As I've stated on my profile, updates will be delayed due to wedding plans and a few other real life things. However, I know I owe you guys the second half of the last chapter - despite it being a bit short, it does have a lot of information.
Enjoy.
The whooshing sound of the wind tunnel that was the scanner filled Tianna's ears as she fell forwards, onto the floor of the scanner room. Next to her, the sound of the scanner that contained Ulrich whined as it prepared to release him; she panicked, and sent an orb of electricity into the scanner door. It halted with only a small inch open, and she heard him banging on the door as he regained his bearings. She dropped her hand and coughed as the after-effects of a forced devirtualization hit her.
I'm here. The warriors are here. Jeremy might call the others back, now. I need to get out of here before they see my human form. Her initial human panic faded slightly as logic kicked in, and she pushed her weakened body up. Ulrich continued to bang on the scanner doors as she moved to the elevator and hit the button.
Cameras. I need to take care of the cameras. She gathered what remained of her strength and slammed her electrically charged fist into the metal wall. The currents sought out the camera feeds and shorted them; she rested her forehead against the cool metal of the elevator door. Forced devirtualization made the stored information of her human form rush to compensate, and it had nasty after-effects on her strength.
The elevator came just as Ulrich began to push the scanner door open. She stepped in and punched in her destination as the ground floor. As she rested against the back of the elevator, she heard it grind to a stop only a few floors later. She cursed as her fist connected with the metal; Jeremy or Hopper had stopped it. Looking up, she spotted the small opening on the ceiling, and she sighed. Quickly, she crouched down and sprung up; she slid the trapdoor open and hoisted herself up.
As she began climbing up the ladder, she heard someone thump into the elevator. They're following me? Persistent. She pushed herself faster up the ladder as she heard someone climbing after her. The main floor of the factory came into view as light filtered down the elevator shaft. It was tinged orange – the sun was setting, she noted. All the more better. I can lose whoever is chasing me much easier once it's dark out. With that, she ran; whoever was following her likely only saw a wisp of hair as she sprinted away.
With Boulogne-Billancourt's many small streets and their habit of crisscrossing diagonally, Tianna thought losing her tail would be easy. She was wrong. On one of her turns, she confirmed her chaser was, indeed, Ulrich, who had apparently forcibly pushed the scanner open to follow her. He did not seem as weary as she did; she was consistently tripping and stumbling, which made her lose more and more ground.
Eventually, she rounded into an alleyway and crouched below a dumpster. The dirty wet snow seeped into her shoes and jeans, and she shivered as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Ulrich's footsteps echoed down the wet sidewalk, before they halted to a stop. It was silent, and she tensed. If he comes down this alley…. The footsteps started back up again, and they came closer, quicker.
The moment his figure came into view, she sprung forward and barreled into him. One elbow dug sharply under his ribs, while the other plastered over his face and slammed it sharply into the opposite stone wall. He grunted in surprise, before he slumped forward. She did not back up until she was sure he was truly unconscious; then she stepped back and ran a hand through her hair.
"Good work, Tianna. You captured a warrior and you don't have a way to feasibly bring him to X.A.N.A. yet." She ran a hand down her face. "What will you do now?"
—
With a beautiful array of colors, the sun rose the next morning. Tianna sat, curled up in a chair and wearing comfortable sweats, with a cup of coffee in one hand. She had not slept the entire night, despite how weak she felt. Instead she had spent the night staring at the LYOKO warrior on her sofa, sleeping off the electric shock she had dealt to him after she had dragged him back to her apartment.
She had yet to decide what to do with him; part of her knew she should bring him to X.A.N.A., but the other part rationalized her desire not to by bringing to her attention the danger, and the trouble, of turning two warriors. Yet it left her with the peculiar situation of Ulrich Stern being unconscious in her apartment, and how that could end terribly. Her lips thinned, and she drained the remnants of her coffee.
Dragging Sam through the digital sea had not bothered her, but imagining the rest of the warriors – her friends, once – finding the same fate stirred a strange feeling inside of her. Guilt? She had pondered it for most of the night, as she drained her coffee supply.
Contrary to Jeremy's original belief, the scanners were anything but safe. Going to LYOKO turned humans into programs, and while it allowed one to easily switch between the two, it messed with the human side. The molecular structure changed, ever so slightly with repeated changes; it became a projection of the digital form's program, rather than the mortal form being the prominent form. The process was similar to how return trips strengthened X.A.N.A. – every transfer shifted the dominant form to the growing digital file.
Once one went to the digital sea, however, the transition was complete. The human projection was deleted, and the program took precedence as the files were scattered around the internet. Franz Hopper had been the first victim of it, before he had understood what was going on. Her previous journeys, before X.A.N.A. had taken back control, had allowed her to gather his fragments and piece him back together to recreate his human projection. A harmless replica, created unknowingly when Jeremy had done a similar process for Yumi when she had fallen, became the powerhouse to continuously keep their human projections up without interference from X.A.N.A.. William's program, from when she had brought him back, also resided there. Even a back-up of her human projection was stored there.
She told herself that the warriors had purposely chosen a path that could include harm, and they should be prepared for if she dragged them through the digital sea and destroyed the remnants of her humanity. It did not make her feel any better, and she scowled at the unconscious Ulrich. He was her latest reminder of the internal war that she, ultimately, had no control of. She distinctly remembered X.A.N.A. overriding her programming the last time he reined her in under his clutches.
Without much of a notice – partially due to her lack of attention – her front door slammed open. She jumped to her feet after a moment of surprise, though she wobbled on her feet from her lack of sleep. The LYOKO warriors – Yumi and William, at least – sprung through her door in fighting stances, followed by Odd and Aelita in weaker attack stances. She could see Jeremy, and oddly enough, Franz Hopper in the hallway.
"What's going on?" she asked, in genuine surprise.
"He's over there!" Yumi gasped, and pointed to Ulrich, before she ran to his side. "Ulrich!"
William's brows furrowed at the reaction, and seemed particularly perturbed that it was Yumi. Tianna filed it away for further consideration, but her focus remained at the curious glances she was receiving from the rest of the group.
"Amelia?" Aelita blinked in surprise. "What are you doing here?"
"Careful, Aelita, she could be—" Jeremy was cut off by Tianna.
"What are you doing in my home?" she snapped, annunciating each word.
"We were looking for our friend," Yumi replied, and turned back to face her. "Jeremy was able to track his cell. What is he doing here?"
Hopper's gaze seemed particularly calculating as he watched her, and she ever-so-slightly shrunk back towards her chair.
"I found him in the alley between my building and the one next door, on my way home from work. He was unconscious." The lies flowed from her quite naturally, at that point. "He'd have gotten hypothermia if I left him there, so I dragged him back here."
"Is he okay?" Yumi asked at the same time Jeremy asked, "And you didn't think to take him to the hospital?"
She bit her bottom lip for a moment as the lies continued to form. "My mother is a doctor. She works nightshift – we came here from America, you see, so she could take an advanced neurology program here. Had her check him out before she left for the night. Figured it would be… cheaper."
"Oh." Some of the warriors seemed to lose their confrontational nature as Yumi pressed again, "Is he okay?"
She nodded. "My mother said he just had some bruising to the stomach, and very, very light head trauma. She told me to let him sleep it off and just to keep an eye on him. He shouldn't do anything too exerting."
"Well, thank you." Yumi sighed, and collapsed on the ground next to the sofa.
"Did you see anyone else, when you found him?" Aelita asked. "Out of curiosity."
"No, no one." Tianna shook her head, before she regarded them with a raised eyebrow. "Is everything okay?"
"Fine," Jeremy replied, rather quickly. "We were just worried, since he didn't come back to Kadic last night."
"Oh. It's just that, well you brought all these people – even an adult. Should I have called the police, or something? I thought he'd just been roughed up."
"I'm Aelita's father," Hopper clarified, as he stepped forward. "They came to me, and we were going to do what we could before we got the police involved."
She shrunk back just a bit more. "I see. You guys are welcome to take him back, if you want. Just bring him to the hospital if his condition worsens. But, uh… do you guys mind leaving my apartment?" She shot them an annoyed – if a bit angry – look.
"Of course. Thanks again, for the help." Aelita began herding them out, with Odd and Yumi carefully helping Ulrich out of the apartment.
Tianna tapped her foot as they left, and closed the door behind them after they murmured their thanks once more. She pressed her ear to the door, and heard the beginnings of an argument on whether or not she seemed suspicious amongst the warriors. With a wince, she crawled onto the once-occupied sofa and dragged her laptop from the coffee table to her lap. Before she passed out, she hacked the nearest hospital's records and made a "Doctor Henson, Neurologist" exist on paper.
I'm likely going to retire this series after this story, as I finally have finished planning out the rest of this story. However, I am considering doing something if season five inspires me enough to create a sequel series (since I have invested so much time in Tianna and the characters here). Let me know your thoughts in reviews.