Chapter Two It's Not Over

"Aelita sure is adjusting well..." Ulrich said at the lunch table the next day. Aelita was now discovering this new-fangled invention called 'food'. As soon as she put her fork to her mouth, she began eating bite after bite, faster and faster. She was gobbling up her food, and charging back up to get some more. Her culinary consumption rate rivaled even Odd's, who was impressed greatly. Everyone else was looking a little amazed.

"Um, Aelita, if you keep eating like that, you'll start to get sick..." Jeremie suggested.

"Nonsense, Jeremie!" Aelita could barely breathe, let alone talk in-between stuffing her mouth with food.

And then, as she was just finishing her third plate of unidentifiable cafeteria food, Aelita let out a great, huge belch. Everyone in the lunch room giggled, and Sissi walked by the table giving her a disgusted look.

"Well, well, well. If it isn't Miss I'm So Special Just Because I'm New. Don't think you can fool me. I'm on to your little trick," She said, and a sudden hush swept over the room, just like it does before a fight. Aelita, on the other hand, was confused as to what this girl was talking about.

"What do you mean? I'm not pulling a trick--"

"Oh, please," Sissi scoffed. "You think I can't see that you've got these boys eating out of the palm of you hand?"

"Hey!" Yumi said, offended by being put in the same gender as her friends.

"Oh, yeah. And the loser girl," The principal's daughter said with an evil smirk. She turned towards Ulrich, the obvious reason she came to their table in the first place.

"Ulrich, dear! Do you want to come sit with us and leave these..." She eyed Aelita. "dimwitted twerps?" Ulrich was very upset.

"Look, Sissi," He said, squinting his eyes at her, "After you come over here and demean my friends like that, I'd rather chew off my foot than be anywhere near you." Sissi's face went through a mixture of shock, hurt, anguish, and fury all at the same time.

"Hmph!" She turned up her nose and went back to sit with Herb and Nicolas.

"That's okay, Sissi. They're all just pedomorphic idiots," Herb tried to console Sissi, who was leaning on the table and sniffing.

"You shut up, do you hear me?" She snapped. Suddenly, back at the Lyoko gang's table, Aelita hiccuped. And hiccuped. And hiccuped. She started to hiccup uncontrollably and she grabbed at her throat, gasping for breath.

"Oh no! If she keeps hiccuping like that, she'll run out of air!" Jeremie stood up and dashed to get her a glass of water. The others helped her up. She drank the glass of water, and the hiccups stopped.

"That was strange..."

"Just the hiccups. Involuntary spasms of the diaphragm. Usually happens after you eat too fast." Jeremie explained.

"No, I know that. That wasn't it... it felt like... I don't know how it's possible, but I felt... pulsations. I know I'm not in Lyoko, and XANA is shut down, but it felt exactly like that before I started hiccuping." Soon after Aelita finished, a beam of light knocked down the door to the cafeteria. In walked 3 blocks, materialized on Earth!

"XANA!" The Lyoko gang exclaimed at the same time.

"HOW! WE SHUT HIM DOWN!" Jeremie was beginning to get hysterical.

"Jeremie," Yumi said suddenly in an urgent tone, "Look at that block. Does it seem... different to you?" Jeremie turned and looked at the block. It seemed just like the blocks he had seen when Aelita gave him a view of Lyoko through her eyes. Except… That's it! he thought. The XANA symbol is missing. What is that in the center of it, then? It looks like some weird 'e'…

"An 'E'? Why is there an 'E'?"
"I don't know. But I'm thinking we should get to the factory so we can be virtulized into the supposedly shut down super computer." They made a break for it and ran out the door.