Four months. I had been living on the Destiny's Bounty for four months. And for the past two months, I had been living there under my real name.
The morning after Nya had tried and succeeded to find out my identity by making me cry (though not in the way she'd intended), I'd revealed my secret to the rest of the group. Kai had been open about his shock while Jay insisted that he'd known all along, despite the fact I was probably the only life-form in Ninjago that he hadn't guessed. Wu had said he should've figured it out sooner, which made me feel slightly better, and I was pretty sure Lloyd still held a grudge against me for keeping my identity secret for so long and thus forcing him to live through the others' constant guessing. The rest of the day went mostly normal.
After that day, however, everyone started acting… different. I thought at first that they were perhaps getting used to knowing who I was, but the behavior kept up. Nobody was really being mean, but everyone seemed to be… avoiding me? And whenever they spoke to me, they seemed nervous. Even Zane fell into the pattern, which made me extremely anxious. I wasn't sure if I'd done something wrong, or if something had happened that I wasn't aware of, but I felt completely alienated.
So one morning after this behavior had been happening for almost two months, I was about to approach Nya about the issue— I assumed that due to the time it started, she had something to do with it—when Zane asked me to meet with him after breakfast. I agreed, aware that the others (although talking to each other) seemed very interested in our conversation.
While Lloyd and Nya cleared the plates, I followed Zane to his quarters, feeling very much like the others were watching us. However, they did not follow.
Once we reached his door, we suddenly stopped. I asked why.
"P.I.X.A.L.," he said suddenly, "I am about to do something, but I need you to trust me. Okay?" His voice was serious, but gentle and not grave. He also posed the question as a request, rather than a demand.
"O-okay," I responded, hoping that whatever was about to happen might explain the recent odd behaviors of the others. He pulled me in close and ran his hand up to the back of my head, opening the port in the back. I trembled violently as he clasped my neurochip, subsequently creating the illusion of someone taking ahold of my entire body. Then I blacked out.
—
The next thing I knew, I was lying on my back, barely opening my eyes to see Nya, Lloyd, Kai, Jay, Zane, Cole, and Master Wu surrounding me.
Opening… my… eyes?
They shot open as I took in a deep breath of oxygen, but I couldn't move my other limbs yet. After a few moments, sensation began to come back to me. I sat up slowly, flexing my joints. There were more than before I had blacked out.
"How do you feel?" asked Cole. The faces around me were mostly nervous, but they displayed excitement, too.
"I feel fine, but what…?" I didn't finish my sentence, for I looked down at my hands— which were smooth and white.
"DO YA LIKE IT?" Kai asked, a little loudly. I flinched along with the others in the room.
"Uh, Kai? Maybe we should show her before she decides," Lloyd said. He seemed more at ease than the others. He then leaned down and pulled a full-length mirror from off the floor, holding it up to me so I could see myself.
My reflection, sitting on a reflection of Zane's bed, stared back at me. She had a normal-shaped body, made from what felt like titanium with a smooth white coating of paint. Yet the many joints on her allowed for much more movement than the clunky suit of armor, and her clear green eyes saw with a degree of clarity that she hadn't realized she'd lost. Probably most surprising of all, her body was adorned with new garments, which upon closer inspection looked to be silk. A surprisingly well-made dress, patterned to resemble the updated gear of Samurai X, flowed across the carefully shaped curves that made up my new body.
"I…" I was at a loss for words.
"I love it," I finally said. I looked around me, awestruck. "Wait… who's idea was this?"
Nya beamed down at me. "The idea and original sketches were mine," she said, "but I had a lot of help."
"I helped with the inner wiring!" Jay piped up.
"And Zane programmed it so that it would be compatible with your neurochip," Cole added.
"Kai did a lot of the sewing on the dress," Lloyd chimed in teasingly, earning him a whack on the head from Kai.
"Well, it was Cole who just happened to know where to go to get the right kinds of fabric," the red ninja added defensively.
The black ninja grinned. "Hey, I'm not denying it."
"And Lloyd kept the stuff hidden in his room until it was ready, since, you know, you sneak into Zane's room every other night," Jay snickered.
"I'll have you know—" Zane started, but Master Wu cut him off.
"And I," said the old man, "was supposedly in charge of keeping you from finding out, although I'd say that my pupils probably didn't need any help in that. They were very cautious… too worried about ruining the surprise, I'd say." He smiled knowingly at them.
Some feeling inside my chest rose up. "You all did this… for me?"
"Well, duh," Nya said cheerfully, "I wasn't about to go the rest of my life with a bad track record. And the boys were happy to help."
"Except when Kai got Nya's measurements wrong and Nya didn't notice," Jay amended. "That was a disaster to fix."
"Hey, I made ONE mistake—" Kai started.
"It did set us back almost an entire week," Zane laughed good-naturedly.
I cocked my head, confused. "Wait—" I processed my own height, chest, and waist measurements, then scanned Nya for hers. They matched exactly. "Why did you make me the same dimensions as Nya?"
"Well," Nya said sheepishly, "For one, Kai already makes me clothing, so we figured it would be easier on him—" I stole a glance at her brother, who was mouthing "zip it" angrily. "—And two, I figured you might still want to wear the Samurai X suit into battle and stuff, so I had to make sure it would fit you. And since I originally built the suit for myself, the most logical route to take was to match our measurements."
"The suit still needs some re-adjustments, by the way," Cole said, "before you can use it with a body again. But we couldn't really work on it while you were inside, so we figured we'd wait until after transferring you over.
I looked around with an overwhelming feeling of… happiness? Gratitude? Relief? I got down from the bed and tried to stand up, though I was shaking.
"Thank you all so much… I… I don't know what to say," I stammered.
"That's enough for me," Nya said, and pulled me into a hug.
"I agree," Zane said with a huge grin, and wrapped his arms around us to crush us both.
"Hey, don't leave me out," I heard Cole laugh as he joined the pile. Before I knew it, everyone in the room (including Wu!) had formed a crushing support circle around me and each other. As individual phrases were drowned out in the mutual teasing and laughing around me, I— once again accidentally prompted by Nya— began to cry.
Two years.
Two years I had been living on the Destiny's Bounty, and I finally,
finally,
felt like I was home.
—
(Author's Notes: yaaay, we did it! XD I really hope you guys enjoyed this ending! A couple of notes: First of all, thank you all SO much for your nice reviews, they've seriously been such a confidence boost for me and inspire me to keep writing. I can't put into words how happy it makes me when somebody says that something I've written has put a smile on their face!
Secondly, I promised to explain the continuity error from the canon of the show that was in the previous chapter. Guest user "A Random Person" cleverly pointed out that it was Nya's idea that SX2 was actually Skylor, but while they are correct, that actually wasn't what I was referring to! (I thought that after Nya shared her theory with Kai, he jumped onboard. You still get points for pointing that out though :D) My error is actually in the timing of PIXAL's transfer to her new body. After rewatching Scavengers multiple times, I realized that even after Nya re-enters the room (with a new binary power cord), PIXAL is still in Zane's body, because she conducts the total electrical overload to fend off the Vermillion Warriors. Directly afterwards, the suit is missing. Due to this, the only moment when PIXAL could've performed the switch to the SX2 suit was during the electrical overload, which, while possible, would imply that her neurochip is... actually still in Zane... woops. [The Hageman brothers said time-travel could be involved in the new SX2, so I fully expect a good explanation!]
Third, I tried to include a link to my AMV in the Cole chapter, but FF apparently doesn't like links. You can find the video by googling "ninjago astronaut amv" or going to my youtube channel, Candaru Driemor.
Last but not least, I drew a quick picture from this last chapter just for fun, which you can find at /j2NVRG. Thank you all for sticking with me through this story and I hope you'll be with me for my next one! ^^)