"Pix, you're gonna get in Kai's car with me?" Lloyd asked when they got ready for the way home later in the afternoon.
"Uhm ..." Kai began hesitantly.
Cole grinned. "Lloyd, you really think he wants an AI monitoring his way of driving and commenting on his carelessness regarding speed limits and traffic rules?"
Lloyd snickered and Kai opened his mouth to utter a sharp reply, but Jay cut him off.
"No, probably not," he smirked and turned to Pixal. "I bet you'd rather get a ride with Snake Jaguar anyway, right?"
Pixal gave a slight smile and glanced at Zane, who already sat on his bike.
"This might be the preferred option for all of us," she agreed, appearing somewhat absent-minded.
"Sure, come with me," Zane smiled back and made room for her to mount behind him.
"Take care of him, Pix," Nya remarked before she got into the car with Jay. "We don't want him to be attacked and shut down in the middle of nowhere again."
"I'll do my best," Pixal promised. "But I can't see why we should get into trouble. No need to prepare an intensive care bench at the hangar."
Her tone was casual, but Zane knew what she had gone through when the ninja had found him after his duel with Mr. E. He also knew that Pixal – wrongly – blamed herself for having been caught unawares when the Mechanic attacked the two of them and abducted Zane to power Unagami's portal. No, they never wanted to repeat either of these experiences.
"I'll be right behind you, just in case," Cole tossed in. "You won't get to play a double game and leave me behind this time."
Zane flashed him a good-humored smile. "Understood, Rocky Dangerbuff."
The sun was shining for once, the road was almost completely dry, and Pixal turned out to be right: no villain tried to interfere in any way with their journey home. Zane thoroughly enjoyed the ride with Pixal behind him, feeling the warmth of her body against his back and her arms wrapped around his waist.
When they arrived at the monastery, the two bikers pushed their vehicles into the hangar. Cole took the elevator to meet the other ninja upstairs, while Zane went to look for Pixal. She had remained outside and absent-mindedly gazed at the scenery at the foot of the mountain.
She startled when Zane put a hand on her shoulder, and he apologized.
"I am sorry. You seem preoccupied?"
She gave him a thoughtful look. "I can't stop thinking about that second billiard ball the Dartfrogs were after. It must have been right under our nose. Dareth and Gayle had it with them while they were at the Plaza."
"But it was not there anymore today," Zane pointed out. He had given the matter some thought as well, always arriving at the same conclusions.
"There are several possible explanations for this. To begin with, there simply may not be a second ball with a hidden memory chip. We misheard what they said in the recording, or that was not what they meant. Second, the Dartfrogs may have made a mistake, and the ball is still at Laughy's as Jay suggested. Third, the woman who snatched Gayle's bag after the news show may have been able to take the ball out and exchange it right before the police arrived. I wouldn't put it past her that she's not only a fighter, but also a skilled pickpocket. Right now, we have no way of finding out which of these theories is correct."
Pixal sighed. "No, probably not. But the whole affair just … bothers me."
"Why?" Zane gently cupped her cheek with his hand. The rays of the afternoon sun warmed his face and made her hair sparkle, and the view over Ninjago was breathtakingly beautiful. He could not accept that Pixal continued to indulge in gloomy thoughts.
"Let's suppose there really is a second ball. Did you consider the possibility that it contains just a duplicate of the data we already found? A backup copy?"
"No." She briefly looked up. "This sounds … rather plausible, too," she admitted. With another sigh, she leaned against him, looking somewhat defeated.
He pulled her into a hug and brushed her forehead with his lips.
"Let's wait until we hear from your father, ok? The files on that first memory chip may tell us if there is any information missing, what kind of information that would be and where it may be hidden. Then, we will continue our search, if it proves to be necessary."
To conclude this eventful weekend, Kai and Cole suggested to play a few rounds of Ninjago Noire, an action-adventure video game that Zane had discovered during his research on historical criminal cases and private detectives. Nya and Lloyd bowed out, the former wanting to fix a minor glitch she had noticed with the Bounty's navigation system, the latter preferring a neo-noir comic magazine from Zane's newly established collection. Since Pixal was nowhere to be seen, this arrangement left Zane and Jay to play against Kai and Cole, and it did not take long before the competing teams were completely immersed in their task of solving puzzles, interrogating suspects, and fighting various criminals.
Nobody noticed when Pixal entered the room, gave the monastery's pool table a long look, and stepped behind the sofa to watch the game unfolding in grayscale on the large screen.
"Ha, we beat them again, Kai!" Cole rejoiced. "Quick, let's grab our car."
"Yeah, they'll never get to that place now that all other means of transport are either taken or destroyed," Kai snickered, while Jay furiously slammed down his game controller and gave him an angry look.
"Unfair. You're not supposed to disable the vehicles you don't use, just chose one for your team," he hissed.
"Sorry, bud, wasn't us. We just happened to, uhm, accidentally lead that nasty gang to the car pool, and you weren't fast enough getting yours out before they blew the whole place up," Cole retorted.
Zane, in the meantime, had accessed another menu and typed strings of numbers into a black field in the bottom left corner of the screen. "Ta-dah."
A hidden garage gate opened, allowing him and Jay to take possession of a brand new race car. He reached over and pressed a button on Jay's controller. "There you go. I want to see what you learned in the Speedway Five-Billion!"
"Whoa! Who said unfair before?" Kai was outraged. "Zane, you're a nindroid, but this doesn't mean you're allowed to hack into the game and program novel features yourself!"
"You are mistaken, Kai." Zane replied. "I did no such thing. That gate has always been there, you just had to find the combination to open it. I admit, though, that cracking the code may have been a bit easier for me than it would have been for you." He glanced back at the screen, where Jay's and Cole's cars almost went head to head. He smirked and nudged Jay excitedly. "Go, Jay, go!"
When Jay managed to take the lead, Zane threw his arms up in the air – and hit Pixal in the stomach with the game controller. He turned round, rather embarrassed.
"Oh, no! I am sorry. I didn't notice you standing behind me. I hope I didn't hurt you?"
"No, it's alright. Having fun?"
"Well, yes." Zane couldn't quite hide his delight in Jay's winning the race. "Cole and Kai are super strong, but I think Jay and I finally achieved a draw in this level."
"Good." Pixal's voice revealed that her mind was elsewhere. "Listen, I actually wanted to go through your hypotheses about that missing ball again." She nodded at the pool table behind her. "I feel we are overlooking …"
"Pixal," Zane pleaded. "Didn't we agree that we'd let the matter rest until your father has looked at the memory card?"
She glanced down, and in the brief moment it took her to come up with an appropriate reply, Jay jumped up and held his controller out to her.
"Hey, Pixal, you should give this game a try. Zane's rather engrossed in it right now, and whatever you two have to discuss can surely wait for another hour. Look, I'll go and check if Nya needs a hand at the hangar, and you join Zane. Can't wait to see you finishing the next couple of levels with five stars while Cole and Kai are left out in the cold," he chuckled and thrust the controller into her hand.
She tried to protest, but Kai eagerly started the next level already. "Just you wait. Cole, ready to play against two nindroids?"
"Absolutely. Zane, Pixal, you're all set?"
"Affirmative." Zane gave Pixal a shy glance, but she had apparently resigned herself to her fate.
"Affirmative," she echoed.
Pixal wasn't often seen playing video games, but when she did play, hardly anyone stood a chance against her. Her nindroid reflexes gave her a considerable advantage in race or fight scenes, and solving the simple puzzles an ordinary adventure game could offer was no real challenge for her. Zane was the only one who could really compete with her; now that the two nindroids were on the same team, it came as no surprise that their combined computational power proved to be vastly superior to the performance of their human opponents. Even though Pixal did not seem to be overly interested in the story and more often than not chose her moves without coordinating them in any way with her partner, the nindroids collected star after star. Shortly before the end of the next level, Pixal unlocked a feature the ninja had not yet encountered during the few times they had played Ninjago Noire before.
"Cool!" Cole exclaimed. "You get to color the avatars of your team. What do you choose?"
"I don't really care." Pixal replied sullenly. She had not wanted to play this game, and she had no intention to pretend that she enjoyed it. "Whatever."
She hit a button without looking at the screen, and her avatar acquired a stylish teal uniform with purple and gold stripes. "Oh." She looked up. "Ok, that's quite nice."
"So what are you getting for Zane?" Kai asked.
"Is that a serious question?" Lloyd piped up from behind. "A pink gi, of course."
Zane sat up. "I respectfully disagree. May I suggest …"
The world would never know which color he would have preferred, because Pixal, without hesitation, pressed another button. "Yes, of course," she said matter-of-factly.
Kai and Cole smirked when Zane's avatar turned bright pink and was equipped with a matching hood. Zane shot them a venomous look, but held his tongue. He could not vent his anger on them when it was really Pixal who annoyed him. Her pointed indifference towards a game he considered rather well made and cleverly thought out, her way of outplaying Kai and Cole with an almost arrogant attitude, and her ostentatious disregard of himself as her teammate was irritating.
The ringing of Lloyd's mobile phone relieved him of the necessity to comment on his newly colored avatar.
"Oh, hello Gayle," Lloyd said, grabbed a remote control and paused the game without asking. "Yes, exactly. Just a brief question which you may consider odd, but we need to know this: what did you do with Dareth's cue ball when you exchanged it for the other one at the Plaza?"
He had the undivided attention of everyone in the room, and when he switched on the loudspeaker, they heard Gayle's voice. "Why, I put it back into the bag when …" There was a pause. "Oops." Gayle suddenly sounded uncertain. "Well, I know exactly that I put it on a stool close to the wall, but it kept falling down, so in the end I left it on the floor and shoved it into the space between the stool and a potted plant so that it wouldn't roll around. But now that you're asking, I can't recall picking it up again after the game." She thought for a moment. "I went to the bathroom after Dareth and I had finished our last game. When I came back, he packed up his set, and we left. But we were talking all the time, and I can't remember for the life of me which of the white balls I put into Dareth's bag." She gave a brief laugh. "I'm sorry, this is rather embarrassing, I know."
Cole raised his eyebrows, and Kai slightly shook his head. Lloyd thanked Gayle for the call, put his phone away and looked at the others. "This wasn't really helpful at all," he said resignedly. "They may have left the ball at the Plaza, or they may have taken it with them. We knew that before. But we also know that it wasn't there anymore in the morning." He sighed. "Sorry, guys, didn't want to interrupt your game."
"No problem." Kai grabbed the remote control. "Next level?"
"I don't know." Zane hesitated and glanced at Pixal, who stared absent-mindedly at the pool table in the back of the room. The clicking of the balls was heard when Lloyd began to play a game against himself and broke the triangle with his first shot.
"Pixal?"
"What? You know, I think what Gayle said is rather interesting. It narrows down the …" Something in Zane's expression made her pause. "Oh yes, I see. You want to continue the game." She turned to the screen again. "Please start."
She seemed to be lacking in concentration, but easily kept up with the game nevertheless. For some reason, this made Zane angry. He saw a look of 'I do not need my full processing power to succeed in this game' in her eyes, and he suspected that she had set aside a partition of her drive to ponder other topics that she considered more important. Admittedly, he sometimes did this, too, when he felt that his nindroid abilities gave him an unfair advantage over the others. But he never let it show like this!
Besides, why couldn't she wait until after the game? It upset him that she did not let him enjoy the evening in the same way as their human friends. To make matters worse, his frustration with her – an entirely irrational, human frustration – impaired his own processing power. He had to remind himself of the added difficulties of the level they were about to play.
"Watch the moves of these policemen, some of them are double agents," he warned her.
She briefly glanced at him. "I knew that," she stated in an unnervingly calm voice. A sudden attack by one of those very double agents made Zane gasp and almost lose control of his avatar, but Pixal knocked the assailant out with ease and saved them both.
Kai, whose player was in a safe hiding place, whistled admiringly through his teeth.
Cole nodded at her. "Nice, Pixal." He never held back with well-deserved praise, even though in this case, Pixal's move had robbed him and Kai of an advantage.
"Thanks," muttered Zane.
She played … like a robot! – he thought and immediately scolded himself for it. Kai and Cole did not seem to mind; they were used to playing against nindroids and considered it a welcome challenge. In all objectivity, Pixal probably did not act differently than on any other game night, and the other ninja might not have noticed anything peculiar in her attitude. But Zane felt awkward around her, and the tense silence between them could hardly go unnoticed.
The four avatars on the screen, the only colored spots in a scenery kept in grayscale, arrived on a large square with a fountain where the final showdown was expected to take place. Kai and Cole exchanged a few whispered words, trying to establish a strategy for taking on the gangsters in the game and beating Pixal and Zane to the last crucial piece of information at the same time. Zane glanced at his partner, but she continued to ignore him and instead stared mesmerized at the gushing water on the screen. Despite her seeming inattentiveness, she reacted instantly when a bunch of gangsters appeared on the square.
"There you go," she muttered through her teeth, kicking two of them back. "And another one. Sorry, Cole." Her player's taser sent Cole's player tumbling down.
With the gangsters defeated and his partner incapacitated, Kai realized that the other team were his real adversaries now. Encouraged by Cole, he desperately tried to keep the two nindroids at bay, but while Zane was willing to cut him some slack, Pixal was unstoppable.
"Nope, Kai." She blasted the whole fountain with a flick of her player's hand, and the sudden torrent of water carried not only Kai's, but also Zane's avatar away.
Pixal looked up. "Seems like I'm the last one standing."
In the background, there was a loud clack as Lloyd forcefully struck the billiard balls again. The screen froze, showing the grayscale image of the overflowing fountain, and the Game Over jingle began to play.
Pixal dropped her game controller on the sofa and got up. "So much water," she remarked thoughtfully. "I must find Nya."
Zane stood up as well. "You're leaving?"
"Well, yes. The game's over, isn't it?"
"It is," he agreed, ice in his voice. "You made sure of that. And I don't feel like repeating the experience of being your partner in this."
"Too bad. I'm sorry you didn't enjoy it."
If her voice wavered a tiny bit, that moment passed quickly. Her next words were composed and cool again.
"You have not been really cooperative, either. For a wannabe detective, your lack of interest in solving a real-life mystery is disturbing. But there is someone who may be more helpful than any of you here." She glanced in the round. "Good night."
Pixal closed the door behind her, and Zane noticed that he had involuntarily clenched his fists. Exhaling slowly, he relaxed them, raised a hand and rubbed his neck.
"I guess I'm going to bed, too," he stated. "See you, guys."
He did not look back when he left the room, but he knew that Lloyd, Kay and Cole were staring after him.
"Ouch," Kay remarked in a low voice. "Did we just watch our nindroids fighting? That was so uncomfortable."
Zane could almost feel Lloyd and Cole nodding in agreement behind his back. His anger and frustration mingled with shame.
There was a much stronger word than 'uncomfortable' needed to adequately describe how he felt.