"And they may still be trying to find her," I finished.
"But if that was the case, why would they have dumped her on the road?" asked Michael.
"Maybe that was an accident. I'm not sure," I said before I turned back to Latias. "Latias, do you remember what happened before you were left on the road?" She looked at me for a second before shaking her head no.
"Well, there's not much we can do right now," began Ryan, "other than protect her here. I mean, we've got an extra bed for emergencies, and I certainly count this as one."
"Yeah, but aren't the other guys going to notice if we keep taking extra food back to our room?" asked Ryan as he tossed Latias a pancake. She caught it and started to eat it slowly.
"We won't know for sure until we try," I said back.
"So what if those guys are really looking for her for something?" asked Michael.
"If that's the case, then we'd better be careful," said Ryan.
"Yeah," I continued. "We'll have to be careful where we take her and where she can go," I said as she recieved another pancake and continued eating. She looked up at me when I said that and frowned slightly. "I'm sorry Latias, but it's the truth."
"Guess you're right," said Michael. "So what do we do from here?"
"I guess all we can do is wait for a while. We'll see if anything goes on. We'll watch the news, buy the paper; we'll do anything we can to get information on these guys," I said. "Let's start by searching the internet for 'em. Michael, where's your laptop?"
"I left it at my mom's place," he said. "Remember when I visited her a week ago? I got bored so I booted up a rom of Mario and started playing that. Regardless, what are we gonna search for on the internet that's going to help us find them? I mean, it's not like we can just boot up Google or Bing and type in, 'secret science organizations of America'."
"Why not?" asked Ryan and I simultaneously.
"I guess it's worth a try," said Michael. "But don't expect anything. If they really are some sort of secret organization, then they aren't going to be advertising themselves."
~Three Hours Later~
"Well would ya look at that," I said after typing in 'secret science organizations of America'. About three results popped up. The first was some sort of club on facebook that was dedicated to dominating the world with bacon. The second was a small page about some guys at a place called Black Mesa. They were spouting stuff about 'changing the world' and 'aliens invading'. The last link, however, led to a black and white window that had a text box in the middle.
"Maybe this is it," said Ryan as he looked over my shoulder.
"If it is, then those scientists must be really stupid," said Michael.
"Maybe we need some sort of code," I said. Latias started hovering behind me and pointing her fingers (or claws?) at some keys. "Maybe that's it," I said.
"That, or she's just guessing," said Ryan. Latias turned and made an angry face at him.
"We might as well try it," I said. I carefully entered each of the keys that Latias continued to point out until the box said something along the lines of AJEIGNS656SJGLSF. Nothing happened so I tapped the enter button a few times. The screen suddenly went blue and an error message popped up.
"Dude, what the hell?!" yelled Michael.
"What'd I do?" I asked him, slightly frantic.
"You just blue-screened my computer! Oh god; if any of my Minecraft saves are gone, you're dead," he said in complete anger.
After a few minutes, Michael shut down his computer, started it back up and sighed in relief. "Everthing seems to be okay," he said to Ryan and I.
"That must've been their site then," I said. "Whatever caused the blue screen must've been some sort of securty measure to stop random people from getting in."
"That's a good assumption," said Ryan. "But if we can't figure out the code, then we'll never get in."
"True..." I said as I went deep into thought. We all sat pondering for a few minutes what we could do to discover the code or get into the system.
"I've got it!" said Michael all of a sudden. "I've got a hacking program on my USB at the school. It's probably still in my desktop computer in class."
"Great!" said Ryan. "So let's go and get it then."
"Problem," said Michael. "My teacher keeps the room under high security lock down on the weekends. He only unlocks it for class."
"Well, you're one of his favorites aren't you?" I asked him. "Maybe you could talk to him and get him to let you in."
"I don't know," said Michael. "He's very protective of his technology. If he starts asking me why I need to get in, then I could get in trouble."
"That's a risk we're gonna have to take," I said.
"Ugh... Fine," said Michael at last. "I'll give him a call and ask him if we can use the lab."
"Great," said Ryan.
"I'll see you guys in a minute," said Michael as he left the room.
He entered again in a few minutes frowning. "Well guys," he began, "I've got some bad news..."
"What? We can't get in?" I asked.
"We've got full access," he said as a smile began forming on his face. "Gotcha!"
"You didn't 'get us' at all," said Ryan.
"He said we've only got a half-hour though, so we'd better get moving," said Michael. "Grab my laptop and let's go."
"Right," Ryan and I said. With that, we all got dressed and prepared to go when a sudden realization hit me.
"Wait a minute, guys," I said. "We can't let Latias be seen. What'll happen if we go out there?" She turned to look at me and deadpanned. She suddenly disappeared for a few seconds before reapearing, smiling at us. "Oh, right," I said, a little embarassed that I'd forgotten one of her key abilities.
We hurriedly stepped out into the sunlight and snow and made our way for the main building that housed almost all of the classrooms and chambers. Latias flew close to me, staying completely invisible. On our way, a few students stopped to look at us and I thought Latias was beeing seen. Thankfully, they all turned away, completely oblivious.
"Sir, a remote connection attempted to gain access to our servers. What should we do?"
"Ignore it. It's probably just some kids mugging about on Google."
"Aye, sir."
As we made our way through the main building, a few janitors stopped to look at us running through the halls, but just dismissed us as we continued. Eventually, we arrived at the lab door. There was no sign of Michael's professor, though.
"Hey, I thought you said he was gonna let us in," I said to Michael.
"He is. One second," he responded. Michael then knelt down next to the handle and pushed a small red button next to the lock. Next to it were a few small holes in the metal that looked like a speaker. "Um, hello? We're here, Mr. Stevens," he said to the lock.
"Alright," came a stern voice through the speaker. "I'll let you boys in." Seconds later, we heard a click come from the door and it swung inward slightly.
Michael pressed the button again. "Thank you, sir."
"No problem," said the man on the other end. "Just don't screw around."
"How's that work?" asked Ryan.
"Electronic lock," said Michael. "He controls it with his phone."
Michael led us inside and then took us to one of the computers in the rows upon rows of them. "Alright," he said. "Hand me my laptop." I gave it to him and he set it down on the table next to one of the monitors. He then started up the computer tower and waited for it to boot up.
While it was starting up, I asked him, "So Michael, how's this supposed to work?"
"Well, basically," he began, and then he mumbled some confusing stuff at me which I still can't make heads or tails of. "In laymen's terms, it's going to try every possible code at the same time. It's likely the computer will crash, but we've got no choice."
Once the computer was booted up, he pulled a usb cable out of his pocket and used it to hook together the computer tower and his laptop. He then took the usb drive he had the hacking program on and plugged it into his laptop as well.
"So why do we need two computers?" asked Ryan.
"I've got a program on my laptop that can allow me to use the ram from another computer for other things. It's how I play Crysis in HD without melting my processor," said Michael. Once the tower had powered up, he opened the program he mentioned a few seconds earlier and started a link to the tower. "Now it's not perfect, being usb and all, but it should get the job done."
Michael then opened up the program off of his usb. It opened and took up the full screen, giving us two options. One was to enter the number of digits in the code we were trying to hack. The other was the URL of the website. After we filled in the info to the best of our ability, a start button appeared under the two boxes.
"Here goes nothing," said Michael as he clicked the start button. Immediately, the computer tower under the desk started to buzz loudly, creating an iritating sound. It soon faded to the back of my mind. After about 30 seconds, both the desktop screen and Michael's laptop screen went completely white. Another few seconds later, the tower shut off and the laptop returned to normal. An internet explorer window popped up and opened the sight we had visited earlier.
Every two seconds, a letter or number would show up in the box. This continued for about 30 seconds before the box turned green and the screen turned blue. This time though, instead of crashing, the screen displayed what looked like a notice.
It showed some long text which none of us took time to read above a picture. At the sight of it, the atmosphere became grave the longer we looked, and the more our hearts filled with despair. The picture on the screen was of Latias.
I instantly felt a grip on my shoulder as Latias, now visible, held it and hid behind me. "Scroll up and read the text," I said.
"Here it is," said Michael. He cleared his throat before continuing and reading the notice out loud. "This creature escaped one of our transport teams and is suspected to be in the state of Washington. If found, attempt imediate capture. If capture fails... kill on sight," finished Michael, the last words coming out of him more as a choke than real words.
I turned around and held Latias, doing my best to comfort her. After all, an order had just been given for her execution.
"We've got to hide her somewhere," said Ryan. "Whoever these guys are, it looks like they're serious about getting her back."
"Yeah," said Michael. "Let me see what else I can find on this website." Michael closed the notice and began to explore the website that was behind it. After looking over it for about five minutes, he discovered that there were several weapon orders sent out to various unnamed companies. There was also some sort of satellite tracking page, a page about orders for different groups, and an alert system which was likely the cause of the message we saw.
Before he got a chance to search for more, his hard drive on his laptop exploded. Literally. Sparks flew from every port on it and the screen shut down. We all stared at the slightly smoking piece of hardware in front of him. "Well, so much for exploring the site," said Ryan.
"It's a good thing I got it insured a few days ago," said Michael with a weak chuckle, still shocked over the sudden death of his computer. He then shut his broken laptop and turned around to face us. "So what do we do now?"
"All we can do now is keep her with us," I said, still looking down at her as she hugged me with her eyes closed. I mostly felt sorry for her. I mean, I just met her last night, but already I felt that she was a friend to us. We were willing to do anything to protect her and help her. "It's not like we can really take her anywhere."
"Let's go," said Michael suddenly. "I feel like someone's watching us."
"Yeah," said Ryan. "I'm feeling it too."
"Okay," I said. "Latias, you'll need to turn invisible again." She looked up at me for a second. "Don't worry. We'll get you out of this." She gave me a weak smile and then turned invisible, eliminating our view of her.
"The door is gonna lock in about three minutes," said Michael. "Security and all."
We quickly left the lab, making sure to take Michael's broken laptop, his usb, and his cable with us. When we got back to the dorm, it was about one in the afternoon. Some of the other guys could have been back, so we decided to sneak her in through our bedroom window. After we got inside, we spent a couple of hours talking about our options and our plan of attack for protecting Latias.
"Sir, I've detected another connection attempting to reach our servers."
"Another one? Where from?"
"It's from some small college in the state."
"Get me a feed of their screen."
"They found a way in, sir."
"Destroy their system."
"Aye sir. Uploading the virus now."
"Good. We don't want anyone finding out about our 'little friend'. Just for the hell of it, bring up the security camera feeds in the room."
"Sir, it looks like they're leaving."
"Good."
Here's the plan we came up with. We knew Latias could understand English, but we didn't know if she could read it. When we asked her to read through some books and then tell us what happened through her telepathy, she did the same thing as before when she shared her memories with me and showed me what she imagined. Sure enough, it was spot on to what the words were describing.
With that out of the way, we thought about what we could do to keep her occupied durring our classes. So, the next day, we showed her how to boot up the XBox and some of our old gameboy games. We withheld Pokemon (for obvious reasons) and any M rated games on our XBox. We didn't want to damage her mind or something. So, to help, we decided to buy her a Wii U for Christmas and some games for it. Of course, that was Christmas which was still a few weeks away.
Then there was the food situation. How were we going to explain sneaking food into our room? That took us some time, but we soon came up with a good plan.
We set up an old minifridge and a microwave in our room so that Latias could make some instant food for lunch. We showed her how to work them and she soon had the hang of it. Every few days, one of us would cut class so that we could keep an eye on her. We also told everyone in our dorm that we had bought a cat to keep us company and, if any of them were ever home instead of in school, they could slip a pancake under the door during lunch for her. Of course, they all thought this sounded strange, but they agreed and asked no questions.
In this way, we kept ourselves out of trouble for the rest of the winter. Christmas morning was the best though. While everyone else had gone home for the holidays, we stayed behind together to look after Latias and spend some more time with her.
She seemed to know what Christmas was and was excited when the day came. She was no fool and had seen that some of the presents under our tree in our room had tags with Latias written on them. So, when Christmas morning was upon us, she tried to wake us all up early. But, like virtually every parent we'd ever known, we stayed in bed for another half-hour, trying to get a little more sleep.
Eventually though, we got out of bed and sat up, eager to see Latias's reaction to the present we had gotten her. We decided to save our presents for each other until later the next night while she was asleep due to what we all told each other was 'the sensative nature of the gifts'. Of course, this gave away what the presents were, but it was a way to protect Latias, just in case.
When she tore open the wraping paper around the cardboard box and saw what was underneath, she looked at us and smiled one of the biggest smiles I have ever seen. She began flying around the room letting out a high "Whoo!" sound over and over. When we got her to settle down, she unwrapped the rest of her presents which were all games for her new system.
We set it up for her and showed her how to switch the input on the tv so she could switch between the Xbox and Wii U at will. Within the hour, we were all playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii U and Rayman Legends together. Despite all of our experience with gaming in the past, she was beating us at everything. Ryan and Michael blamed it on their lack of recent platforming while I congratulated her on beating us so easily when we were all genuinely trying.
All four of us lacked the skill to create any sort of 'Christmas Dinner', so instead we decided to heat up one of those frozen lasagna dinners instead. For us, it was just as good as a chicken.
And that was our Christmas. Video games all day and frozen lazagna. For the four of us, nothing could've been better.