everyone took hits, but only William got devirtualized. Aelita went to the tower, entered the Code Lyoko and deactivated the tower. Mission accomplished.
"Hey Mary, which grade did you get?" Odd questioned in the scanner room. "X.A.N.A. attacked before you got to answer!"
"9. The topic was one I've learned on Lyoko," Mary noted. Only William truly knew something about her time on Lyoko and she had asked him to keep his knowledge as a secret. She trusted her friend's word.
Everything was fine and gradually Mary started to adjust into the double life as a student at Kadic and a Lyoko Warrior. No one could suspect, let alone imagine, that she had never been to school before or that she carried powers from another world. She looked just as normal as Aelita, who was a decade older than them all, William, who had been possessed by an AI, and the other Lyoko Warriors, none of whom had been a normal youngster ever since the first time they had stepped on Lyoko. While she had been shocked to find out that her sense of time had failed with nearly two and a half years – making her already 17 years old instead of just barely 15 years – she decided to get on with it and act like she had never thought otherwise.
But X.A.N.A. was not planning to give up. Fortunately to the world, the same applied to the group of Lyoko Warriors which was now two warriors stronger.
After seeing the AI's destruction, Mary saw with her mind's eye a world without danger, a world which they had had for a short while. That was a world without X.A.N.A., and someday they would get it back. She wanted to be sure about that.
Now she was a full-blood Lyoko Warrior now and she knew her mission.
/Code Lyoko (c) Moonscoop, Lyokostar story series and its original characters (c) Me/
