The lunchroom was fairly crowded, but not so packed that every table was full. Mollie picked up her tray of food and looked around the room. She spotted an empty table at the far end, and made her way over. She glanced over toward the middle of the room and saw Aelita and her friends eating lunch. She stopped walking mid-stride for a second, but turned her head away and continued toward the empty table awaiting her.
All the chairs are taken, anyway, she thought quietly to herself.
"So Einstein, you skipping gym again today?" asked Ulrich, sitting back on his chair.
"Yes, I have to. I'm getting close to a breakthrough with the Sector Five virtualization. I don't have time for Jim's boring speeches and clumsy demonstrations today," said Jeremie with a smile.
"If only we were all so lucky," Aelita joked.
Odd, who was happily wolfing down thirds of his mashed potatoes, stopped eating suddenly and glanced up.
"Odd? What's wrong?" asked Yumi.
"Huh?" he asked, looking at her.
"What were you staring at?" she asked him, turning around to look at whatever had caught Odd's attention. She didn't see anything strange, expecting some small sign of a XANA attack. She only saw the new girl, Mollie, and a couple 7th graders sitting at separate tables, calmly eating their lunches.
"I wasn't looking at anything," Odd said, and Yumi turned back around. "I just remembered we have that big history test tomorrow." He looked back down at his food and kept eating.
Yumi turned back to Jeremie and asked about the virtualization program, while Ulrich, knowing his best friend too well, looked back past Yumi's shoulder to where Odd had been staring and also saw nothing suspicious, just some younger kids and the new girl. He glanced back at his friend and saw him nearly shove a whole banana into his mouth, and wipe it on his sleeve.
Totally normal.
Ulrich mentally shrugged and silenced the question that had entered his head.
"Now then, listen up! You kids may not think running is a real sport, but it is! Why, if you don't know the proper breathing techniques and have enough stamina, you'll pass out right on the field! You wouldn't believe how many professional athletes haven't been taught how to run a simple sprint. I had to demonstrate for the World Cup teams nearly six times-"
"You've worked with the World Cup teams, Jim?" asked Odd with an eyebrow raised.
"Uh, um, well..." Jim spluttered. "I'd rather not talk about it." He turned his back sharply and began pacing slowly in front of his students seated on the field. "Now! The first thing you need to know about sprinting…"
Mollie plucked another blade of grass and slowly began peeling it apart. She let the slivers fall the short distance to the ground and collect on the small pile that had formed. She heard the tap-tap-tapping of someone behind her sneakily trying to text on their phone. She scanned her head around to the right and noticed (well, re-noticed) Aelita's friend Ulrich sitting about two feet away from her, whispering quietly to the boy Odd. He had dark eyes, Mollie noticed; dark, severe, but gentle eyes. Mollie quickly looked up at Jim and tried to get her attention back on his lecture.
"You never want to exert all of your energy on the first few steps. If anything, save it for the last seconds of…"
Is he still going on about this? This is more of a study class than a gym class.
"Now, I'll be picking four of you at a time to demonstrate to me how well you've grasped the concept of a good sprint…"
"Oh, great, just what I needed on my first day: public humiliation," Mollie muttered under her breath. She mentally cringed – running was definitely not her best sport. Ulrich cocked his head slightly to the left and moved his eyes over to Mollie. She saw this out of the corner of her eye, but kept her focus forward, thankful that a blush didn't creep onto her cheeks. Ulrich had looked back to his friends within a second anyway.
Jim called on four boys who hadn't been paying the slightest bit attention from the back of the small bundle of students to be the first runners. They walked the short distance over to the track with Jim following behind. They got in their lanes and prepared for Jim to start them.
Mollie didn't feel, but heard a soft buzzing on the ground near her. She looked with her eyes as Ulrich held his phone in his hand and pressed a button. He read his text quickly and showed it to Odd and Aelita. They both gave him a little nod and raised their hands.
"Jim?" they all called out.
Jim, who had his arm raised above his head ready to swipe down as a mock-flag, flinched sharply and turned to them.
"What?" he sounded slightly annoyed.
"Can we go to the bathroom?" the three of them asked.
"Do you really think that I'm going to let the three of you, of all people, to-"
"Jim, my leg is cramping!" one of the boys complained from his crouched starting position. Jim sighed in frustration and called back, "Fine, fine! Just hurry up!" He turned back the sprinters and began the countdown.
Ulrich, Odd, and Aelita got to their feet and hurried around the sitting group of students, none of whom looked up as they left. They crossed quickly back to the buildings, but, Mollie noticed, headed for the park area instead of around the corner to the nearest bathrooms.
Leaving again, huh? Mollie thought. She shook her head and distantly stared out past the boys running around the track.
*A few minutes earlier*
Jeremie, leaning forward in his lab chair, scanned his eyes across the pages of data. The Sector 5 virtualization was coming along, but there were still big gaps in his program. He was sifting through some recent information Aelita had been able to access from Sector 5 when another screen popped up and started beeping.
"Oh, great, just what we needed," Jeremie groaned. He typed on his keyboard and localized the tower that XANA had activated. He pulled out his cell phone and quickly sent a text to Yumi and to Ulrich.
"Well, I guess all I can do now is wait," he sighed as he pulled his virtualization program back up.
Jeremie had been working on his program for all of a minute, mentally tuning out the annoying alert sound, when the beeping from the computer monitor suddenly stopped altogether. He straightened up with a puzzled look on his face. The window that had shown the activated tower had disappeared, leaving only the virtualization codes scrolling along before him. Jeremie scratched his head and tried to bring the window back up, but it was gone.
"What the…" he ran the activated tower search again, but it brought up no results.
"Again?" Jeremie sat back in his chair, frustrated. He sat for another minute and re-launched the scan, but there was still no activated tower in Lyoko.
Jeremie sighed in confusion. "What on earth is XANA up to?" he muttered, bringing up Yumi's number on the screen and choosing 'dial'.
"Yumi?" Jeremie said when he heard her slightly out-of-breath 'Hello?'. "False alarm; XANA's called of his attack," Jeremie said into the small microphone. He heard her breathing hard as she ran, but stopped short and sighed.
"Another one? Great, I thought I was going to be able to skip that math test."
"Hopefully the next one," said Jeremie with a slight grin. Yumi hung up and her picture disappeared from the monitor. Jeremie then pulled up Ulrich's cell.
Odd lifted the sewer lid off of the opening as Ulrich pulled his vibrating phone out of his pocket.
"Yeah, Jeremie?" he said. Odd and Aelita looked up at Ulrich's phone as if Jeremie were talking to all of them.
"Again? … Are you sure?" Ulrich heard a small sound of exasperation in Jeremie's reply; it sounded as if he'd had to explain this many times before this call. "Yeah, ok. Bye." Ulrich hung up the phone and looked at Odd and Aelita's wondering expressions. He shrugged. "Another false alarm." He turned on his heel and headed back towards campus. Aelita's eyebrows came together in confusion as Odd set the sewer lid back down in its place.
"You mean another tower has deactivated itself?" Aelita asked as she followed Ulrich through the woods.
"Seems like it. Not sure why, though."
"This is getting a little strange," Aelita said slowly. "I think I'm going to go the Factory and see if I can help Jeremie."
"Hey wait, Aelita. If we go back to gym with one less person, I think even Jim might get a little bit suspicious," said Odd.
"Couldn't you make something up?" she asked tentatively.
"What do you want us to say – that you got stuck in a toilet?" Ulrich asked.
Aelita smiled and sighed. "I guess not." The three continued through the trees back to class.
I know something's up. They couldn't all have had to go to the bathroom all at once. Especially after reading that text message… Mollie wondered suspiciously as her three classmates returned to their spots on the ground. They didn't look like they'd done anything wrong… but there was something inside Mollie that was telling her they had gone somewhere else. A clubhouse? Maybe… but why in the middle of class? That doesn't make any sense…
"Young lady, stop your daydreaming and get yourself over on the track!" Mollie started and looked up in front of her at her gym teacher. He was looking at her and pointing to the starting point where Aelita, Ulrich, and Odd were also getting in place for a sprint.
Oh no, not them! I can't race Ulri- ...Aelita and her friends. Mollie felt nervous getting up and mentally scolded herself for not volunteering to go when he- ...when they hadn't been there to see.
Aelita, Odd and Ulrich were in their positions waiting to start when she got to them. As she passed Aelita and Odd, they both looked up and gave her small smiles, Odd's being slightly bigger. She tentatively returned their grins and passed by Ulrich, whose face was smooth and inattentive. Her hands got a little clammy and she hastily wiped them on her shorts before kneeling down next to him. She sneaked a glance over at him and saw that his face had not changed. She noticed he looked…determined? Suddenly, Jim's voice was loud by her ear.
"Three! Two! One!" he made a gunshot noise and Mollie assumed he had lowered his thumb to beside his forefinger to act as a pistol, but she was too preoccupied watching her feet as she ran down the track to look back. She glanced up and saw that Ulrich was already a mile ahead of her, with Odd and Aelita closely following.
Where'd they all learn to run that fast? She crazily wondered as she begged her feet to move faster. It was suddenly all over, though, and she had scrambled across the finish line just barely in last place.
"Well, that wasn't too bad!" Jim called to them from about halfway from where they'd started. "I'm glad some of you actually know what you're doing enough to not look too foolish out here." Mollie knew he was addressing the whole class, but a small blush of embarrassment crept upon her cheeks as the four of them walked back to their classmates. Ulrich, she noticed, still looked calm, cool, and collected… and still stone-faced. She internally groaned. It's going to be a long year.