I've been thinking about this chapter for a very long time, and I'm excited to share it with you, enjoy!
Morgan's pov
Ba-dum...ba-dum...ba-dum...
What was...this feeling?
Ba-dum...ba-dum...
A pulse...a warmth...liquid moving throughout my being...squishy...slimy...disgusting.
Ba-dum...ba-dum...ba-dum
And that beating, that beating that shook me, that would not stop, the sound beat against my head, my ears...
Ba-dum...ba-dum...
That beating that told me I was...
Alive.
I took my first sputtering breath as I fell out of the scanner face first onto the floor.
As soon as my face hit the floor, this, um...thing radiated throughout my head. It was not pleasant. I immediately backed away from the thing that had caused it, the floor. I sat up. My hands reflexively reached for where the bad sensation was. That was pain, wasn't it? The sensation felt when the body was damaged. All I did was fall less than a foot onto the dirt ground. That was enough to already be damaged? Then I was going to have a harder time of this than I anticipated...
The convenient thing about the human body is that it knows what to do to survive. You don't have to monitor it's every movement like you do with a Spectre body. This was one of the only advantages. My new body took breath after ragged breath, trying to get the hang of living. Air came in through my nose and mouth, then it would go out. Every time it went out, there was this sort of longing in my sides that pushed the body to keep breathing. As it breathed, there was sensation in my nose. It wasn't particularly pleasant or unpleasant. And there was still the bad sensation in my face, and sensation all over my body.
There was too much sensation, entirely too much sensation, and not enough data. How did people operate this way? Getting all of this incoming sensation with no information about what exactly it is. Was the whole world just a mystery to humans? Well, that was probably what the senses were for...if I could just differentiate them. I studied this. Smell was gathered by the nose, so the sensation in my nose was smell. Eyes saw, ears heard, lounge tasted, should all else fail, it's touch, which is carried out by the nervous system all over the body.
So I was smelling and feeling...hearing, too, but I was used to that sense. All I heard was a slight mechanical buzz. I could guess what that was coming from. So what was I smelling, I would start with that. Well, what was smell? Smell was a sensation that happened when minuscule particles of surrounding material entered your nose. So...what was it? There was no way to tell exactly, even if I opened my eyes and looked around. I would have to create a mental index of different things I smelled and compare them in order to identify for sure what material went with what smell. Since this was the first and only thing I smelled up to that point, there was nothing to compare it to, and thus had no way of telling what exactly I was smelling. I could take an educated guess, though, if I opened my eyes.
How did I get this thing to move? You just sort of willed it to move, and the nervous system took care of the rest, right? Only one way to find out. I willed my fingers to slowly open and shut. They did without a problem. I tried moving my arms. That worked too. I pushed my hands downward. They met resistance. Resistance was the feeling of solid, but only if it was full stop resistance. If you encountered only some resistance it was liquid or something in between, like...I thought I remembered jello being the example? I pushed down and my body moved up.
Clearly, I had done a considerable amount of research. I had this solution in the back of my mind since I saw how quickly the Skids had been reconstructed. If the Skid could be rebuilt, the multi-agent could be rebuilt. I did what I could to stop them, but there was always the chance they would succeed, and I was not about to let myself be destroyed in the same way my father was. There was no way our legacy would be defeated and humiliated twice.
Even if that meant losing the very essence of who I was.
Even if that meant becoming human.
I opened my eyes. The room was dark, except for small glowing red eye of Xana. This was my screensaver. I pushed down on my arms more until I was in a good position to get onto my feet. I had to lean against the scanner wall to keep myself up. Wow...I was a lot heavier than I was used to. Skin and bone and muscle and blood sure were heavier to carry around than smoke and electricity and a magnetic field...I had to get used to it though. This was the only way I could keep the war going...this was the only way I could live to fight another day. Yes, I had this major handicap, but now I had the element of surprise on my side. The Lyoko Warriors thought I was dead.
I took a few shaky steps out into the middle of the floor, but soon got the hang of it. My muscles had been materialized fully formed, so, biologically, I didn't have any trouble supporting myself. I just had to learn how to do it, and I was a fast learner.
I walked over to the side with my hands outstretched until I encountered more resistance, it was in one flat plane, up, down, and to either side of my hands. It was the wall. As I moved along the wall, some of the material fell off the wall and ran down my hands, I could feel it, and then fell on the ground, making a sprinkling sound. After a moment, my hands encountered a different shape of resistance. Wait, breathe, I needed to not forget to breathe, and to balance...so many things to keep track of. It was a lever that my hands encountered. After some minor difficulty, I pulled the lever.
All the lights went on at once, and my eyes closed again on instinct. Why did they do that? And they were in pain. Not as much as my face had been, but it was a similar sensation. What? Too much light at once hurt the eyes? Or a sudden change in light? Why was this body so susceptible to damage. It was annoying was what it was! This body was annoying.
Gradually, the pain stopped, and I opened my eyes again. I was in the room I dug out in the sewer wall. The room was mostly dirt with wires on the ground and embedded in the walls. There were light bulbs strung up along the ceiling, which was where the light was coming from. The mechanical hum came from the Supercomputer I built in the middle of the room with the red eye of Xana screensaver. Taking up the entire back wall was a large rectangular scanner. Kanky stood, motionless inside the scanner. It was much bigger than him, though. Big enough to, say, hold a Krabbe or Megatank without breaking? The only one it wasn't big enough to materialize was the Kolossus, but that was fine. I wouldn't be needing him.
"Well, Kanky? What do you think of me?" I asked. He was completely unresponsive. He didn't recognize me because I was no longer a Spectre, right. I would have to work something out. It would be useless to materalize monsters if they weren't going to obey me. Maybe a remote control of some sort?
I smirked, maybe my monsters didn't recognize me, but neither did the multiagent. Jeremie's program was simple, at it's core. It scanned all programs it came into contact with for a particular code, a code that linked everything controlled by me or Xana together. That particular code was in us, all the spectres, all the monsters, all the Replikas. Then how was Kanky standing before me? Did I take out that code somehow? No, I did not. That code was still within him. However, it didn't matter. I moved NegaCarthage into this Supercomputer and completely cut of access to the network. With NegaCarthage completely isolated, there was no way for the multiagent to get in. If Jeremie were to install it here, it would be destroyed instantly. If we were to go on the network at all, we would be destroyed instantly. But...there was no need. I didn't need Lyoko or the network anymore...
I was bringing this fight to Earth.
time elapsed since last chapter: like a few minutes
time elapsed since chapter 1: 3 weeks, 2 days
Hope you enjoyed that one. It's really ramping up now, folks. Leave a fav, follow and review, if you would. And as always guys, have an awesome day!~