Yumi rubbed her eyes and stared again, hoping that the apparition would go away.
"Just what are we looking at?" She said, just barely above a whisper.
Actually, it was pretty obvious to all of them what they were looking at. It was a city. But it was not like any city they had ever seen on Earth. It was about a hundred times the size of the ghost channel Xana had made on Lyoko in the ice region. It was surrounded by a high wall of some sort of red metal, that seemed to merge flawlessly with the two lower sandstone walls that went up to it. From where they were standing, they could just barely make out a gate that rose up halfway in the wall. Rising behind the walls were a number of towering skyscrapers, colored a dull gray. The strange thing about them was that they all seemed to be pyramids, differing greatly in height and width. Rising from the walls in some places was some sort of glass-like material that curved upward before being cut of in jagged edges. It gave the impression that the city had been covered by a dome at some point, but it had been shattered. The whole complex stood on its own in the center of the plateau.
The kids stared at it for a little while longer before Ulrich broke the silence.
"Impossible.", he finally said. "It has to be one of Xana's traps."
Aelita looked at it, closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them again, in what was a little too long for a blink.
"I don't think so, Ulrich"
"What?"
"You have to remember, Ulrich, that in a way, I am part of Lyoko. I can 'talk' to the land as well as sing to it, and I can use that ability to figure out what's real and what's not. I've used it once before to determine which was the real one of two towers, remember? The plastic alien?"
"Oh yeah."
"Xana was creating false signals from the fake tower to confuse me, and I was scared I had chosen wrong, but the point is, that city is no illusion."
"Still..." Yumi said uncertainly, "How did it get here? How long has there been a civilization living here on Lyoko right under our noses?"
"Well, why don't we ask them?" Odd said enthusiastically. "C'mon! Lets meet the locals!"
"I don't think we can, Odd.", said Yumi.
"Huh? What do you mean?"
"That city looks totally deserted!"
As they walked through the valley, going closer to the city, it became clear that Yumi was right. The reason the metal wall was red was because it was completely rusted over. The buildings looked cracked and broken down, some on the verge of collapsing. As they walked toward the gates, they saw signs of habitation outside the city; a shell of a house here, a bit of fencing there, what remained of a path, etc. A quick investigation of the house failed to turn up anything of interest.
"Don't you think its a little weird that you've never been here, Aelita?", Ulrich asked.
"Before we entered the maze, I said that I had been in the area before, but I had never seen this plateau. But you weren't listening because the frelions were attacking."
"That's weird." Yumi said, puzzled. "What happened? Was this place separated from the rest of Lyoko by some invisible barrier since before we discovered Xana?"
Yumi didn't know it, but she was absolutely right.
Aelita was taking more readings of the land. She decided that when she had some free time, she would need to check to the programs governing that process, because the analyzing program said that the terrain was 40,000 years old, and she was sure that Lyoko hadn't existed that long. On the other hand, if it was that old, it was plenty of time for a civilization to grow, thrive, and eventually die, which would explain the abandoned city. She was only a few pieces short of finding the truth, but for now, it was a puzzle boxed into a mystery cleverly wrapped up in an enigma, and her head was spinning with questions. But she had to cut her musings short, for they had arrived at the city gates.
The gates were nothing too fancy. Just two massive slabs of metal on giant, rusted hinges. Aelita guessed, though, that the rust was obscuring some intricate designs on the door.
"We'll have to go through if we want to reach the tower, but how are we going to get in?" Yumi asked.
"It wouldn't hurt to try this." Odd said. "HELLO! IS ANYBODY HOME? CAN YOU LET US IN?"
The massive doors, which seemed so strong before, were no match for the sound waves. The doors gave an agonizing creak, then fell inward off their hinges, churning up dust.
"That answers my question." Said Odd. "Oh, look! a sign!"
The sign Odd was talking about was just inside. It was a little metal rectangle on a post, and looked like it had been drawn on with a marker. It had barely escaped being crushed by the falling doors.
It said in crude letters, "Welcome to the City of Whispers. The place where dreams come true."
"Looks like the inhabitants were pretty proud of their city to claim something like that." Aelita said. "You'd think they would have a better sign. Any dreams that you guys have that you want to come true?" she said sarcastically.
"Ooh! Ooh! I've always dreamed that the cafeteria will give out banana splits for desert!" Said Odd.
They all got a good laugh from that.
"Let's go." Ulrich said. They all walked into the city. As Ulrich passed the sign, he got a momentary shudder as a brief vision of the creature from his nightmares flitted through his mind. He shook his head to clear his head of the thought. That certainly wasn't the kind of dream the citizens meant. Or was it?
---------------------
In a pane less window high in one of the buildings near the entrance, a small, silver ball about a foot across floated in midair. On one side, a large eye opened. If it had been controlled by Xana, the eye would have undoubtedly been the familiar eye of Xana, but it looked more like a human's eye. It watched the entering humans with uncertainty. It thought that all the humans had been eliminated over 200 years ago. It decided to report the finding to its master, which had only recently been stirred from his slumber. Silently, it began transmitting what it was seeing to its master.
The being received the transmission instantaneously, and saw what the ball was seeing in real time. It was just as confused as the ball was, seeing as there had been no humans in the city for nearly 200 years, but nevertheless, they were fresh meat in its domain, undoubtably lured inside by the false sign that had been posted outside. He did some careful hacking, and in an instant he had access to the contents of the minds of the first three of them. Carefully, he copied all the information in their minds; their thoughts, their desires, their hopes, their fears, and their dreams. Ah yes, the all important dreams. Not simple wishful thinking, but instead the things that dwelled in their heads at night. He now had all he needed to destroy them.
He turned to watch the last one, and stopped short. He couldn't take his eyes of her. Why was that, he wondered. The feeling he had was indescribable, but he felt a burning desire to learn more about her. He did the same hacking procedure, and in an instant he knew everything there was to know about her. More than she knew herself, it seemed. She even held a possible way to escape this prison of a virtual world, the "keys to Lyoko", and continue the reign of terror that had ended with this city so long ago.
He went back to watching her. What was the word he was looking for to describe her? He tried a cyber dictionary to figure it out. It was.. it was.. oh yes. Beautiful.Beauty was something he thought he had destroyed long before. But there was something different about this girl, and he knew that never in a million years would he ever want to kill her. The nearest thing he could find to what he was feeling was wanting to own her, but it that wasn't even close.
And suddenly, it hit him. He was feeling what the humans called love for this girl. For a nanosecond he found the notion of that human emotion revolting, but in the next one, he was embracing it whole-heartedly. He decided that he would have the "keys to Lyoko", and he would have her. No matter what the cost, no matter if she didn't love him back, and no matter how many people got in his way.