To the readers
I appreciate any comments on the story.
Notes
[] are used to indicate stage directions
All dialogue follows a "Speaker: dialogue" format
{} are used for author comments.
CONTINUE
[Grigory is on the factory floor walking toward the elevator. He has his gauntlet on one hand and a pistol in the other. As he makes to push the elevator button, the door opens.
And Grigory gets a flying knee in the face then proceeds to fly across the entire width of the factory to the opposing wall.]
THUD
[He gets his hands under him and looks up to see Ulrich walking out of the elevator.
But not Ulrich in his olive-green jacket. It's Ulrich in his yellow skintight streamline suit, a bandana and two swords in his scabbard on his back.
Ulrich: I've come here to chew bubblegum and kick a$$. And I'm all out of bubblegum.
Grigory: [grunts and stands up.] Finally, someone who appreciates the classics.
Ulrich: [annoyed] Okay, I show up dressed like The Bride, wearing a ninja's bandana, with dual sabers, QUOTING CLINT EASTWOOD, and that's your response?
Grigory: Believe me [recalling something] … you are not the strangest thing I've seen today. Now do you want a rematch?
Jeremy: [comms] Ulrich, you may have an hour, but are you going to waste it talking? As long as you have energy left, you can come back to help Yumi.
Ulrich: Jeremy, please. Who do you think I am? Odd?
Grigory: A quick question before we start. Do you-
BANG
[cuts himself off to shoot.]
[Ulrich deflects the bullet with a slight tap from his saber.]
[beat]
PLINK
[It awkwardly hits the far away wall at the end the room. Ulrich's sword glows blue from the impact.]
Ulrich: Super sprint!
[He runs over to Grigory, a blue contrail in his wake. When Grigory comes into frame, he's in slow mo. Ulrich easily yonks the gun out of Grigory's hand and tosses it away.]
Ulrich: Yonk.
[Time goes back to normal. The blue from Ulrich's sword finishes dissipating.] {The blue glow from impacts dissipates in less than a second. That's how fast he was.}
Grigory: [whistles] IMPRESSIVE. WHAT POWER IS THAT?
Ulrich: Why are you shouting, I'm right- [realization]
[Ulrich spins around and smashes the flat of each blade into the two rottweilers Grigory has signaled with his whistle. Each weapon intercepted them midair and he slammed them to the ground.]
Ulrich: You are not little diggity dogs are you?
[Grigory activates the memory machine and closes on Ulrich's unguarded head.]
Ulrich: Denied.
[Ulrich performs a Lan Fa, a spinning high kick with the back of his foot, and absolutely devastates Grigory's face. This time, he went halfway across the length of the cathedral room and skidded along the factory floor the rest of the way until he hit the wall. Grigory stands up, slower this time, and ducks into the door to the other section of the factory.]
Ulrich: [comms] Our uninvited guest is running to the abandoned part of the factory.
Jeremy: [comms] Ulrich, you're going to have to be more specific. It's all abandoned.
Ulrich: [comms] The part you told us never to go to because it was so in decay.
Jeremy: [comms] Follow him, neutralize him, and get back here. In 5 minutes.
Ulrich: Touchy, are we?
Jeremy: Your power is super speed. I'm budgeting for you messing around.
Ulrich: [grins] Super Sprint. [follows Grigory through the door.]
[The monsters are pouring through the doors of the gymnasium. The ice blaster Sissi and Laura brought is firing white-blue streams into the onslaught. Everyone is hiding behind stacked mats and what sports equipment is in the gym.
And then the Ice blaster runs out. There is nothing that holds the monsters back.
Jim gets hit by a laser and goes down.
Tameia gets hit and falls.
Ms. Hertz is hit.
Sissi is hit.
Cut to the door as two blox block out the light from outside. Then they both fall as Odd and Sam slam into them.]
Odd: Did someone order a, actually no food jokes, I'm too hungry. BANZAI!
[While the battle is going on inside, Diva is waiting outside the gym. She waits until she sees Odd fighting in the gym. She takes the guitar in her hands and twists. The XANA symbols flashes in her eyes as she pulls the head ever so slightly so that its casing cracks apart.
A kankrelat walks up to her. She holds out her arm. The kankrelot charges up a laser.]
PHLEW
[The tiny bot burns her arm, and a scorch mark is painted up the entire length of her forearm. Nothing changes about her face as she is burned.
Cut back to the gym interior. A hornet falls out of the sky and onto Odd, knocking him to the floor. He kicks it off just as a creeper replaces it. Sam sees this, but a blox launches an ice beam across the floor, freezing her and her board to the ground.]
Sam: AH! Odd!
[Odd turns around just in time to see…
The creeper being smash by Diva and her guitar. This hit completely wrecks her "makeshift" weapon and its head falls off.]
Odd: Wow, thanks for the save.
Diva: No problem. I'm always here to help.
Odd: [spots her arm] Hey should you be up? That looks nasty.
Diva: [nonchalant] Oh please. This is nothing. I'm immortal. Here, I found these on the way.
[She slings a bow and quiver of arrows from her back and into Odd's hands with the precision and fluidity of a machine programmed to do so. Before Odd has a chance to say anything, she's already off and toward Laura.
Odd knocks an arrow and aims at the ice around Sam's feet.]
Sam: WAIT! Have you ever fired a bow before?
Odd: No but I have shot a metric ocean liner's worth of arrows.
[He lands the shot at Sam's feet and shatters the ice.
He's grinning fabulously.
Odd fires arrow after arrow, turning the monsters into pincushions.]
Odd: LASER, I mean, REGULAR ARROW, REGULAR ARROW, REGULAR ARROW.
[Under the onslaught of the attack, Diva delivers the parts to Laura.]
Diva: Here, everything you asked for.
Laura: About time.
[As soon as Diva dumps the parts on Laura, she begins to work.]
Diva: [passive aggressive] Fun fact: did you know that if you're nice to people, they respect you.
Laura: [sarcastic] I had no idea such an obscure fact could be so helpful.
[They glare at each other and then go back to what they were doing.]
Laura: [As she starts working with the parts] Weird. These fit perfectly with the robots.
[Cut to Carthage with William and Yumi. They are on the second floor of a tower. Yumi and William both place a hand on the screen.
On Jeremy's screen, there are two bars under each of the avatars of Yumi and William.
Yumi's bar has 8%
William has 0%.
The bars balance out to 4% each.]
William: [swagger] [wiggles his fingers] Codeless no more.
[They both exit the tower. William uses super smoke on himself. Jeremy summons the Overwing. Yumi flips onto it for no reason. They retrace their path to the tower room. The monsters are immediately alerted to their presence and fire. Yumi's vehicle is destroyed. She flies through the air and lands on a manta.]
Yumi: Jeremy, you gave me new fans right?
Jeremy: [smug] Who do you think you're talking to?
[Yumi summons two fans and does a double down strike into the manta.
She jumps to the tower, but the other manta had just released a tracking mine. She notices it just as her fingers pass through the tower wall and…]
BOOM
Yumi LP: 140 - 15
[Yumi falls sparking and devirtualized she hits the fog of the hard kill zone below.]
William: No!
[He throws his sword. It splits one creeper in half and impales another. The only problem, the 2nd one's death explosion sends the sword over the edge. The smoke particles from the monsters' deaths linger.]
William: Damn.
[Yumi is still hurt when coming out of the scanner. She still has all the injuries and burns on her clothes from her fights in the Hermitage and sewer.
Yumi almost bangs her hand on the scanner floor but stops herself.]
Yumi: No Yumi. You're better than that.
[Back on Lyoko, William weaves around monsters with super smoke. Pan to the tower as the mantas lay mines in front of the tower. They blow up just as William zooms to the tower, realizes he can't make it there in time, pulls up, and he's knocked back onto the platform.]
William LP: 120 - 45
[The fight has taken Ulrich and the man with the dogs to the western part of the factory;
A storage unit with tall shelves stacked floor to ceiling filled with dusty boxes. The aisle ends face the wall separating the room from the direction of the rest of the factory, it's only decoration a shutter door allowing access from the other rooms. Unlike the one on the bridge to the factory, this one was off its track which had fallen off the wall on one side creating a triangular gap.
And the opposite wall, a row of tall windows revealing where the section of the factory they are in drops off to the river's rapids outside as they pass around the island the factory is on, letting in light that paints dust motes in the air. There is a door to the small grassy landing on this side of the island. The ceiling was a stratus of beams and broken panes of glass arranged in 6 sections above each grouping of shelves. Elevated several meters above the ground, catwalks crisscross above the aisles below and spread along the 4 walls of the room. The second level can be accessed with a switchback staircase stacked over an office in the corner or a second shutter doorway to the outside where a suspended bridge connected the storage room to the rest of the factory. This allowed supplies to be delivered to the upper levels of the stacked shelves via the catwalks.
[Real Life- by Greek Fire starts playing]
Ulrich runs circles around Grigory in the storage area. He runs up and down aisles, behind, in front, along the tops of the shelves, and straight up the sides, kicking up dust wherever his feet fall. As he's running along the top, he kicks out boxes to drop onto Grigory. The man grunts in annoyance more than anything else.
Ulrich slashes a shelf's supports causing it to collapse on Grigory. Grigory avoids it by smashing through the cardboard boxes on the bottom and into the next aisle.]
Ulrich: Triplicaaaaaate!
As Ulrich attacks while Grigory is getting up, two clones split off from the after trail behind him. One clone aims for the ribs, another sweeps low into the man's ankle, knocking him over. And while he's falling, Ulrich Prime hits him in the solar plexus with an elbow. Grigory flips over himself and finally slams on the ground without moving to get up.
Ulrich: [smiles] We're done here.
[Real Life is dulled and plays softer in the background.]
[Aelita exits the elevator.]
Aelita: Damn it damn it dammit!
Jeremy: Woah.
Aelita: WHY ARE YOU SO CALM? Now we can't deactivate the tower.
Jeremy: Aelita.
Aelita: [panicking] I couldn't do anything and now XANA's army is going to… going to kill-
Jeremy: Aelita!
Aelita: What?
Jeremy: The others can deactivate towers. You'll remember why after the RTTP.
Aelita: But I'm the only one with Code Lyoko. [worried] Right?
Jeremy: Interesting enough, I tried copying it when I was adding new equipment. It's one of those programs that the supercomputer doesn't allow to be copied. Anyway Will will [stutters over the alliteration] …William will find a way to pull through. We always do.
[Aelita sees the security footage of Ulrich and Grigory on one of the monitors.]
Aelita: Um, did I get hit harder than I thought or why does Ulrich have Lyoko powers in real life?
Jeremy: Oh, you like it? It's a little something I've been working on during the break. So, I figured out how to possess us to give us superpowers like the people XANA possesses-
Aelita: Remember that.
Jeremy: -and I figured out how to send our avatars to the real world as something similar to XANA's specters-
Aelita: Drawing a blank.
Jeremy: -But the possession was easily hacked and the specters only lasted 13 minutes even when we docked with a tower the entire time. So I made a few compromises for this and combined the two versions for this. [indicates the screen.] I temporary activated the tower and put the virtual energy into Ulrich's body giving him all of his virtual powers in the real world.
He's invincible, as long as he has virtual energy left that is. The only drawback to this version is that he can't be teleported; defeats the purpose. So, he has to be materialized from the scanner. But if you do run out of energy in a fight…
Aelita: You're toast.
Jeremy: Essentially.
Aelita: But wait? If he has virtual energy like a XANA creature, doesn't that mean he has the weaknesses as well?
[Real Life stops playing]
[Ulrich approaches Grigory.]
Ulrich: Okay, Einstein. Intruder subdued. What should I do with-
[Grigory reaches up and clamps onto Ulrich's leg. Electricity jumps from the glove and covers Ulrich's entire body. It pixelates and distorts while he convulses. He pulls out a second gun, a semi-auto pistol, and lays 6 shots into Ulrich. Each one causes a distortion effect where it hits.
Ulrich solidifies for a split second and…]
Ulrich: Super sprint!
[Grigory's 7th shot misses. Ulrich retreats from behind a shelf at the far end of the room.]
Jeremy: [comms] Ulrich, one more hit and you'll lose your powers.
[Grigory has run to the other end of the room where there's a door to the river outside. He slides in another cartridge as he runs. He tries the door but its locked. He immediately turns around and aims at the aisle he knows Ulrich is in.]
Ulrich: Hey jackhole. I can hear you reloading. And I have one hit left in me. So, if you hit me before I reach you, you win. You better ask yourself a question. Do you feel lucky. Well do ya punk?
[Greek Fire turns back on at full blast for final chorus.]
{Can we live a real life; and know people outside machines?}
[Ulrich sprints toward Grigory.
BANG
Blocks one bullet.
BANG
Blocks a second.
BANG
Slides underneath a third.
Then sabers rocket into the man's gauntlet and his pistol destroying them both.
{"Can we live a real life…"}
Cut to each clone which has each thrown a saber as they jumped into the air.
Ulrich leaps up from his slide to kick Grigory into the air. The first clone knees him in the gut and the 2nd clone Lan Fa kicks Grigory in the face so hard he shatters the window as he flies into the river outside.]
{"…between the devil and the digital sea?"}
SPLASH
Ulrich: Guess it just wasn't your day. Have a nice swim!
[Ulrich's body flashes yellow and he's left in his normal clothes.]
Jeremy: [comms] You're out of energy. Where's your friend?
Ulrich: Eh, he flew off somewhere.
[Cut back to the gym where the monsters are marching into the gym, forcing the motley crew of students and teachers against a wall.]
Jim: [as lasers are flying by.] Reminds me of the time in Chernobl where [fires his nail gun] where I was trapped in a collapsing building with a hoard of rabid racoons streaming in from every direction.
Laura: Done! [threw her arms up as if finishing a test she eagerly wants to be graded on.]
[Laura had finished repurposing a couple of tarantula's arms, a blox's laser, and two creeper heads into laser guns. Students use them to fire back at the monsters. Jim and Odd join in the volley with nail gun and arrows respectively.
Laura finishes another weapon.
And another.
And another.
With every weapon whose lasers where turned back on the robots, the fight gets a little more even.
Pretty soon, the lasers fried from one side are answered by an equal number by the other.
And then the students stop firing.]
Odd: Keep firing!
Laura: They're out of energy.
[There a barely any monsters left. Two tarantulas, two hornets, a couple creepers, and a couple kankrelots.
But enough to be a threat.
Odd looks around to see that everyone else but him and Jim had fallen due to being hit by at least one laser. Jim was trying to make the nail gun work, but it had either jammed or run out of ammo.
And all the monsters were eyeing Odd.]
Odd: [smirks] It's just another day. Nobody can seem to get enough of me. [shakily nocks his last arrow]
[The monsters have surrounded William and are about to fire. He holds out his hand for his sword.]
William: Come on.
[But his gaze is being drawn to something to the side. It's the smoke, the black particles, from the destroyed creepers. It flickered when he put out his hand. He turns his hand toward it. The smoke is sucked toward him and is absorbed into his black suit.
The monsters fire. William fires his hand toward the ground and black smoke explodes from it. The lasers are swallowed up by the smoke. The creepers look unsure of what happened.
Within the cloud, William jerks his hand up. The zweihander zooms up from over the edge, its root covered hilt glowing orange, and plunges into the smoke. Cut to him reaching out within the dark cloud.]
William: [impressed] Woah.
[He slashes the smoke screen apart, the tip just barely scratching the nearest creeper, but it still completely destroyed its head.]
William: XANA! Feel the wrath of a jailbroken avatar.
[He slashes the monsters apart, dashes using super smoke in between their attacks.
William: And the best part… it's ALL. YOUR. FAULT!
William does a continuous combo from monster to monster. He uses smoke powers like smoke screen and levitation in tandem with his sword, lifting up a creeper then slashing it apart. He throws the blade through the remaining manta and pulls it back to him, slicing another creeper on the way, just in time to block a laser. He absorbs smoke from the monsters he defeats. He keeps using super smoke to dash closer and closer to the tower until he outmaneuvers the last monsters and glides into the air…
Right into the tower. He solidifies inside the tower.]
[In the gym, the students are about to be over run.]
[The blue aura covers William and he rises up.]
William: Hmm, so this is what it's like
[William super smokes up through the tower's 2nd level to make it go faster.
He touches the screen.]
[Sissi is guarding another student from a hornet's stinger.]
Text appears.
"William"
It's replaced by
"Cancel activation."
[All the robots collapse. All the students look up half relived and questioning if it's over.]
Odd: Look at them. Their batteries are dead. An entire army and nobody brought a charger.
Jeremy: Return to the Past-
Aelita: [snaps her fingers] Now.
[Jeremy hits enter. Cut to white]
[Fade in to the Rec room on Kadic campus. There's a foosball table over by the far wall by the arch windows and a ping pong table and computer by the far door. On the left of the main door, there's a refrigerator and bookshelf. Lastly, posters and whiteboard are on the walls.
Jeremy, Aelita, and Odd are on the couch. It faced the TV and both are positioned behind a shelf to the right of the door. William and Yumi are on the other two cushion seats in the room that they dragged over for their meeting.]
William: Maybe I should be in charge of deactivating towers now. I am the one who can turn into an untouchable cloud of smoke.
Aelita: [frowns. Harsh tone.] Almost untouchable. Let's stick with the usual for now.
[Awkward silence.]
William: …So, I found out I'm basically Delsin Rowe.
Jeremy: Makes sense we would have never known about it. XANA possession gave you practically infinite access to virtual energy. He hacked your avatar to give you all kinds of advantages until we freed you. Negating the cost of your super smoke abilities appears to be one of them.
Odd: Yeah, about XANA. WHY did it COMPLETELY change its tactics? AGAIN.
Yumi: The monsters didn't care if they were attacking me or anyone else. And the guy Graven called Grigory went after Ulrich and Odd, but not me or Aelita. So, he's not after code bearers? …Why?!
William: I dunno.
Jeremy: Don't know.
Yumi: We'll find out somehow, right?
Aelita: Yeah. Probably.
[Ulrich arrives safely from the woods in the Rec Room.]
Ulrich: [panting] I think I … I just missed him.
[William kicks over the chair from the computer desk and Ulrich plops down, exhausted.]
Ulrich: Now that Lyoko is shut down again-
Jeremy: I didn't shut it down. We are not equipped to deal with this Grigory without ... without…Odd. Name it.
Odd: Uh uh pixelation.
Jeremy: And until we know what's up, no one goes anywhere alone.
Yumi: We still have another issue.
William: Graven.
Yumi: No, there's another scanner in the hermitage basement. [turns to Aelita] With a message from your father.
Aelita: [excited] Oh really, that's- oh. [withers.]
Jeremy: What?
Aelita: [sad] During the attack, I was thinking of how it would feel to finally rescue him and I just remembered that he isn't coming back.
Yumi: So, you remember everything? [Aelita nods]
Jeremy: What did Graven do?
Aelita: I don't think he had anything to do with it. He wasn't anywhere near me.
Yumi: If it was Graven, we can't let you go with him if he can erase minds.
Jeremy: We don't have to worry about him being around. I've thought about it for a long hard 5 seconds and came up with something.
Odd: [counts on his fingers] Voice synthesizer, you whip up some new "undiscovered documents" and a call from my "parents".
Jeremy: Basically.
Ulrich: What's the plan for Grigory? Please tell me I get super sprint again and can rush him.
Jeremy: I came up with a plan to capture him. Come on. I want to check out that scanner Yumi found.
William: But you just said-
Jeremy: [smirks] Oh. They're connected.
Yumi: I've got nothing better to do.
Odd: I said I would meet with Sam, but exploring a creepy house sounds fun.
[They all move to the door to leave. Hiroki approaches them at the door]
Hiroki: [impatient] There you guys are. Ready for the competition to begin?
William: Later Hiroki. Something came up.
Ulrich: [explains] Higher priorities.
William: But we will settle this later.
[Ulrich nods.
As they are walking across the courtyard, Aelita signals to Yumi to hang back. Yumi slows her pace so she and Yumi are in the back of the group.]
Yumi: Yeah?
Aelita: I need something.
Yumi: Sure. Anything.
Aelita: I need you to train me. Today was the last straw. It happened before with other attacks. If I'm not going to be the "princess" anymore, I need to be able to keep up with the rest of you. Otherwise I'm just holding you all back.
[Laura is walking in the dorm. She reaches for the door handle, but then she clutches her head. She brushes off whatever her pain is. She opens her door.
Diva is laying on her bed with a laptop on her legs. Laura ignores her and sits down at her desk.
There are a couple seconds of them just not acknowledging each other.
[beat]
Diva: [suddenly] BTW, some guy in a suit is at the school.
Laura: [doesn't care] Oh.
Diva: He was from that place you had that interview with. Uh, uh, Deckard Inc.
Laura: [immediately interested] Really, where is he?
Diva: He wanted to talk with pixie hair girl. Uh phphph [exhales trying to think] Aelita right? Delmas's office.
[Laura gets up to leave. Diva starts to get up.
Diva: [passive aggressive] Okay, let's go now.
Laura: You don't have to come.
Diva: Do you know what he looks like?
Laura: [submits] Fine.
Diva: Let's go Roomie.
[Cut to the hermitage, looking at the same sign on the decrepit, ivy covered fence that Grigory was looking at.
There is a pan across all 6 of them staring at the hermitage. Aelita is in the front as if holding them back.]
Jeremy: [to Aelita] Are you ready? [reaches out and holds her hand]
Aelita: No. [takes her hand out of his] But let's do this anyway.
[She steps across the threshold.]
Episode 17 end.
AFTERWORD
For those of you that have questions about William's ability, I named his blade energy wave beam (as it has not been named in canon) Heaven Piercer
It's been canon since Triple Trouble that abilities are voice activated. That's why they say them. Also, it's been canon since "Nobody in particular" that XANA's avatars cannot break this rule. William always using super smoke by saying "super smoke" confirms this.
I have fleshed out the mechanics of Lyoko. If you get hit in the head if you are a human player or doubleganger, it's a one hit kill. Everything else reduces Life Points or is specific to the weapon. Such as when Ulrich bisects or stabs through someone with his saber, it's a one hit kill.
Also, I didn't like how William was spamming his Heaven Piercer in "Final Round" but has only done it once per episode in evolution. It didn't make sense, so I added the "avatars always start with enough virtual energy to use their ability once" rule and the "avatars can regain virtual energy" if they block attacks.
You know what? It's long to type virtual energy. I'll just call it VEN.
When they block, they absorb the attack through the weapon and its damage is turned into VEN.
Also, I made William more like a conduit from the infamous series as his smoke abilities are overpowered if he can use them at will and it would add a lot of unnecessary "well why didn't he do this" moments later in the story. But rather than omitting them entirely, I had the idea he absorbs the black particles (virtual smoke) introduced in evolution after he defeats a monster. This allows him room for growing his abilities without making him OP.
Also, this gives a bit of flavor to XANA possession as it explains XANA is basically jailbreaking an avatar, so they have infinite VEN to use on abilities. This makes XANA possessed avatars more powerful by default rather than just giving them a new OP ability and has different implications based on who is possessed.