Hello all, in case you haven't been able to tell yet I have been adding a little bit of a beginning with more of an intro to the traveler. I do hope you all don't mind, but from the reviews that I have gotten so far, you don't. I intend to eventually release the actual stories that I have started about him... but they aren't anywhere near finished. In any case I intend to bring it back to Lyoko in the next chapter. Thank you all, and enjoy.

The changes began immediately, but if any of the Lyoko gang had been watching it, they would not have known what was going on. The beginning was similar to what usually happened but after that it changed. A white light began emanating from around the factory but as it spread out it began forming a symbol. Suddenly it began moving creating a circle within a circle. An 'S' was formed in the center then an 'A' on the center line of the 'S' and an upside down 'A' completed an 'N', finally a small 'T' like shape formed a 'G' on the top part of the 'S'. Around this symbol hundreds of other smaller symbols were formed, many of them were in various human religions or philosophies, but many of them were not. In the outer circle eight smaller circles were formed and a vivid image that made one think of the elements: fire, water, earth and air appeared in four. In the other four images of electricity, ice, metal, and a tree formed. Once all of the symbols were formed the entire sigil was lifted into the air around the illuminated factory...

Of course, during all of this time was not paused, and, even though a storm was raging on around them, people couldn't help but watch the sigil being formed. The strange thing was that the lightening would not pass beneath the sigil and the wind had seemingly stopped. The people who noticed this began to feel safe again, and the people who were watching called everyone else to watch.

The sense of security ended as the next series of events took place, though. The sigil began to grow brighter as lights from all the other symbols were drawn into the center. The new light began forming a spinning ball, and the ball began to grow larger and brighter. This continued for a few seconds until the ball was large enough to consume a European double-decker buss. Then came the part which terrified all the people who could see it. The humongous ball began to slowly lift into the air and a small breeze began to blow. On the breeze was one word, "Absolution." The ball fell and hit the light emanating from the factory the two merged, the ball appearing to consume the factory, and the ball exploded outward in what must have looked like a nuclear explosion...

The light spread throughout the city consuming everything, and as it passed by Kadic Junior High it spread to the two humans in the Aricitopian universe. They were 'whisked' away and appeared in their own universe. The light continued until it reached the edge of the city, there it seemed to fade, but that was only what it would have looked like. As it faded it came back upon itself and time slowly reversed...

I watched the ground as Ulrich and I walked through the small forest on school grounds. I had told him about the nightmare I had just had. He had looked shocked and we had begun on our journey through the wood, in silence. He had walked in silent contemplation, thinking over what I had told him, ever since he suggested that we take a walk. I didn't know what to do, whether or not to say anything or simply continue walking in silence. It seemed that this new information was difficult to take in, but it also seemed that there was something else on his mind.

"Yumi," Ulrich said suddenly breaking the silence. "Do you get the feeling that this has happened before?"

"Yes, it's like déjà vu." I replied. "You were just about to say, 'Yumi, I think there is something wrong with me...'."

"Yeah, strange." Ulrich said mystified. "Do you think there was a tower activated and Odd and Jeremie deactivated it with out us?"

"No, we have always remembered things that happen before."

"Perhaps we should find the others." Ulrich said.

"I agree, but maybe we should check the factory. I don't know what it is but I get a strange feeling that something is wrong..." I said and then added. "We should hurry."

Unfortunately we weren't near the entrance to the sewer and it took us a while to find it. We jumped down and noticed that our skateboards were gone. Sighing in exasperation we began running, but I felt something else with us. For some reason it was like there was a third person here and they seemed really worried about something. As we neared a corner I suddenly began to brace myself for impact and felt myself hit something. I fell back and landed hard on the ground. When I looked to see what I had hit there was nothing there, but Ulrich seemed very startled.

"I felt as though I ran into something, and... it feels as though there are two other people here with us." I said.

"Ghosts?" he asked.

"No, more like déjà vu. Like this place is remembering an event that should be happening right now." I told him. "Oh! Let's hurry. Come on." I yelled jumping up and running again.

We continued on and I could feel Ulrich's gaze on my back. I knew he was watching me, worried, but I could also feel the other two, who ever they were. When we got to the ladder up I climbed as quickly as I could and literally burst out onto the bridge. When I looked at the factory I saw just a hint of a creepy pure white light emanating from around it. I turned around and helped Ulrich up, and when he saw the factory he said, "Whoa, what is that? Yumi, do you see that light?"

"See," I said, "You do have special abilities, like me."

"Yumi, you haven't said that, not recently at least... and yet, I feel as though... Oh, this is getting annoying, come on." He ran to the factory and I followed him.

"Come on, Ulrich, I think its fun. Besides, you get to see some of the stuff that I have to go through daily."

"Really? How can you stand it?"

"I can't. But I want to continue living... so I deal with it."

We jumped off the ledge and grabbed at the wires hanging from the roof. I watched Ulrich grab one, but I missed mine. Suddenly I was falling two storied to the hard cement ground, but just before I landed I adjusted my body and caught myself, almost like a cat... I looked up at Ulrich's horrified face, and showed him that I was ok. He nodded and swung down.

"I can sense it, there is strong magic at work here." I said.

"Really, or have you always been such a gymnast?"

"Well that too."

We rushed into the elevator door, which was waiting open for us. It closed when Ulrich pushed the button and we began moving down. Almost as soon as we were moving though Ulrich said, "Shoot, I don't know the combination to get in."

"That's not good, how will we get out of the elevator?" I asked, but as if in response to my question the elevator stopped and the door opened.

"I just had a horrifying thought," Ulrich said as the door opened. "What if this is a trap?"

I was about to answer but the door opened wide enough for us to see through. At first I didn't know what I was looking at, nor could I see very well. The entire room was illuminated with the nauseating brilliant pure white light. It seemed to be coming from the computer terminal, but there was something off about the chair... Suddenly it hit me.

"Jeremie!" I nearly screamed as I ran over to his limp body.

He was lying against the chair completely limp. All the color, what color there usually was, was completely drained from his body. He looked dead and I could tell that he wasn't breathing. I quickly checked for a pulse and felt none...

Tears came to my eyes and I embraced him in a hug. Jeremie was dead, dead, and there was nothing we could do about it. We all knew that no one could be brought back by returning to the past. Now there was nothing we could do for one of our most dear friends. He was... Jeremie was dead...

"'Past restoration complete.'?" Ulrich asked.

I looked up at him confused. He was looking at the computer terminal. I looked at it and saw on it the words he had just spoken, there was some symbol rotating beneath it, but I didn't know what it was.

"Is he alright?" Ulrich asked looking down at me.

"What do you think?" I asked bitterly.

"You're crying? Oh, god. Is he... dead?" Ulrich asked in shock.

I nodded and he broke down crying. It was one of the first times I had seen him cry. I gently placed Jeremie's body back against the chair and moved over to comfort Ulrich. I placed my arm around him but the emotions were too overwhelming, especially since I was feeling his as well as mine. We both cried together, holding each other. Jeremie was lost, and...

"Oh, god, Odd." I got up and looked around, but we were alone... or, well, alone.

"He must be down in the scanner room." Ulrich said.

Ulrich began running to the elevator, but then he remembered that there was a pole that lead directly down one level. He ran to that and jumped down it. I heard his movements in the scanner room and suddenly realized that he had left me alone with Jeremie's dead body... I shuddered and moved away slightly. No matter how much I loved him as a friend, being near a lifeless body was not something that I wanted to do.

I heard I cry of agony come from the scanner room and I knew that Ulrich had found Odd. Two of our best friends had been lost today, three in all. How could we go on? How could we continue living knowing that they were dead, and even so, how could we continue to fight against X.A.N.A.?

I opened my eyes and saw a blue-green sky. I felt somewhat soft ground beneath me, and realized that I was lying on my back. I began standing up but suddenly a face appeared above me. The face was kind looking, and also wild looking. I could see that it was a girl, but her features were slightly strange. Her hair appeared to be willow leaves, and her skin looked wood-like. Other than the treeness of her features she looked normal.

"Hello." I said.

When I spoke she seemed to jump slightly. She looked over at someone and then back at me. "Hello," she said, her voice sounded normal but with a bit more hollow woodyness to it.

"Where am I?" I asked.

"You have appeared on Aricitopia." She told me. "You must be a powerful magician to be able to come here. What is your name?"

"Jeremie." I replied and began getting up again.

When I was in a sitting position I looked over at her and got a shock. She was completely naked. Having lived in France for all of my life it wasn't that much of a shock to see a naked body, but I was still shy around nudists-having never gone to a nude beach myself.

She noticed my shock and how I became uncomfortable and at first she didn't seem to understand, but then she realized what I was uncomfortable about and giggled. "Alright then." She said and what appeared to be leaves appeared in a close like fashion around her body. When they had finished 'growing' she looked like a girl wearing a green dress.

"I don't mean to be rude, but what are you?" I asked.

"I am a wood elemental. But you may know me better as a dryad." She said.

"What?" I said surprised. "But I thought they were just a myth."

"Where you come from we may be but in many universes variations of my people do exist." She told me. "Where do you come from? And why are you here?"

"Um, I thought I came from earth, but if there are different universes I guess that wouldn't help much." I told her. "As for why I am here, I don't know."

"Well then, you will just have to see the traveler." She said matter-of-factly. "If you don't know where you came from you won't know how to get back. You must not be a very good traveler, unlike my mother, Shyoishofu. She was the traveler of my race, you know?"

"No, I didn't know. Like I said I have only just found that your species exists. Sorry." I said.

"You really are new to traveling then..." she said. "Well, the travelers were eradicated recently, so you would have to be. How old are you?"

"Me? I'm thirteen. Why?" I asked.

"Oh, I am three hundred seventy-six, earth years." She said. "You are just a baby aren't you?"

She was walking and up until now I had been following her, but at this comment I stopped. Not only was I shocked that she was hundreds of years old but I was also insulted that she thought of me as a baby. I was not a baby in any sense, and that was an unfair statement.

"What?" she asked, having stopped herself.

"I'm not a baby." I said, a hint of a whine in my voice.

"But you are only thirteen, that's so young." She said. "Maybe I misunderstand something, but the traveler himself is many millions of years old, maybe more."

"No way." I said now shocked. "That young boy is so old?"

"You didn't know? Well I suppose you are finding out a lot today."

"Well, truth be told I have only recently met the traveler."

We began walking again, this time in silence. As we walked I began seeing more dryads, they all seemed to be clothed now. I guess news of my arrival had traveled somehow. As we passed through the forest we neared a stream and I saw another people. These were water people, naiads, except not. Naiads and dryads were nymphs and these were both male and female. They must have been truly elementals, spirits of the elements themselves. With this new knowledge I began to wonder how lucky I was to see these people, not many people from my universe would have...

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"To the air elementals." She replied. "We need to get somewhere fast and they are the people to see."

I looked around me; I was floating in a vast open space. It was mostly dark around me, but there were small lights every here and there. Suddenly I realized that I was floating in space and I became disorientated. My body began thrashing about wildly trying to grasp top from bottom, but there was nothing that would allow me to do so. Then, in my panic about floating, I suddenly realized that I shouldn't be able to breathe. I gasped for air and found that I could get air into my lungs. This allowed me to relax slightly. It might just be a premonition.

I looked, uh, down, I think it was... though by now I had moved so much that I couldn't have ever figured out where I had started. Beneath me was a very large planet, and oddly enough, there were four large glowing things floating around it. One of them was yellow, one was white, one was red, and one was blue. I had no idea what they could have been, but now I had something to orientate myself to. I positioned my body so that I was standing facing the planet and placed myself in a sitting position.

'Well, Odd,' I thought to myself. 'Lets just see where this takes you.'

We had reached an open grassy plane. Around me I could feel a genital breeze flowing in one direction. The wood elemental's hair was flowing in the breeze and she seemed happy, calm. I had already seen many different elementals, and a few that I hadn't thought were elements. But that was not what was on my mind now because in front of me I saw a very large building looming into the sky. It was mostly a clean white color, void of most other colors at all. As I looked at it I realized that the air was flowing to it, and not in its general direction. I also realized that this tower was similar to the towers in Lyoko. Then suddenly it hit me, I knew exactly what we were doing. We were going to use this tower to move from one part of this world to another.

When we entered it I knew that I was right. The tower was built differently than a Lyoko tower but that was natural, no solid material would allow other solid material to simply move through it. On the inside there were two sets of stairs, one leading up around the outer wall of the tower and another leading downward directly beneath the second set of stairs. The two stairs spiraled around the tower and were really more like one set than two.

At first I thought we were going to take the stairs, either up or down, but I suddenly realized that we were now. The wood elemental brought me to the center of the room over an insignia that I knew that I had seen before. It was some kind of twisted S and N. I didn't have long enough to look at it before a light began to illuminate the insignia and then the air around us. Suddenly I felt myself moving very fast, but it didn't look like I was. I could see that I was in some kind of tube or something and I could see out of it. There were hundreds of other tubes around us and there were things moving within them. Around the tubes though was white space, which looked like normal space but was white instead of black.

I didn't get to see much of that space before I suddenly appeared on the same insignia in a different place. There standing and waiting for us was a tall man with long golden blond hair. He was wearing the same things that I had seen before, his four wings relaxed behind him. He had been waiting for us, so he knew that I was here. Well, I would just have to see where this would lead.

"Welcome back, Jeremie." The traveler said. "Did you enjoy your trip?"

"What the hell did you do?" I demanded, loosing my cool for some reason.

"Did you think that magic wouldn't have a price? Did you think that I would do you a favor for free? Did you think that I could do you a favor for free?" he asked. "No, Jeremie, there is always a price, but I am usually the one who pays it, as I am now."

"How do you mean?" I asked.

"Well, you are here, fully, physically, as is Odd..." he said. "But you are not a skilled traveler, you can only travel through dreams."

The wood elemental next to me, I still hadn't learned her name, gasped. She looked at me shocked, and then relaxed and began to look almost angry. Had I somehow offended her, or, no there was some fear there, was something going on that I didn't understand. That must be it, and I was sure that I would find out soon enough.

"Let me tell you something," began the traveler. "I have been to your universe, or one similar to it, before. I know what Lyoko is like, and how it works. For me it can be dangerous, it allows things to move between universes, and in doing so change. But long ago I made a law that stated that no one could possess that technology. I did this manly because the one universe that I gave the technology to used it to enslave many others... but that is another story.

"You see the problem that I have with it now, other that what it can be used for, is that it interferes with my abilities. But that isn't the only thing it does, there is a price for using the technology that allows you to communicate; to go to Lyoko. But because it is a mechanical device this price is different. It tears up your body and reassembles it in Lyoko, you change, become someone, something different. But, in the sense that it does it you and your friends are, relatively speaking, safe. There will be no real effect on the five of you, but it still drains you of everything you have, just to use it. And X.A.N.A. is a byproduct of what you are using..."

"But X.A.N.A. was created even before we ever came to Lyoko. He was made from a virus!" I objected.

"True, I didn't say that you had created him, just the technology, the machine, that you use to see Aelita; to go to Lyoko." He replied calmly. "For all good there is evil, for your machine there is X.A.N.A., for Aelita there is X.A.N.A. as well. Because of both of them he was created... But the scanners themselves, they are the most dangerous. They can take life or give life. But the cost... never mind. It is simply a machine; the cost is dealt with through mechanics..." he paused and looked off into the distance. "But that isn't why you are here. You are here because a different evil has entered your universe, one that I created." He sighed. "This always happens. Well, do you know how you got here?"

It seemed to me to be a stupid question, but I decided to answer anyway. "No,"

"Did you know that every time you had traveled into another universe you were only partly there?" he asked. "You were never truly physically manifested there, but now... now you are here in a completely physical body. Why is that, do you think?"

"Because you summoned me here?" I guessed, but that seemed wrong to me somehow. No the look he had on his face, it must have been some reason that had something bad attached to it. Like he said, all magic had some sort of price, what was mine? Then it hit me, I was here physically because I was not physical elsewhere. "Because I died."

"You and Odd both." He told me. "The price to rid your world of my evil, or at least make it dormant until I can, was death. But I never allow this to happen. No one will die when I can save them." He placed out a hand and a dark plane appeared. It looked almost like a keyboard, but it was completely flat, semitransparent and wasn't connected to anything. He appeared to type something and a couple of screens of the same kind appeared around him. "I will bring you back from the dead, but I can't do it alone, not while I am here at least. Let's just hope that your friends have found you already..."

I had brought Odd's body up to the computer room. We had laid them on their backs in an open space and were trying to decide what to do with them. We would have to tell someone that they had died eventually, but how? There was no evidence of injury. As far as we knew they hadn't been poisoned, and someone would check. They hadn't been drowned, that was obvious. How could we explain their deaths?

"What are we going to do?" Yumi asked. "This has gotten out of hand..."

"I know-" I started but I was interrupted by a loud beeping sound.

Yumi and I looked around for the source of the sound and realized that it had come from the computer. On the terminal was a display with the words, 'Restore Life Losses?' Yumi and I looked at one another stunned. What did this mean? We both knew that once people died they could not be brought back by Lyoko, so what did this mean? But on the other hand this screen didn't have the Lyoko symbol on it, instead there was the one that had been on it before.

"What do we do?" I asked.

Yumi answered by walking up to the computer and pressing the 'Y' button... nothing happened.

"Perhaps it is voice activated?" I suggested.

Quickly Yumi placed the headset on and said, "Yes."

Then the computer monitor came alive. Thousands of things were popping onto and off of the screen at once. But that wasn't all that was happening. The room around us, and the pure white glow, was changing. The glow was moving from the walls to the place where we had put Odd and Jeremie's bodies. Suddenly I saw their bodies beginning to float in the air, their chests apparently being held up by something. As we watched they began to change, Odd's cloths stretched over him and became large cat-paw gloves, and a tail grew... but what was more impressive was what was happening to Jeremie. His entire body was changing. He seemed to be aging to somewhere around seventeen and his cloths were becoming more... mystic. I suddenly realized that these must be their Lyoko characters, Odd's was certainly what he had become, but I had never seen Jeremie's before. I was just beginning to wonder why this was happening when suddenly both of them disappeared in a flash of light.

"Oh, sh-" I began but Yumi seemed to have an idea. She had begun typing franticly on the keyboard and apparently was trying to connect to Lyoko. Suddenly Aelita's face appeared in a window.

"Hello Yumi, where is Jeremie?" she asked.

"I was hoping that you could tell us. He just disappeared in front of us and I believe he has somehow gone to Lyoko." Yumi told her. "Can you check? I mean, is there a way to?"

"I am already doing so. I should find them in a matter of seconds, but if you could help I would appreciate it."

"How can I help?" Yumi asked.

"If they have been somehow transported to Lyoko, without using the scanners, then we will probably have to use Jeremie's Materialization program. If that's the case someone is going to have to get it..."

"No problem," I said. "He keeps a copy here at all times."

"Oh, well that made it simple... the other thing is I need you to run a search for an activated tower. If this is a X.A.N.A. attack we need to know what tower is active."

"But wouldn't you feel pulsations?" Yumi asked.

"It is possible that X.A.N.A. has found a way to mask the pulsations..." she paused for a second and then appeared to hold her head. "Or not... Yes I feel pulsations. Run the scan, we will need to know where to go."

"Ok, but how are we going to get there?" I asked.

"I can virtualized you." Aelita said. "Just run those scans. And if I need you to do anything else I will let you know." The window disappeared.

"Is it just me or does she seem changed somehow?" I asked.

"Yes, she does. What do you think it is?"

"I don't know, but I am sure we will find out soon enough.