Sissi sat on a bench in the quad. She looked at the door of the school building, waiting for the door to open. She looked down at her watch then looked up again to see the door swing open and Odd come through it.

"So how did it go?" she asked.

Odd shrugged. "Not as bad as I thought," he said. "He only gave me a month of detention."

"Well, it could have been worse," she said, smiling a bit to break the tension.

Odd nodded. "He still hates me, but yeah, it's not so bad." Both of them laughed uncomfortably before they fell silent. Each of them looked at each other, waiting for the other to break that silence. Finally, Sissi decided she would be the one to say anything.

"Um, hey, Odd... I've been thinking."

"Yeah," Odd said, anticipating what was next.

"We both approached this whole thing the wrong way. I mean, I share a lot of the blame, but I think we both messed up when we decided to do this. If we ever did this again, I know I would do it differently."

"Um... so what are you saying?" he asked. In the pit of his stomach, he felt that the stunt he pulled earlier might have backfired on him. He was prepared for the consequences and also for Jeremie to initiate a return trip to the past.

Sissi smiled. "I'm saying we start over."

"Start over?" Odd's eyes widened. He was hoping things would work out but he never really expected it to happen.

"Start over," she confirmed. "I want to have a normal relationship. No secrets. No lies. No hiding. Just you and me making the best of everything we have before us."

Odd nodded in agreement. "Well, then, I know the perfect way to start over." He grabbed Sissi's hand and led her towards the dorms.

The Lyoko gang sat in Jeremie's room engaging in some random conversation when they heard a knock on the door. Aelita got up and opened it. Everyone was surprised to see Sissi and Odd standing out in the hallway holding hands.

"Hey, everyone," Odd addressed his group of friends. "I want you to meet my girlfriend Elisabeth."

Author's Notes

Welcome to Story #4, by far the largest and longest fic I have written thus far. After putting down a general fic, a character driven fic and a fluffy fic with a theme attached to it, I decided to go for a romantic comedy. By far, this is one of the most popular genres for Code Lyoko on the site. To get an idea of how crowded of a genre this is let's keep a few stats in mind. As of this writing, there are 3,683 stories up on the site for Code Lyoko. With 25 stories displayed per page, you have 144 pages of fics to go through that span all genres and ratings. If you simply whittle it down to the subject of romance, there are 80 pages to go through. This equates to 1988 stories that deal with romance one way or another. As you can see, competition for this genre is fierce and it is a very popular genre to work with. Without further ado, here are the big issues from the writing process for this story.

-Coincidence: First it was "All Hallow's Eve" unknowingly ripping from another fic entitled "A Halloween Dance." Now, as I'm writing my Author's Notes section, I come to find out that this fic unknowingly rips from episode 46 of the series entitled "Deja Vu." I haven't seen these episodes in a long time and I really don't remember this one. So, thanks to lack of research, I had to put some last minute rewrites on the fic so that this seemed like something that would plausibly happen without ignoring the official canon episodes. Nothing big but meaningful nonetheless.

-Couples: The biggest disagreements among the fans is which characters should hook up. This is especially true for Odd who is notorious for going after any and every girl in the series. I picked Sissi because I don't feel like investing the time and energy into creating an original character for the sole purpose of hooking her up with Odd. I also picked Sissi because they seem to hate each other so much. This is usually a perfect recipe for a couple in a romantic comedy. You can get an equal amount of humor and mush from that type of pairing. Knowing that some people don't care too much for that couple, I did make sure to sprinkle the story with other pairings so that the world would seem alive and that the world will no just revolve on the spotlight couple.

-Length: Story length is always important. You don't want to shortchange the reader with a really deep plot that has little to no detail to it. At the same time, you don't want to make the story too long by adding artificial depth to it. It's a tricky thing to handle and, hopefully, I'm getting a handle on it. This is a damn long story, though, clocking in at 51 pages in OpenOffice. By comparison, "Writer's Block" came in at 11 pages while "Wits" and "All Hallow's Eve" came in at 10 pages each.

-References: First off, I have no concrete plans on whether or not most of my fics are going to be part of one big interconnected story arc. In the off chance that I do plan to do that, however, I made sure that there would be little bits in each fic that would reference previous ones or becomes references I future ones. In this case, the only reference made is when Jeremie tells Odd that he almost lost his hearing the last time he let Odd use his computer. In case you were wondering, this was a reference to "Wits" where the volume on the headphones was so loud that XANA's voice almost blew out Jeremie's mind... literally.

So that's it. I hope you enjoyed this fic as much as the previous ones, if not more. The same deal as before. Reviews are nice, criticism is welcome if it's constructive and flames will be put out by the fire department. I don't know what the next fic will be or how long it will be. One thing for sure, however, is that I will be doing heavy research on it to avoid the near-fatal mistakes from the last two fics.