"I'm telling you, you have to let this go," Nya said for the umpteenth time. "Jay? Jay, you have to stop. We need to leave, right now."
Jay was somewhat surprised Nya was even still here to tell him he needed to leave. She had told him over and over that this was a bad idea, that he shouldn't do this, that he couldn't do this, that if he kept going she was going to turn around and head back. Yet she had followed him, and now they were on the edge of the Sea of Sand. They were close, so very close.
The town name had brought them to a little town, barely a village, beside the Sea of Sand, and the street name had brought them to the middle of a bunch of trailer homes. The street stretched out in front of them, and Jay trotted along, looking for the address number he had seen on Jeb Garmadon's papers.
"Jay, come on, we need to go," Nya said, but she was walking along behind him all the same. "Jay, you aren't listening to me. You need to listen. We need to go."
"Not yet," Jay stated. "I'm almost there. I'm about to find them."
"And by 'them' you mean the people whose names you saw that probably weren't connected with you in the slightest?" Nya said irritably.
"By 'them' I mean my parents," Jay retorted. "There!"
He had spotted the correct address number on a thick fence. Breaking out into a run and dodging around a few cacti, he raced to the fence and peered beyond it.
A trailer home sat a ways back from the fence, surrounded by piles of junk that trailed off into the distance behind it. Jay stood on tip-toe to see as much as he could, drinking in the sight. This could be it. This could be where he had been meant to grow up.
"What if they don't live here anymore? What if they moved halfway across the country? What if they died?" Nya asked as she walked up, reeling off questions with a speed that impressed even Jay. "What if you read the wrong paper, or what if, even if you read the right paper, they had nothing to do with you?"
"But what if they do have something to do with me? What if they have everything to do with me?" Jay asked.
"Jay, even if they are your parents, which they almost certainly aren't, what makes you think they're ready to see you? What if they gave you up? What if they gave you to the School for a reason, and they don't want anything to do with you?" Nya continued.
"But what if they didn't? What if it was an accident, or a mistake, or a trick? What then?" Jay asked, starting to bounce on his toes in excitement. "Nya, this could be it. This could be everything I've ever wanted."
"Now I know that's wrong, because everything you've ever wanted would include a bunch of robots you've invented actually working because you had the parts you needed and not just whatever we could scavenge," Nya scoffed.
"That's not what I meant," Jay stated, but before he could say anything else, the sound of a door creaking open made him instinctively kneel, shrinking against the fence and looking around for the source of the sound.
Nya knelt too, automatically on high alert.
Together, kneeling in a pile of garbage, nudging aside old spray paint cans and rusted bits of appliances, they looked around.
Nya figured it out first, peering through a crack in the fence. "Look."
Jay spun around and looked through another crack.
A woman had stepped out of the trailer home. A steaming coffee cup in hand, she was strolling around the yard, nudging around bits and pieces in the junk piles like she was looking for something. Her hair was gray, and her face was mapped with wrinkles. She sipped from her cup, then pulled a notepad from her pocket and looked at it, then at something in one of the junk piles.
Jay held up a hand to the crack, comparing their skin tones. Did they look the same? He thought they did.
The woman picked something up from the junk pile she was hovering over and headed back into the trailer home. The door slammed shut behind her, and Jay let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
"So that was it," Nya said, sounding almost disappointed.
"That was it," Jay agreed, a little breathless with excitement. "That was my mom."
"You don't know that," Nya said immediately. "You barely have a clue that she could've been your mom, you can't know that she-"
"I can't know until I ask," Jay interjected, looking at her.
Nya was frowning. "What, you're going to walk up there, knock on the door, and ask her, 'hey, did you give up a kid to evil scientists a decade ago?'"
"Not like that, no, but I'm going to ask," Jay said definitively.
"You can't just do that," Nya stated.
"I can and I will," Jay said, and he stood up.
Nya stood too, looking at him. "You aren't serious."
"I am completely serious," Jay said, and he made his face as serious as he could.
"You can't-" Nya began again.
A laugh cut her off.
And it wasn't Jay laughing.
Jay spun around, fists already coming up to his chest to be ready to fight as Nya tensed at his side. He would've recognized that snake-y laugh anyway.
Serpentine. They'd been found.