Back to Life

"It's like she's a ghost," Ulrich said as he gazed at the cold metallic ground in the computer room. The cold seemed to pierce his body harder than it normally would. But that was the thing, the factory was never cold.

"What do you expect?" Odd shrugged, "You basically told her to fall off the face of the earth."

"Guys, quiet. I'm trying to program Aelita's anti-virus," Jeremie murmured, tapping away at the supercomputer's interface, although, he could understand their plight. Yumi sat on the edge of the hologram with her eyes on the floor.

Aelita sat next to her. "What's wrong, Yumi?"

"It's my fault. I shouldn't have dogged her like that. She's done nothing but helped us and I messed up everything."

"It's not your fault, Yumi," Ulrich spoke up, "If anything, I'm the one who rejected her hard."

"Yeah, that's pretty true," Odd added.

Yumi growled, "Okay, Odd. Don't think you're innocent in all of this. You could have vouched for her."

"And go against you two, Uh-uh. I know when to fight my battles."

"So you just let Sissi get chewed out just because you're a wimp?" Jeremie asked from the sidelines.

"Hey! I didn't mean-"

"Guys, calm down! It's obvious that you all feel bad about her," Aelita said. "It's okay to feel bad, but you shouldn't be fighting with each other like this. Even Sissi wouldn't like that."

"That's true, princess," Odd sighed, getting up to stretch. "Now if you'll excuse me, I have to find Sissi."

"What? Why?" Ulrich asked.

"To let her join our gang, of course."

"Odd, Sissi might help most of the time, but don't you think it's risky to let her join?" Jeremie asked.

"Well, she already knows about our secret, and she wants to help us fight against XANA. And you forget one thing. Did anyone, over the past few weeks, think to ask HOW she remembers the attacks?" Odd asked. Jeremie immediately stopped typing and looked at the comedic blonde. Everyone else did as well.

"That's right. If she went onto Lyoko, we would have known," Aelita explained. Yumi and Ulrich looked at each other with confusion. Yumi looked back at Odd, raising her eyebrow.

"Why are you so passionate about this?"

"Because I want her to feel better. It's obvious she feels this way because of us. Even Delmas can't get her to cheer up. He's bought her almost every single phone she could find, but she's still not...Sissi."

The silence in the room punched everyone in the gut. Yumi sighed and rolled the tense silence off her shoulders. Lifting her head, she walked to the elevator like a determined soldier. The rest stared at each other with puzzled looks. "Well, what are you standing around for, let's go!" She called in a firm tone. They left without question.

The whirring of her drill was the only thing that interrupted the silence. Carefully inserting the wire into place, she coiled it around the metal pipe and slid it into a hollowed-out wooden shaft. Bottles of unknown substances lined her shelves, and a neat stack of papers was filed away in the corner of her desktop. Netting some pieces of wires together, her hands felt detached from her mind, like she felt no pain or weariness. In fact, it felt like she was just in a zone of mindlessness, a plain with no distractions. Complete flow, if you will. Sometimes she was glad she didn't have any friends or satellite people. She could work in private, no one bothered her, and it allowed a lot of things to go 'under the rug'– no one knew the amount of stuff she had in her room or the value of it.

But Sissi was still lonely and try as she might, the sound of her tools against hard metal, the scratch of her pencil on paper, and the smack of her fists against the punching dummy at her new Karate coach's dojo didn't distract her from that. It was still lonely.

Then a knock on the door came. "Come in, Dad," She muttered lifelessly.

"Wrong-o, O Dragon Queen!" Sissi jumped at the voice, a voice she hadn't heard in a while. She stumbled to the door, opened it, and the whole Lyoko gang flooded in, Aelita included. "Sissi, we've been dying to see you," Odd smiled gladly.

"You have?" Sissi asked.

"We... I wanted to say I'm sorry for what we put you through. It wasn't right of us to be suspicious of you when all you've done is help. I know-"

"Guys, listen. I don't want you pitying me," Sissi interrupted Yumi.

"We're not. But we were wrong for suspecting that you would do something about our secret. I'm sorry for what we... I said," Ulrich shamefully replied. Sissi closed her eyes and breathed in a long breath of air.

"It's okay," She said, trying to release all of the pent up sadness in her head. If only it were that easy.

"Okay, now that we got that settled away, Sissi this is Aelita," Odd smiled. Sissi furrowed her eyebrows and crossed her arms.

"Odd, I know about Aelita," She said.

"I know, but it's how you know Aelita."

"Huh?" Everyone else muttered.

"I'm no genius, but even if you did figure out about our little secret, you wouldn't have known about the attacks, right? So how do you actually know about Lyoko? Hmm?" Odd stroked his chin with a cheeky smile.

Sissi's eyes widened, but then she laughed, harder than she had in a while. "HAHA! That's why you're here? Yumi and Ulrich want to apologize, but you're curious why I know? That's it?! I thought you would have asked why I'm as smart as Einstein."

"I wouldn't really say that smart, but ow!" Aelita elbowed the smartmouth in the ribs. "But we are a little curious." Sissi sat back in her chair while the others made their way to different sitting spots. She explained everything that really went on; The bus accident, the Incident, and how she knew about Lyoko, Aelita, and XANA. Odd couldn't handle it.

"Wait, wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. You're telling me you're actually from the future and you got sent all the way back here?"

"Yep," Sissi answered.

"And that you remember every attack because of the 'Incident' you had in the factory in the future?"

"Yep."

"But in your time, did we defeat XANA?" Ulrich asked.

"I think you did. From what I could hear from you guys, it seemed like you were finally done with something. I guessed it was XANA," Sissi replied.

"Well, that's a relief," Yumi sighed.

"No, it's not. With Sissi's interference in the past, there's no guarantee that the present we're in is going to have the same result in the future. For all we know, even with Sissi's help, XANA could still win, and since she doesn't know what we did, she can't help us defeat XANA faster than we would have without her," Jeremie replied frantically.

"Calm down, Einstein," Sissi smiled. "Think, if you could do it with all of my antics in the previous timeline, you can do it now."

"Huh, I guess that's true."

"Of course, we still have the issue of how exactly the supercomputer transported you here and now," Aelita said.

"There are a lot of theories," Jeremie sighed, rubbing his cranium.

"Maybe the shoe triggered a reset default program that we haven't found on the supercomputer," Aelita suggested.

"Yeah, but then how would Sissi remember everything that happened. Returning to the past is one thing, but returning nearly two years?" Jeremie argued. "And why here? Why not until it was first made?"

"Yes, but let's say the supercomputer defaulted to its last date of stability," Aelita rallied back. Sissi rubbed her chin as Jeremie laced his fingers together in front of his mouth.

"It could have been the scanners," He added. "The shoe may have triggered the reset function, but it wouldn't explain how she could remember the attacks. So maybe it was calibrating itself as it was defaulting. That way, anything outside of the system was forgotten and anything inside became part of the data. That's why we can't remember anything, but she can."

"But that doesn't explain why it stopped at the beginning of the annual dance and not somewhere else," Sissi argued.

Jeremie threw up his hands, glaring with annoyance. "Well, what do you think happened?" He barked.

"I think it was the way the shoes slipped into the machine, triggering something that the computer wasn't programmed to do along with the reset theory and the scanner. It gave the supercomputer a different kind of program foreign to it. It had to be some kind of weird combination that made this possible," Sissi replied.

"But that wouldn't make any sense."

"Aelita, nothing about this situation makes sense," Jeremie muttered. While the tinkerer, Mr. and Mrs. Einstein debated, Odd, Ulrich, and Yumi looked at each other, scratching their heads and giving each other shrugs. Sissi finally waved her hands in surrender, sighing loudly.

"Listen, there's no way we're going to figure out how things happened. We don't even know how the supercomputer works completely."

"What do you mean?"

"Do you know how that thing can reverse time?" Sissi asked. Jeremie paused for a moment then nodded.

"You're right."

"So… the brainy bunch's conclusion on how Sissi managed to reset time so far is-" Jeremie, Aelita, and Sissi all shrugged. "And I thought all of you were smart."

"Can it, dog for brains," Sissi snapped, causing Aelita to giggle.

"Sooo what's the plan now?" Ulrich asked.

"Simple, Sissi joins the group and helps us with Lyoko, we defend Aelita, and Jeremie works on the Anti-virus program so we can finally be done with XANA," Odd replied.

"Are you sure you're okay with XANA coming after you?" Yumi asked Sissi.

"Well, I've been doing okay so far. Sure I was scared out of my mind with the rats, but I've gotten used to it." Sissi grinned as she stood up and stretched her back. "In the meantime, we never gave Aelita a full tour of the school. What do you say?"

"That would be wonderful," Aelita beamed. Ulrich, Odd, Jeremie, and Aelita walked out laughing and giggling while Yumi held Sissi back by the arm.

"We'll catch up with you," Yumi called out as she shut the door behind her. A silent room with two black-haired girls wasn't natural for Sissi at first. She saw Yumi's sagging shoulders and lowered face, and before she could even say anything, Sissi beat Yumi to the punch.

"You don't have to apologize."

"But I was wrong for-"

"Yumi," Sissi paused to take a long sigh. "Do you know why I was really upset? It wasn't because I broke your trust. Ever since Herb and Nicholas left, I realized that I have no friends, no good ones anyway. Herb and Nicholas admired me but never really knew me. Whenever I look at your group, all I see are people being themselves. I can't do that."

"But you can." Sissi rose her eyebrow. "Sissi, ever since you've been here, you've changed. You may have been shallow, bratty, annoying, uppity-"

"That 'but' better come soon, Yumi," Sissi flared out.

"You don't cause trouble anymore, and you're proving you have a heart of gold… more than I do," Yumi said as she rubbed her clothed arm. Sissi shook her head with a slight smile and walked over to her. Putting both hands on her shoulders, face to face, Sissi said,

"We're both trying our best. We're human, we make mistakes, but it's because we're human that we can deal with it. People who don't understand that, well, they're probably as delusional as XANA."

"How would you know?" Yumi asked.

"Something just tells me that he doesn't know much about humanity," Sissi smiled. "Come on, let's go find the others. Oh! Wait a minute." She rushed over to her desk and grabbed something long and wooden. It was a new cane! She held the handle firmly and proudly stomped it on the ground. "There, much better."

"You made a new cane?"

"I've been making a lot of things lately. I had to figure out a way out of my pathetic sob fest," Sissi smiled. The two chuckled as they walked out of the room.

Continued…