Episode Four : The Birds
Soundtrack: All American Reject's "Move Along."
Chapter Three: Femme Fatales
Aelita hadn't been gone for more then a minute before Sissi got tired of hiding and bounced to her feet, shrill voice ringing in the quiet, bare computer room. "Well? She's gone. We should go too, unless we want to be late. I don't know about you, but I have these little things called 'grades'?"
"That would plummet to their doom if Herve forgets to hand in the homework he did for you, I know," Kloe interrupted, also rising to her feet. Sissi crossed her arms over her pink shirt and hmphed indignantly, but Kloe walked right past her to the computer. "You can go if you want, but I'll happily cut ethics if it means finding out what Aelita and the others are up to." For the first time she could remember, there was something intelligible on the screen: a card of the sort you might find in a video game, showing the picture and stats of a virtual character. Only… the name across the top was familiar, and the character, despite her pointed ears and eclectic clothing, was – from pink hair to the earring dangling from one lobe – unmistakably Aelita.
Curiosity piqued, Kloe began clicking around on the screen, pulling up several other cards in turn: A geisha with a pair of wicked looking fans who was clearly Yumi under the face paint, Ulrich wearing simplified samurai armor and holding a katana, Odd in his trademark purple, a feral grin, cat paws, and a tail, and a girl clad in a flamboyant red trench coat with a bandolier of darts across her chest…
"Light," Kloe breathed.
"Hey – that's you!" Sissi accused.
She ran through a virtual landscape, pulling a dart free… Aelita held by a tentacled apparition… "...fighting an evil supercomputer…" …flying lasers… "that's trying to take over…" "Return to the past NOW!"
"I knew you were in on this!" the principal's daughter continued. "Now, tell me what's going on or… or… I'll bring my father down here!"
"Shh." Kloe commanded, "I'm only slightly less clueless then you, which is a grave insult as far as I'm concerned. Look, remember last Sunday? When I interviewed you, and we found the Factory?"
"How could I forget?" replied Sissi sarcastically, "You still haven't printed that interview, by the way."
"It's in today's paper, if we ever get it out," said Kloe absently. She pulled out the pen tucked behind her ear and turned it over in her hands, poring over the innocuous writing utensil. "Anyway, I could just be crazy, but I think it happened at least twice."
There was the smallest of flickers in Sissi's expression before she resumed her formidable mascara'd glare. "That's ridiculous," she replied. But Kloe hadn't missed that hesitation. What did the principal's daughter know that she wasn't telling?
"There's only one way to find out." Kloe tapped a finger on that one inexplicable character card. "You'll have to virtualize me."
Sissi drew herself up to argue. Kloe sat in the chair and tried to let it wash over her. "Why you? What does that have to do with anything? What is virtualization, anyway? Only you could possibly come up with such a…"
Eventually, she wound down. "Sit in the chair, put on the earpiece, and run the program," Kloe advised when silence resumed at last, "or go back to school. I'm sure you have people to antagonize. I'm going down to the scanner room."
- - - -
Jeremie tapped away at his keyboard, fingers trembling slightly, occasionally stopping to cough. He looked like something the dog dragged in, which probably would have become a pun if Odd hadn't been just as bad. Jeremie's hair was plastered damply against his head, his glasses askew; he was sweating and shivering, often both at the same time.
"Now straight ahead – if you move left, you'll find a log bridge," he said hoarsely into the mike atop his laptop. He was staring at a map, made of faintly luminous blue lines on which a pair of triangles, yellow and green respectively, edged their way left. A trio of red dots blinked suddenly into being at the upper corner of the screen: Jeremie scowled, glanced at some text snaking along the bottom of the map, and added, "More wasps, but only three. Looks like XANA's stretched itself a little too thin." Not that it matters if this virus comes back into the past with us…
In Lyoko, Yumi's fans shrieked through the air. Aelita ducked behind a tree to avoid a rain of lasers. One struck Yumi's kimono, leaving a brief crackle of sparks - and eliciting a "watch those life points!" from Jeremie - but the other two went wide, the fans cut deadly arcs through the air, and the monsters dissolved into mechanical miscellany.
Jeremie nodded to himself. "All right. Once you're across the bridge…" Another green mark blinked into being near the bottom of the screen. "Huh? Yumi, Aelita, you have company."
"Kloe?" Said a piercingly shrill voice, "I ran the program, did anything happen?"
"Yeah. Wow, yeah," said another voice, pitched in the alto range and ready to slip into sarcasm at the slightest provocation, "Umm. Wow. It's a computer game, only… not." A pause. "There are two other people… uh-oh…"
"Jeremie?" Asked Aelita, "Is that Kloe?"
"Who's that?" Sissi demanded.
Jeremie typed frantically; past the shivers and Kiwi licking his shoe it was hard to concentrate. "Uh – she must have virtualized herself at the Factory."
"I 'virtualized' her, if that's what you call it," said Sissi peevishly, "And I demand an explanation now!"
Jeremie coughed. "It's complicated. Hold on a minute – Kiwi, would you stop… Kiwi?"
"What is it?" Breathed Aelita.
"I'll tell you later. Take Kloe with you, the Tower is dead ahead. Sissi, watch the screen for red dots, shout if you see one." Jeremie's sickness was forgotten in a rush of excitement.
"Where are you go-" Yumi's voice was cut off as Jeremie toggled off the microphone, closed his Lyoko map, and connected to the Internet.
- - - -
Kloe raced across the log bridge, never glancing at the vast, misty void below, and drew to a halt by Aelita and Yumi, panting slightly. In her long, red trench coat and heavy boots, she should have been sweltering, but there didn't seem to be any temperature, in the same way the bandolier across her chest should have been heavy from the weighted darts hung in it, but didn't seem to affect her at all – as Elyse had deduced from Kloe's pirated fragments, it was a video game, albeit a video game more vast and complicated then anything ever before created. "I've been here before," she stated, or asked, as she joined the other two girls. "But I couldn't remember."
"No, you weren't," Yumi corrected, "We went back in time. There's no way you can remember. As far as you're concerned, it didn't happen." She began walking, straight forward.
"That makes no sense," came Sissi's voice from nowhere in particular.
Aelita shrugged. "But Jeremie said the return-to-the-past program is bugged. Maybe it decided Kloe was one of us when she went into Lyoko. That was how it operated originally."
"Does that mean I'll remember this time?" Asked Kloe, with some enthusiasm at the prospect.
"And what about me?" Sissi added.
Aelita shrugged. "Jeremie might know."
Kloe nodded, accepting for now, if not content. "Speaking of Jeremie, wha- whoa!" The last was the result of nearly stepping onto empty air; the trio had reached a place where the ground split, creating a sheer drop into the mists of the virtual void.
Aelita peered across it. Somewhere on the far side, a bone-white cylinder wreathed in red was dimly visible. "Aah…" Sissi's voice hummed, "there's a black patch on the map in front of you…"
"It's a bottomless abyss," Kloe corrected dryly. "Is there any way around it?"
"Aelita," Yumi asked, "can you-"
"No," the elf cut her off, "This wasn't put here by XANA, it's part of the original code. I can't change that. We'll have to go around."
"Is there any way around it?" Kloe reiterated, faintly irritated at the way no one had listened to her the first time.
The sounds of Sissi puzzling through the intricacies of Jeremie's map floated through the air. "Alright," she shrilled at last, "turn left."
Aelita shook her pink head. "Oh, Jeremie…"
- - - -
Ulrich slipped, shivering, through a world of vague and uncomfortable half-sleep, sometimes dreaming, more often painfully awake, trying to preserve what strength XANA's virus hadn't sapped from him yet. If Jeremie faltered, he would take over – what exactly he could do he didn't know, but ignorance had never gotten in the way of Ulrich's iron-hard determination. If XANA won today but the group survived, they would keep going because the brown-haired soccer player was in front. Some people mistook his bouts of angst for weakness, Ulrich breaking under stress, but that was a mistake; while he bent easily, he could bend almost indefinitely, until you hit something hard. Yumi had some of the same quality, which was probably why he… admired her.
"Ulrich?" called Jeremie, as though from a distance. The world slowly came into focus; a pair of glasses resolved, followed by the sweat-slicked, miserable face on which they were worn. The computer operator was standing over the bed, one hand on the frame for support. Ulrich levered himself up on his elbows; the world spun, but he thought he could make it to his feet, maybe even walk if called upon. "How do you feel?"
"Like something a krab dragged in." Ulrich managed, "Yumi? Aelita?"
"They're fine, but going back in time isn't going to solve this. Can you walk?" Jeremie asked. The bespectacled boy didn't look like he'd be doing anything of the sort, but Ulrich had been resting. By way of answer, he rose into a roughly standing position, only needing to grab his friend's shoulder once for support.
"What do you need?" he asked. Jeremie handed him a fresh printout, already crumpled from his unsteady grip.
"All this. Go to the science lab, or the nurse." Ulrich looked at the paper; it appeared to be a short list of equipment and chemicals. "I don't have time to explain," Jeremie added, "We have less then half an hour before we're out like Odd." Ulrich glanced over at the opposite bed, where only the blonde, spiky tips of their friend's hair were visible above the covers.
"All right," he responded, and headed unsteadily for the door.
The hallway was long and silent – too silent even for this early hour, except for the occasional, ringing fit of coughs from one of the dormitories. Ulrich walked up it as quickly as he could, footsteps echoing along the empty corridor. Everywhere in the school was the same, students transferred to the infirmary or sent back to their dormitories when they took sick. It had spread so quickly… but the news reported birds were the main vectors, and Odd had admitted Kiwi had found a goose on the grounds, so between the close quarters of the school and the amount of small animals to spread the plague, it was hardly a surprise.
The science lab was both deserted and, by some miracle, unlocked. Ulrich lifted the list with one hand and grabbed the corner of a desk with the other; the words danced and wavered on the page. Microscope. Syringe – might have to go to the infirmary for that one…
- - - -
Yumi, Aelita, and Kloe raced through Lyoko to the rhythm of hurriedly gulped breaths and pounding feet. The long path ahead of them cut right, and they turned, slowing slightly. "The pulsations are getting stronger," Aelita reported.
"Right," said Sissi's voice, "Umm… you'll have to turn right again soon. Umm… Eep!"
"What?" Yumi demanded impatiently.
"Red dots, three of them. No, four!" Sissi reported frantically, "What are they?"
Yumi spun to face up the path; Kloe turned downward, slipping a pair of darts free of their holsters. Three spiked creatures, distorted domelike shells mounted on scuttling legs, raced down the path towards her. Yumi glanced backwards. "Kankrelats. Aim for the symbol on their shells."
Sissi blinked at the screen as a pair of character cards appeared on the screen; Kloe in her British-army outfit and three thorny, scuttling creatures, joined by the letters 'vs.' She tried clicking on them, but it didn't seem to have any effect.
Kloe let the two darts fly, then leapt to the side as three lasers zinged through the air. Her adrenaline, or its virtual equivalent, was up, and she found herself grinning. Had Lyoko been designed as a video game? If it ever got onto the market, it would be the biggest fad since jeans. This was what people played video games for – and it was all real. She tossed another pair of darts and twisted away from the lasers, reveling in ludicrously augmented reflexes as she danced with virtual death. One laser grazed her, but it didn't hurt precisely, just struck crackling blue sparks that tingled unpleasantly. There were only two kankrelats remaining now; one of her darts must have struck home. She darted between the pair and froze, feeling their eyes on her. Wait… then… jump!
Two lasers fired. Both hit, although not their intended targets, and Kloe landed in a pile of dissolving mechanical components. "Thank you for holding your applause until the end," she told the other two, sketching an exaggerated bow, drunk on the thrill of battle.
Yumi's look clearly indicated that she was not amused. "I thought there were four," she said, flipping her fans shut, but keeping them in her hands.
"Mmm…" Sissi peered at the screen. "One of them must have left!"
Yumi let out her breath in a half-growl, but Aelita began walking. "We'll find it when we find it, but if one of XANA's monsters decides not to attack us, I'm not going to… what's the expression?"
"Look a gift horse in the mouth?" Kloe suggested.
"Maybe," Aelita shrugged, "Although I'm still not certain how beasts of burden come into it.
Kloe did, but she wasn't about to start a discussion of obscure etymology with a girl from a computer. Besides, in XANA's case the expression didn't hold exactly – they would be checking to be sure the proverbial teeth were pulled.
- - - -
Ulrich collapsed on the bed, spilling delicate equipment across the vacant mattress, coughing and shivering violently. "Here… you go… Jeremie." His eyes closed, and he slumped back against the wall.
Jeremie pushed himself out of his chair, hoping he still had enough time. Carefully selecting one of the chemicals Ulrich had secured, he loaded it into a syringe and injected it into his own arm; then, pausing briefly to check Ulrich's pulse, he got to work. "Kiwi!"
- - - -
Yumi released her fan with a high-pitched "Yah!" as another kankrelat materialized in front of her. The scuttling creatures were beginning to get on her nerves, but XANA didn't seem capable of more then minor annoyances today. "Jere- Sissi. How many life points have I got left?"
"Life points?" squeaked Sissi.
"Bar on the bottom of the card? Red dots?" Yumi hinted, beginning to run again.
"Umm… not a lot?" Sissi hazarded.
A laser zinged through the air from the stinger of a frolion. "Actually, you don't have any," Sissi continued as Yumi dissolved into fractal squares. Kloe whirled, a dart whipping from her fingers to destroy the wasp as it tried to target her.
"Yumi's out," she reported, "Looks like it's just you and me, Aelita."
The elf nodded, looking less then enthused at the prospect. "We're nearly to the Tower," she said, gazing out at the bone-pale cylinder to the front and right. Then she began to run again; Kloe followed.
- - - -
Odd opened his eyes. Something was licking his face. "Kiwi?" He pushed the dog away and sat up, feeling as weak as if he had just been devirtualized. Jeremie was leaning over him with a concerned expression, looking pale and unsteady, but neither shivering nor coughing. "So, Princess did her thing?" Odd quipped, trying to give his friend a reassuring smile. Jeremie breathed a sigh of relief and turned back to the desk, where a microscope had been hooked into his computer, and various titration, distillation, etcetera-ation apparatus had been arrayed. Lifting his glasses, he peered closely at an unpleasant-looking liquid, then loaded it into a hypodermic needle.
"I don't know," Jeremie responded, holding the needle in his teeth and grabbing a damp cotton ball lying next to a bottle of peroxide. Ulrich was lying prone on the bed under Jeremie's poster of Albert Einstein; Jeremie swabbed a patch on the boy's inner arm and injected his unsavory-looking chemical concoction. "I'll check while Ulrich's coming around." Tossing the spent syringe in a wastebasket by his desk, the bespectacled computer operator sat down at his laptop and began to type.
- - - -
The lustrous doors of one scanner tube slid open, and Yumi fell forward as though shoved out. Back aching in memory of that last laser, she rose to her feet, darted for the elevator, and jammed down the button.
- - - -
Sissi sat at the computer, putzing around with buttons and feeling quite pleased with herself. Maybe she hadn't taken as active a role as Kloe, but she had certainly shown Ulrich and the rest of them what an asset she was. As if they hadn't known already! Well, now she would shove it in their faces. They wouldn't be able to shrug her off as easily as they had after that leaf monster fiasco, which they probably still thought she didn't remember. That just proved…
The elevator doors clicked. "Huh?" Went Sissi, turning to meet the full force of a frantic Yumi charging out like an Olympic runner off the starting block. "Is Aelita almost to the Tower?" the black-haired girl demanded, seizing the mouse.
Sissi stuck her nose in the air as Yumi clicked around the screen, refusing to budge from her seat. "Maybe. Why?"
"I need to find Jeremie's return-to-the-past program," said Yumi, which wasn't much of an answer. "And hope I'm not too late…"
- - - -
"We have arrived," Kloe announced theatrically, although her lack of breath spoiled the dramatic effect. The last few yards to the Tower they had been chased by a tarantule, which was still tailing them – even as Aelita touched her hands to the smooth white exterior, lasers flew and Kloe vanished in a shower of flickering squares. The virtual wall rippled and Aelita stepped through, feeling it part like liquid around her. The concentric circles of XANA's symbol lit with musical chimes as she walked passed them; a familiar weightlessness swept over her and she held herself stiff as some invisible force bore her gently up to the top platform of the Tower. A blue screen hung at chest height, tilted invitingly towards her. She rested one hand upon it.
IDENTIFICATION: AELITA
CODE: LYOKO
The world around her dissolved into black. "Tower deactivated," she whispered, and the last number winked out with a noise like the world on rewind.
- - - -
"Here it is!" Yumi exclaimed. Sissi tried to look past the black clothing of the other girl to see what she had found, but Yumi was already hitting the 'enter' button. "Return to the past now!"
White light exploded outward.
- - - -
Aelita padded down the hallway of the silent school and rapped gently on Jeremie's door, dreading what she might find. For a moment, she shivered – and it had nothing to do with the flu or the thin pink fabric of her nightgown.
Then the door cracked open to reveal Jeremie's familiar glasses. "Come in, Aelita."
She obeyed, the wooden floor chill under her bare feet. Odd was sitting on one bed, petting Kiwi and grinning like the maniac he was; Ulrich had taken Jeremie's usual chair, and his expression was one of more subdued relief. Aelita felt herself relax for the first time since Jeremie had reported an active Tower. "So – we went back in time?" She asked awkwardly.
Ulrich smiled. "Actually, it's thanks to Jeremie we're still here."
Jeremie shook his head and lead Aelita over to a free space on the edge of his bed. "Kiwi gets a lot of credit too," he said.
"Yeah…" Odd mused, "Want to explain that one to us again?"
"Alright." Jeremie never turned down a chance to demonstrate his genius. "The plague XANA created was targeted against humans specifically – so Aelita wouldn't get it, I think. But it also wasn't fatal to animals. Kiwi there recovered, and his immune system created antibodies to the virus. All I had to do was use his antibodies to give us a leg up, and our white blood cells could do the rest!"
Odd nodded. "Okay – you want to explain that to us again again?"
- - - -
The world… lurched. Kloe put one hand to her head as a sense of nauseating vertigo swept over her, rearranging everything and leaving her stranded in what felt distinctly like the wrong place.
But that was ridiculous. The Factory was exactly where she had to be if she ever wanted to find out what Jeremie and his gang were up to.
The elevator doors clicked shut on William, and Kloe dragged herself back to reality. "Did you feel that?" She asked Sissi.
The principal's daughter glared haughtily. "Feel what?" But under her makeup, she looked as queasy as Kloe felt. "Get your code and lets get back to the school."
Kloe shrugged and pulled out her flash drive. "So – William. Is he hot or is he hot?"
"Forget it. He's smitten with that Yumi girl too."
And the elevator swept upward, carrying William to the top of the Factory. In the instant as the doors closed, his expression shifted as quickly as a jump cut, leaving him glaring at the door as if it had offended him personally and clenching one hand into a fist. "Again!"
– Fin –