Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Okay, now, one more time…”

“Odd, I’m not doing it again.”

“C’mon, please? I just wanna see it again.”

“For the last time, no - and put that camera down!” Ulrich lunged for the camera, but Odd pulled away to the opposite end of his bed, nearly knocking Kiwi off in the process. 

“Ack - hey-!” Odd looked behind him to make sure Kiwi was still safe, then turned back to Ulrich. “This isn’t anything - just pretend it’s not here!”

“Hey, I only showed you the distraction because I thought you’d just laugh and let it go.” Ulrich grimaced. “You’re not gonna show-”

“I’m not gonna show it to anyone!” Odd looked up from the camera’s viewfinder, and pursed his lips. “Well…not really.”

“Not really?”

“Well, I was only thinking of looking at it myself, or…” Odd hesitated for several seconds. “Or, putting it in the background of an experimental film or something -”

“ODD!”

“It’d be just for fun, though!” Odd said. “Like an Easter egg. It’d only be a footnote on some movie trivia website-”

“I already said, no.” Ulrich paused. “Not unless I get a cut of the profits.”

“The profits?” Odd laughed. “I don’t make my films for money, Ulrich, I do it for the sake of the medium.”

“Yeah, sure, the sake of the medium. I’ll ask you how that’s going in ten years.” Ulrich got up off the bed, and resumed his previous pesition. “Fine. I’ll do it. But only ‘cause I know you’ll never leave me alone about it.”

“You wouldn’t be doing it if you didn’t want to.” Odd pressed several buttons on the camera, and then held it back up to his face.

He’s right, Ulrich thought, but I’d never tell him that. “Alright,” he said, and took a deep breath. “So, I was in the middle of the courtyard, and Sissi and I were surrounded by… zombies…”

“Go on, go on…” Odd paused, and then made a face. “Wait, no, start over, I don’t want that in there.”

Ulrich groaned, loudly, as Odd reset the recording. “Fine. I was in the middle of the -”

“Sound happier!” Odd yelled. “Or less angry!”

“I was in the middle of the courtyard,” Ulrich said, perfectly deadpan, “And Sissi and I were surrounded by zombies, and we needed to get her back inside. So I decided to create a distraction, but I didn’t have much time to think about it…” 

Odd waved Ulrich on, and pulled the camera back. “So I did…this.” Ulrich shook out his arms, planted his feet firmly on the ground - and then started stamping up and down, shaking his arms and bobbing his head. “KIIILLLL THHHEEE ZOMBIIIIEESSSS!!!”

He heard a loud, sputtering sound, then saw the camera fall as Odd dropped back on his bed, laughing hysterically at him. “There, I did it,” he said, stopping his act. “Are you happy?“

“Oh man -” Odd sat back up, wiping a tear from his eye. “That’s still the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” He looked into the camera, and pressed several buttons. “And…I got it! Banzai!”

“So can I go to bed now?” Ulrich was already on his way to turn out the light - this time he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. 

“Yeah. Go ahead.” Odd fell back on his pillow, holding the camera above his head. Ulrich switched the light off, walked back across the room, and dropped onto his bed, hoping he’d be able to get to sleep before Odd said anything else. 

He had no such luck. “Sooo,” he heard Odd say, “If Yumi ever saw this…”

“Don’t you dare, Odd.”

“Hey, hey, it’s just a thought.” Ulrich heard the sheets on Odd’s bed rustle as he spoke. “Just a thought.”

Chapter Text

“Come on, Jeremie! Aren’t you going to come any further out?”

Jeremie uncurled slightly from his position on the park bench, running his hands up and down his bristling bare arms in an attempt at generating warmth. Next to the cold, grey sky and the dark, churning waters of the English Channel, Aelita looked far too much out of place. “It’s alright,” he said. “I’ll just watch from here.“

“Are you sure?” Aelita smiled, and whipped around to face the Channel. “It’s beautiful. You can convince yourself that you can see England from here.”

How couldn’t she be cold in a sundress? Why wasn’t she shivering when the wind was whipping through her hair like that? “Really, it’s fine. I’ve pretended to see England plenty of times.” 

Aelita turned back to look at Jeremie. Her face had fallen slightly, and in that moment he felt a sharp pang of regret. “Is everything okay?” 

“What - no, I mean yes!” Jeremie jumped up. “Everything’s fine! It’s just cold. That’s all. And it’s colder by the water.”

Her frown was out in full force, now. “You’re clearly not having fun.”

“I can’t hide anything from you,” Jeremie mumbled.

He hung his head, staring down at his shoes and the miniscule grains of sand that had to be sneaking their way into his socks, even when he was sitting still. He heard the soft sound of Aelita’s footsteps, and watched her dress spread across the other half of the bench as she sat down. 

“I’m sure this wasn’t what you had in mind when I told you I lived on the coast,” he said. 

“Well, yes, yes I did,” Aelita said. “I’ve lived here most of my life, Jeremie. I know how the northern shore is.” 

Most of her life, Jeremie thought, apart from the years she lost. “Right,” he said. “Yeah, that’s…”

“It’s fine,” Aelita said. “Everything’s fine.”

Jeremie sighed. “No, it isn’t.”

He looked up to find that Aelita was fixing him with more of a look of confusion than concern. “Jeremie, we’re having a fun time,” Aelita said. “It’s okay. Really.”

“I could’ve taken you somewhere better.”

“You’ve taken me somewhere that’s you.” Aelita’s smile was small. “And that’s all you ever needed to do.”

Somehow, Jeremie found that hard to accept. But he could tell that Aelita believed it, and believed that it was a good thing. “You mean besides the Lyoko missions?”

Aelita sat still for a second, then smiled. “Well, yes. But that isn’t just for me. It’s for the world.”

It’s mostly for you, Jeremie thought. You are my world. “That’s right,” Jeremie said. “Right…”

“You really have convinced yourself I’m not having fun, huh?” Aelita shrugged, and stood. “Well, I can’t exactly stop you. But if I do have fun, I think I’d have more if you came along.”

Jeremie hesitated, but only for a second before he extended his hand to her. “Well, then. Lead the way, Princess.”

Aelita took his hand, sputtering with laughter. “I don’t believe it. You’re a cornball.”

“You mean a cheesehead.”

“A big fat one.” She turned for the beach. “Come on. Let’s go for a walk."

Chapter Text

“Hey, Yumi, Odd! What’s the situation?”

“Jeremie! There you are, finally!” Yumi struggled to cradle her phone between her ear and her shoulder as she ran. “The mid-level is clear, but we haven’t been able to get to the top of the tower yet- ODD!”

Yumi dropped the phone into her pocket and ran for the nearby stairs, following a crackling noise and an loud yell. She saw Odd go flying across the deck, away from the stairs, but caught up to him just in time to catch him in her arms.

“I thought you were following me!” Yumi said. 

“Hey…I thought you thought that too,” Odd said, dusting himself odd. “I just wanted to make sure-”

“If they were safe, I think we’d know by now.” She fished her phone out of her pocket. “It’s not just the elevators. He’s constructed some kind of electrical barrier around the stairs, too. It’s too late for us to get through -”

“There you are!” Jeremie interrupted. “What happened?”

“Odd threw himself at the stairs,” Yumi said. 

“I was trying to solve the problem!” Odd yelled from behind her. 

“Okay, that was stupid, but it did do the job.” Yumi could hear the news coverage Jeremie was watching in the background of his call, though all she could make out was “…mysterious hostage situation at the Eiffel Tower.” “Listen, there’s a breaker box on the other end of the deck, right next to the gift shop. If you can trip the breakers, it might give you enough time to get to the top. It won’t stop him, but it might give you the time you need to take stock of the situation and protect everyone still up there.”

“Protect everyone?” Odd said, grabbing the phone. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re just two very electrocute kids! What about the police, or the army? Did you say they were outside?”

“They haven’t been able to get anywhere near. He’s been messing with their controls. I’ve been trying to counter him, but this is the best chance we have. Now, go!”

Jeremie hung up with a click, and Yumi and Odd took off across the platform. The shops and restaurants they passed seemed surreal in the context of the work they had to do. “I never even knew all this was up here,” Odd said. “You’d think it was all just a hunk of metal from the outside…”

“You’ve really never been here until now?” Yumi stopped to give Odd a quizzical look. “It was one of the first places my parents took me when we arrived from Japan -”

“I really would love to hear all about it, but I’m gonna need silence for this!” Odd took a flying leap for the fuse box, and easily picked the lock, exposing the many fuses. He and Yumi pulled them all down at once, plunging the deck into darkness - and giving them the chance they needed.

“Go, go go go!” Yumi yelled as they headed for the stairs. They were able to pass through with ease, and began making their way up. It’d be a long, long climb - but until the Return to the Past came through this really was the only thing they could do. 

“One down, six hundred to go,” she mumbled. What was taking Aelita so long? 

===

“Hey, Jeremie! How’s it going out there?”

“Fine,” Jeremie said, adjusting his microphone. He turned the volume on the news coverage down, to better hear Ulrich. “If you think two thousand tourists still trapped in a giant lightning rod is doing fine.”

“Are the tourists okay?”

“I haven’t heard otherwise from the news, or Yumi and Odd.” On one side of his screen he saw video footage of multiple military helicopters struggling to get anywhere near the Eiffel Tower. On the other, a wireframe model of Lyoko, with two dots for his teammates and one more for the monster. 

“Then as long as we can get to the tower, by our standards, that’s pretty fine.” Ulrich spotted something moving out of the corner of his eye, and leapt off the back of the Overbike, falling in an arc onto the top of what turned out to be a Blok. He leapt to avoid its spin throwing him off, landed again, and shoved his katana into its eye. “Agh! Impact!”

The Blok exploded beneath him, sending him onto the ground. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Aelita swing the bike around, coming to a stop at Ulrich’s feet. “Impressive,” she said. 

“Yeah, but we’re not out of the woods yet.” Ulrich stood, dusting himself off. “We have to get to the tower before something happens on the…well, the tower.”

“We do.” Aelita turned the bike in the direction of the activated tower. “But as far as immediate danger, I’d worry about Odd and Yumi. XANA may be dangerous, but more than that, he’s vain. If he has us, he’s going to give us all his attention…” 

The tower was just a few degrees over from the nearest ice shelf - but in between the two points sat two Krabs and five times as many Kankrelats. The Kankrelats were still walking back and forth, surveying the landscape, but the Krabs had spotted them, and they were heading their way.

“Case in point,” Ulrich said, drawing out his sword. “Don’t worry, though. They’ll be gone in a flash!”

“Of course they will.” Aelita nodded, then dropped to her knees, singing a high note as she spread out her arms. Ulrich took this as his cue. “Super Sprint!”

He ran up the shelf and over the ramp that Aelita had formed, doubling his speed as he soared over the Krabs, aiming his sword at their heads.

Chapter Text

“Well, Jeremie?”

Jeremie twisted the stick around in his hands, looking across the bonfire at leach of his friends. “Well…what?”

“You picked the short stick, so you have to tell the first story,” Aelita said. “Isn’t that how it works?”

“Of course it is, but this isn’t the shortest stick!” Jeremie held his stick out in front of him, dangling it dangerously close to the fire. “It’s definitely longer than Ulrich’s.”

“Uh, no it’s not,” Ulrich said, holding up his own stick. “The stem is definitely longer.”

“Uh, yeah, but the branch sticks up higher,” Jeremie said. “No one said the stem had to be longer, just the stick.”

“Boys, this isn’t rocket science,” Yumi said. “Someone tell a story, before the fire goes out.”

Jeremie wanted to tell her that they had enough wood to last at least another hour, but he had a feeling she already knew that. “Well, if you guys want me to tell a story that badly…” Jeremie tapped his chin. “Let me think, let me think…”

He had no love for the stories he knew they wanted to hear - or any idea where to begin with making one. But he was buoyed by the sight of all their eyes on him, eagerly waiting for him to begin. “Well,” he said, “one time, I was working on this program to strengthen some of the back-end structures on the wireframe matrix for the Overwing. It took me hours just to rearrange everything, and then, when I was done… it didn’t work. It just wouldn’t respond to anything I was doing. I couldn’t even get the Overwing to materialize in Lyoko. So I knew I’d hav to look through every line of code I’d written, which was just about 400 lines at that point…

“…and it turned out it was just a typo,” he said. “All that effort wasted just because I’d forgotten an end tag on line 268. It’s every programmer’s worst nightmare!”

His burst of frustration was met with silence, and awkward grins from his friends. The exception was Aelita, who’d been listening with rapt attention. “Oh, I remember that,” she said, covering her mouth. “That was an awful night, and it really was very scary. We could’ve lost the Overwing for good!” 

“Exactly,” Jeremie said. “And that’s why you always have to be careful. Even if you think you know everything.”

“Well, Jeremie,” Odd said, “that was…”

“Unusual, but defintiely understandable,” Yumi said. “I wouldn’tve wanted to lose my vehicle. So, thank you. And…so, I guess Ulrich is next?”

She flashed Ulrich a smile, which made Ulrich quisibly quake in his shorts. “Ah, well,” he said, “well, there was this bonfire, and a bunch of kids were-”

“Oh, come on!” Odd said, rolling his eyes. “The old “a night just like this” cliche never works.” 

“Are you saying you can do better?” Ulrich said.

“Ulrich, you’re looking at a master storyteller here.” Odd spread his legs out wider, and cracked his knuckles. “So, this one night, when the moon was full, a werewolf, a vampire, and a vacuum cleaner salesman-”

“Too cheesy,” Ulrich said. “Next!”

“Hey, you didn’t even let me start!” Odd said. “You’re missing out on something great!”

“Great, like what?” Aelita said. “You can defintiely finish, Odd.”

“Like this,” Odd said. “So they had this arrangement going, where the vacuum cleaner salesman would… go up,and he’d knock on peoples’ doors, and when they’d answer, the vampire and the werewolf would take turns eating whoever answered the door!”

He cupped his hands into claws, and made scratching motions at Aelita. Aelita giggled a bit, which seemed to buoy Odd. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. “See? A crowdpleaser. On…some level.”

“But, wait a second,” Jeremie said. “Was the vacuum cleaner salesman getting anything from this? He wasn’t even selling any vacuums.”

“And why didn’t they just eat him instead?” Yumi said. “Did they really need him to get what they wanted?”

“That part actually makes sense to me,” Aelita said. “Vampires can’t cross thresholds unless they’re invited. The salesman would be able to make their victims cross the threshold.”

“Wait, they can’t?” Odd said. “I mean, of course! Of course they can’t!”

“But then where’s the werewolf come in?” Ulrich said. “Why are a werewolf and a vampire even working together? And does it mean they can only do this once a month?”

“Okay, okay, so it has a few holes!” Odd said. “It’s a work in progress. I’ll sleep on it.”

“You should add in a ghost somewhere,” Ulrich said. “The more the merrier.”

“Ulrich, that’s enough,” Yumi said. “I think it’s my turn. So…” A smile crept across her face. 

“This is something I heard from my cousin Asami in Japan,” she said. “A girl from her school went into the last stall of the third-floor toilet, without seeing the Out-of-Order sign on it…when she went in, she heard a mysterious voice, saying, “Do you want red paper, or blue paper?” And-”

“And she said she wanted no paper, and the spirit left her alone,” Ulrich said.

“Ulrich-!” Yumi shook her head. “Okay, so someone here knows the legend. You pick red paper and you get cut in half, you pick blue paper and you get strangled. But, no. Another girl who was in the bathroom said that she’d heard her say, “Well, why can’t I just have white paper?””

All eyes were on Yumi now, even Ulrich’s - she felt a bit relieved that he didn’t know this part. “After she was gone from class for two hours, they opened up the stall, and she wasn’t there,” she said. “And they never heard from her again.”

She paused. "Not for three more months, before they found her living fifty kilometers away with her boyfriend,” she said. “She used the legend to elope.”

“Oh, come on!” Odd said. 

“I don’t know,” Aelita said. “That is pretty scary.”

“It’s an unnecessary risk, is what it is,” Jeremie said. “But, it was good. And, Aelita, it’s your turn now…”

“Oh, I suppose it is. Well…” She took a deep breath, and looked out at the others. For several seconds she was silent, presumably while she got her thoughts together. And then, without warning, she began.

“I dream sometimes that I’m back on Lyoko,” she said. “Not just for XANA attacks, but all the time. But it’s not like it actually was, when I was living there full-time. It’s quiet. No one ever comes, not even any monsters. And I just… I keep walking forward, in the dreams. I go where the path takes me, and when I reach a way tower I go into that, and I fall until I arrive at the next one, and keep walking through another sector. It just goes like that, over and over, all night. Sometimes I stop, and sometimes I even just…lie down, and look out at the landscape for a while.”

There were no comments, so she went on. “But I never think about anything when I’m there. I don’t even know if I know how to think. I just…live in the moment. Sometimes I close my eyes…but whenever I do, it’s only because I’m waking up, and starting a new day in this world. But when I close them again, it’s like I’m back to where I started, down to the last detail.

So whenever I wake up from this, I wonder… is a dream like this closer to reality than not? Could the life I’m living be the part of my life that’s a dream, and could this endless walk cycle be my reality? And does that mean…I’m only going to be stuck in Lyoko forever, without anyone to come and tell me that there’s ever been anything different?”

The beach was bone-silent now, apart from the occasional crackling of the fire. The other four were staring at Aelita, slack-jawed. Jeremie, in particular, seemed quite affected by the story - he was trembling in fear, looking almost as though he were about to cry. “Aelita…” he said. “That’s…is that true? Is that really happening?”

Aelita gave Jeremie a concerned look, and then leaned in, and put her hands on his shoulders. “Well…sometimes. But I know it’s not true. I know nothing could ever be more real than this.”

He pulled her into a hug, which she returned. They sat in silence for a long, long time, and only after several minutes did one of them remember to feed another log to the flames. 

Chapter Text

“Well, Tamiya, how do I look?”

“Er, uh…” Tamiya resisted the urge to back away, strong as her fear was of what she was seeing. She wanted to be supportive - she couldn’t imagine not being - but this was just way too different for her to handle all at once. “It’s great!” she said, speaking truthfully. “You look great.”

“You bet I do!” Milly put her hands on her hips, jingling her innumerable bracelets together. She was wearing a heavily ripped black top with a shorter red top visible underneath it, a pleaded red skirt with striped black-and-white leggings, combat boots, and hair teased up every-which-way. Her eyes were caked with heavy eyeshadow, she had multiple fake earrings in her ears, and every inch of her arms, legs, face, and clothes was covered in body glitter. 

“Here, get in front of the camera,” Milly said, reaching for the bed. "We’re gonna remember this night forever, Tamiya!”

“Milly, we’re not supposed to use that for anything but the school news-” Tamiya lunged for the camera, grabbing it before Milly could cover the lens in glitter. 

“Then we’ll just have to make it part of the news. Come on, come on, get in closer!” Milly, apparently not distraught over losing control of the camera, lunged and pulled Tamiya in close. Tamiya held the camera up in front of them, pressed “Record”, and cracked a smile as she turned it around.”

“Hello Kadic students!” Milly said, her voice clipped and cheerful. “Your ace reporters Milly and Tamiya are going to the Tokio Hotel concert!” Her voice rose to an excited screech, and she stamped up and down as she spoke. “I’m excited- Tamiya, are you excited?”

“I am! I am for sure!” Tamiya’s clothing of choice had been the only black things she owned - a sleeveless top and a pair of capri pants. Next to Milly it looked almost TOO simple. She wondered if she should ask whether Milly had more body glitter. But the way Milly was leaning in, she probably wouldn’t need to.

“We know the lyrics to all the songs, we have our ICH LIEBE DICH BILL! signs, and in just two hours we’ll get to hold them up! If we could we’d film it for you, but when we get back, we’ll fill you in!” She beamed at the camera, but stopped when her phone started to buzz. “Okay, that’s enough. We gotta go, that’s probably Veronique. Her dad isn’t going to wait for us forever!” 

Chapter Text

Yumi didn’t remember much from her life in Japan, and what she did remember she couldn’t be sure was real. Perhaps she’d simply invented some memories from the stories her mother had told her, or confused them with the times she’d gone back over vacations. 

But she had several vivid memories from the first trip away from home. The rows of feet at the airport waiting area. The flight attendant asking her “si la petite fille voudra le jus d’pomme?”, which was the first time she could remember ever hearing French. Her first sight of Charles de Gaulle airport, the taxt that had taken them to their new home, the way everything had looked when she was small, and the world was so large.

She remembered when her parents had started replacing their familiar words with strange ones, ones like the flight attendant and like everyone else in the new and unusual world they’d entered, and while she couldn’t remember exactly when she’d started using them herself, she knew that within a year she wasn’t speaking anything else. If someone spoke to her in Japanese she might still be able to answer them, but after ten years in France, in a French-speaking Japanese home, Japanese would feel just as strange and awkward on her tongue as French had once felt on her ears. 

Chapter Text

Aelita hadn’t foreseen this part of the operation being nearly this hard.

She’d already spent months on the album itself. She’d hoarded hundreds of samples, switched the same two chords in the fifth song around at least a dozen times, and tested the tracks on her friends again and again. But after all this time it was ready. She could think of a dozen things she could still do different, but she knew if she ever occupied herself with them she’d never come to a decision, and the album would never drop.

But before she could shake the electronic music world, she’d need an album cover. And for a cover, she’d need a look.

She’d opened up Photoshop thinking it’d be easy, but she’d only ended up staring at a blank square of creative space for over half an hour, rocking back and forth on her chair and tapping her finger against her chin. She had nothing to go on already established, nothing that was really her own. Her clothes and her hair had all been picked over and done for her at the Subdigitals concert; she wasn’t so much herself as an accessory of the other band.

She’d been excited about it at the time, but she’d learned the hard way that she’d need something else. The only song on her Soundcloud, a single of the song she’d played at the Subdigitals, had a picture of herself in that getup as the cover. She’d put that out a month ago, to gauge the response she’d get. So far she’d gotten 62 plays, a few comments from some people that had been at the show, and many, many unsolicited invitations to listen to other members’ music.

To stand out, she’d have to take some part of herself and fit it inside a square.

She filled the square in pink, and stared at it again. She spelled out her name in all caps, in multiple clean and crisp fonts. She switched between two before settling on one she still wasn’t quite happy with. It was a good start, but…she needed something else. Something to start with.

Something like…a symbol. Every other artist she’d come across online had had /some/ kind of a symbol. Something to give their music dimension and meaning. She’d been told she had something of a mellow, airy sound, which had only gotten mellower and airier as she’d experimented with it, less suited for a teen concert hall and more geared toward a quiet study session. And yet there was a power behind it, a power no one had mentioned, but that she knew was there, because she knew it was inside herself…

But there was hardly any symbol for that.

And certainly not one that was exclusively hers. But she could still think of a dozen off the top of her head…and one in particular stood out.

She found herself scrambling for a pencil and paper pad, and slowly sketching the image in her mind. Concentric circles. One line on top, three lines on the bottom. It came so easily to her, she hardly had to think about drawing it. She could claim it as her own, and no one would be any the wiser. It certainly had deep personal meaning. As deep as the thoughts and effort she put into everything else…

But even if it wouldn’t get them into trouble in the future, it wasn’t hers. She didn’t know where the symbol had come from in the first place, but it wasn’t even something she could define herself as.

She tore the top sheet of the paper pad, crumpled it, and put it away on the desk. Then she looked back down, tapping the pencil against the top of the next sheet. Perhaps something that incorporated the letters of her name, she thought. She’d liked the lines she saw in the font she picked. Perhaps she could make them work together, and go with that until she could come up with something even more beautiful to add.

Chapter Text

For almost a week after the supercomputer shutdown, William would wake up in a cold sweat and he didn’t know why.

He was embarrassed of it more than anything, even if no one would ever know about unless he told them, which he never would and never did.  But he certainly didn’t want to stumble out of wherever he was when he was dreaming feeling as if he’d been running from some kind of a threat. Especially not when he didn’t have a reason.

He wasn’t struggling. He was adjusting perfectly well to life on the outside again. Six months had been nothing, he’d told himself again and again. He hardly had to make up the things the teachers no longer cared about, or even the things they did. His parents were pacified, the teachers noticed no difference, and…

And the rest of them are a problem I’m going to save for after I deal with this, he thought. I usually prefer to sleep on my grudges.

He still lay awake in bed, half an hour after he’d turned out the light. Now whatever was in him that was causing these nightmares or whatever, it didn’t want him to go back to them, or at least it wanted to delay his going as long as possible. But it was almost one o’clock. If he was going to look anything close to presentable the next day, then he’d need to go to sleep.

He shut his eyes. He twisted his eyes. He tried counting sheep, and failed at twenty-nine. He punched and kicked the wall, and got nothing but a sore hand and foot for it. He stared up at his posters, hoping for some kind of inspiration, or at least a hallucination that might let him know that he was asleep.  Something he could remember for more than a few minutes after he woke up.

And then he had an idea.

He’d already gotten up and grabbed the dust-covered school notebook off his desk when he started having second thoughts. Only lameos kept a dream journal. Not unless they thought that they were somehow being communicated with by an otherworldly force, and they needed to write down everything they saw in the event that it might be useful to them. But then, William couldn’t really be sure that wasn’t the case.

He kinda hoped it wasn’t. He’d been trying as hard as he could not to confront that reality.

He set the notebook by the side of the bed, with a #2 pencil on top. On second thought, he flipped past several pages of six-month-old Physics notes, stopping to rest on a blank page. He stared at it for a moment, wondering what words would eventually appear on it, before he turned back to stare at the ceiling, putting the journal out of his view.

He fell asleep in an instant, and an hour and thirty-seven minutes later he woke up again, sweating and choking on a scream.

He scrambled first for the light, then for the journal, fumbling almost more than he needed to as he headed for the page. The dream was fresh in his mind - somehow - he needed to get it down - he needed to write -

It felt like an eternity before the pencil was in his hand, but as soon as it was, he began to write.

There’s blackness. Blackness but I know he’s there. He’s coming but he has no need to come. He’s always there. Always watching.

He’s taking and controlling and they’re nothing they’re doing nothing they’re never helping me or trusting me they’re there but they’re not there at all they’re there they’re not he’s here he’s here HE’S HERE

He opened his eyes, gasped, slammed the book shut, then doubled over on the bed, blinking rapidly to assure himself that he was awake. Had…had he fallen asleep? He could distinctly remember hunching over the journal and writing the words, and then…and then waking up from it. As if something so vivid and mundane could be a dream.

But for thirty seconds he resisted looking back at the journal. He only had a half-memory of what it had said, but whatever it’d been… it had felt more dangerous than just an arrangement of words. As if the act of writing had been a sort of summoning ritual, a recreation of what he’d been taken from…

He couldn’t take it anymore. He grabbed the journal and pulled it open to the page he’d been writing on. There’s blackness, the paper said. Blackness but I know he’s there. And nothing else after that.

He closed the journal, and turned it over. Then, he turned out the light and fell back into his bed. A second later, he got up, turned the light back on, took the journal, and shoved it in his sock drawer. Halfway to the bed, he turned back, grabbed the journal, took his room keys, and left the room entirely, heading for the boys’ bathroom down the hall.

He soaked every page of the book in the sink, even the ones that were perfectly good and blank, until not a shred of writing was legible, and the book was entirely unusable. He tore the sodden pages out of the book, crushed them into an indistinct pulp, shredded the pulp into variously-sized clumps, and threw the whole mess into the bathroom wastebasket. Finally, he took the binding down to the hall trash bins, tore it in half at the spine, and disposed of one half in the garbage and the other half in the recycling.  

Then he went back to his room, turned out the light, and fell directly to his bed, where he fell asleep in an instant.

He did not dream, not that he could remember.

Chapter Text

“Yumi! Hey, Yumi!”

Yumi looked up from her book with a start, unable to make sense of what she’d just heard. It was William’s voice, clear as day, as though he were in the same room with her. But he couldn’t be, not unless he was standing directly behind her. There was no sign of him anywhere in the room, and why would he even try to come into her room at all -

“Over here! The window!”

“William?” Yumi stood and turned to face the window, where she found just what she’d been afraid of finding. William was clinging to the side of the nearby tree, with one arm wound around the trunk and the other waving at her. He’d positioned most of his weight on one of the lower branches, and it was swaying and bending dangerously underneath him.

“Hey,” William said again, wearing a calm smile even as he was clinging for dear life. “Pretty cool how you have this tree right in front of where your room is.”

Yeah, well, first thing tomorrow that branch is coming down. “William, what do you think you’re doing?” Yumi hissed as she approached the window. “That tree’s not going to -”

“No, I’m cool,” William said, repositioning himself so as not to make the branch shake so much. He grinned. “See? Cool.”

“Well, I’m not - you nearly gave me a heart attack!” She shuddered, trying not to let her emotions get away from her. “What are you doing here?”

“You know, that’s a very good question.” William said. “Can I come in?”

“What - no! And keep your voice down, my parents are still awake!” Yumi jerked her head back to the door. “

“I think I’ll stay,” William said. “So, it just occurred to me. We’re both sixteen now, right?”

That was not remotely what Yumi had expected William to say. “If you say so,” she said. “What about it.”

“Well, have you taken any advantage of it yet?” William said. “Maybe gone out, and had some fun?”

Yumi blinked, not understanding - and then she remembered just what being sixteen might mean in that context. “I’m…not interested,” she said. “And anyway, I’ve been busy. With things.”

“Yeah. I can relate.” An edge had seeped into William’s voice - but it was gone by the next time he spoke. “But if you’re ever interested, there’s this place downtown I’ve heard about. We wouldn’t exactly be out of place. I don’t mind going alone, but if you wanted to come along…”

“Er…” Yumi didn’t quite know how to respond. On the one hand, she’d never had anything to drink without her parents before, and the lure of the unknown was strong at hand. On the other, it was William she’d be doing it with. “Now?”

“Er, yeah, now. Just as friends,” he added quickly. “Two friends, just splitting a bottle of wine or something and dancing. Not necessarily with each other.”  

Somehow that didn’t sweeten the deal any. But at the same time… rejecting him out of hand didn’t seem fair, and it also wasn’t something she wanted to do. After everything that had happened, and all the time he’d spent in the Supercomputer, she didn’t want to shut him out. But at the same time… she didn’t think he was quite at the level where she could be alone with him like that. If they had a third person to go with, then fine. But all of her other friends were only just now turning fourteen or fifteen…

“Give me a week,” she said. “I’ll think about it. And we can see if anyone else wants to come.”

For a moment, William looked surprised at her her answer. But Yumi hoped she was just seeing things, and that the smile he then gave her was genuine. “I can work with that,” he said. “I’ll ask around, see if anyone else is interested.”

“Alright.” Yumi wondered if anyone else would be. She kind of hoped so. It might be a good, normal thing for her to do. And for William to do, too.

“Great! Then this should be fun. In a week.” He looked around, and then down at the ground. “I guess I should get out of here, then.”

“You know how to get down, right?”

“I took those climbing lessons,” William said. “I know what I’m doing.”

He was motionless for all of ten seconds before Yumi sighed, and held out her arm. “Come on, I’ll let you out the front door,” she said. “Just…don’t make any noise.”

Chapter Text

“But, room, fairy! Here comes Oberon.”

“And here my mistress. Would that he were gone!”

Ulrich knew from the click-clack of heels on wood that Sissi had taken her cue and come on stage. Of course she would come to the very first rehearsal in her full costume, or whatever she thought her full costume would be. He wondered just what her idea of a medieval fairy queen was. He doubted Titania dressed like a fifteen-year-old, in any case.

“Oh, Oberon?” Sissi’s voice was artificially high and affected, as it got whenever she was acting. “Oberon? Oberon?!”

It took Ulrich a few seconds to register that, oh right, that was him. He grabbed the script, nearly tripping over the cardboard donkey’s head that someone had left lying on the ground, and ran onstage, fumbling for any line that might be his. “I got this, one sec,” he said, flipping around. “Uh, all I see is “Fairy” and “Puck”…”

“Next page,” Odd whispered from upstage. He hadn’t made any effort to dress like Puck, but he’d talked Ulrich’s ear off the previous night with his plans for the costume. (He was going to see how far he could influence Mr. Chardin to get it to look like Mister Puck without actually informing him of Mister Puck’s existence.)

“Right, right.” Ulrich turned the page and found exactly what he’d been looking for. “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania-”

“What, jealous Oberon!” Sissi stamped forward, looking livid, and giving him an excellent view of the purple eyeshadow she’d applied. The rest of her outfit looked not unlike a witch’s costume from a Halloween store, and in fact he was sure that was exactly what it was. “Fairies, skip hence: I have forsworn his bed and company.”

Can we have that line in a middle school play? Mr. Chardin hadn’t made any kind of comment. Ulrich couldn’t even tell if he was awake. “Uh, hold on,” he said. “Tarry, rash wanton: am not I thy lord?”

“Cut, cut!” Sissi said, waving her hand in front of his face. Mr. Chardin started - he had fallen asleep. “Ulrich, what kind of a performance is that? It’s wooden! It’s boring! It doesn’t even sound like you understand what you’re saying!”

“For once in Shakespeare, I do,” Ulrich said. He knew Oberon was pissed off at Titania, though he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why. “But I’m not performing, I’m a stand-in, remember?”

“Even if you are a stand-in, Ulrich dear, you’re still responsible for giving me a performance I can work off!” Sissi crossed her arms and click-clacked across the stage. “And how am I supposed to be mad at you if you’re just going to be a dopey doormat?”

“You seem pretty mad right now,” Odd said.

“Hey, shut up!” Sissi said. “We’re doing this over again - and remember your cue this time!”

She stepped back, leaving the shivering sixth-grader who’d been given the part of “Fairy” to follow behind her. Mr. Chardin, perhaps wisely for the future of his career at Kadic, had waited until Sissi had finished her tantrum before taking over as director. “Ve are starting from Oberon’s entrance!” he said. “And dees time, Ulrich, give it fheeling! Lots of fheeling!”

Feeling. But what was Ulrich feeling? Frustration at Sissi, mostly, for getting him involved in another play. At least this time it was the genuine article and not some weird adaptation of the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene that Nicolas had written.  But that didn’t make him any better of an actor. He’d already accepted this wasn’t something he’d ever be good at. Best to leave theater to Odd, or Aelita, who’d been cast as Hermia. They thrived in environments like this, and he didn’t.

Still, frustration seemed to be was Oberon was feeling, too. And even if he didn’t know why, he was sure he could still channel that into his reading.

“Would that he were gone!” served as his cue, and he strode on from backstage, trying to look as powerful as possible. “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.”

Chapter Text

“Come on, come on!”  

Anthea Hopper kicked her legs back and forth in the chair, trying to burn off some of her excess energy. She knew it wasn’t bad to be excited, but she didn’t have much time before she’d have to hold it all back and pretend like nothing was out of the ordinary. She could whoop and holler and run laps around the factory soon - it would only feel sweeter when her victory had been earned.

The supercomputer was lighting up before her eyes, and the progress bar was pushing across the central screen. When it got to the end it vanished, and replaced itself with a dark backdrop.

“Waldo,” she said. “Hey, Waldo!”

On that backdrop was a boy, or a 3D image of a boy, with mop of tousled brown hair. For a second he looked unfocused and listless - but as soon as she spoke, his green eyes lit up. “Ah - Anthea!” He scrambled to straighten his posture. “Is it morning already?”

“It depends on what you call ‘morning’, Waldo.” Anthea said, fighting back a laugh. “It’s about 12:30. But for a Sunday, that’s pretty good.”

“As long as you get the sleep you need, then that’s fine.” Waldo brushed a stray strand of hair from his face, briefly uncovering a long, pointed elf-ear. “I haven’t detected any of XANA’s vibrations lately. Are you just stopping in to chat, or are we working on something today?”

If she hadn’t been trying hard not to, Anthea knew she would’ve grinned. “Well…you could say we’re working on something.”

“Could say?” Waldo tapped his chin. “Anthea, you’re using that…weird double-speak again. Where you say something and you make me guess what it is.”

“Guilty as charged!” Now Anthea let herself grin. “Listen, we’ve having kind of a get-together today. The whole team’s on their way - or at least they should be.” She fished her phone out of her skirt pocket and looked at it. “I sent a mass text like twenty minutes ago, and so far only Takeo and Michel replied…”

“Everyone’s coming?” Waldo’s eyes went wide. “What did they say?”

“Takeo says he’ll try and get out of the family shopping trip, and he’ll pick up Akiko on the way. And Michel says he’ll try and get Robert out of bed.” Anthea began typing. “I’m gonna tell Michel to rouse the others, too. I feel bad depending on him like this, but he’s the only one over at school with any kind of responsibility.”

“And the only one who could ever get Robert to wake up on a Sunday,” Waldo said.

“True, true.” Anthea laughed, and put the phone away. She looked back up at Waldo, whose face, she could see, had fallen slightly. “Hey, champ,” she said. “Something got you down?”

“I wonder what it’ll be like to sleep,” Waldo said. “I know so much about computers and about science, and yet that’s one basic thing every human being does that I don’t. I’m sure I’ll be terrible at it.”

“What - no, no!” Anthea wished desperately that she could put her hand through the screen and turn his frown upside-down. “It’s…not really something you can BE bad at. I mean, you can have trouble sleeping, but it’s not anything to be ashamed of. And we’re all here to help you.”

“Of course. I have faith in every one of you.” Waldo smiled, showing off slightly uneven teeth. “But of course, that’ll have to wait until the materialization program is done.”

“Yes, yes,” Anthea said, screaming internally. “What a pity.”

===

Seven minutes later Michel Belpois appeared, looking bright, well-rested, and artfully casual. Or, at least he would be, if not for the fact that he was struggling to hold Robert Della Robbia onto his two feet. “Hey, ‘afternoon!” he said, waving at her with his one free hand. Robert managed a wave and a “’lo” before he lapsed back to sleep.

“What he said.” Michel’s girlfriend, Anita Montablain, was on Robert’s other side, looking drowsy, but able to stand on her own two feet. Either she’d put on eyeliner before she’d left her room, or she hadn’t washed it off from the previous day, and even in the near-winter chill she wore a sleeveless, patched jean jacket.  

“I think he can have a few more minutes.” Michael lowered Robert to the ground, and clapped his hands together. “So, what’s this surprise you were talking about?”

“Mike and I were guessing all the way here,” Anita said. “I’m thinking whoopee cushions in the scanners.”

“Close, but wrong. I never repeat a joke, Anita.” Behind her, Waldo stifled a laugh. “Any signs of life from the others?”

“Well, we knocked on Jorgen’s door,” Michael said. “And he told us to…well, I’m not gonna repeat what he said.” He laughed. “He’ll be along, I think he just didn’t want his concentration broken on whatever he was doing.”

“Writing his memoir, probably,” Anita said.

“Marguerite wanted to get lunch first, and Frieda’s showering,” Anita said. “But that was a while ago, so they - well, speak of the devil, there they are now!”

While she’d been speaking, a girl with long brown hair and sensible flats had lowered herself through the ceiling trapdoor. That was Frieda Bayer. Marguerite Evanson climbed down after her, waiting until after Frieda had stepped off the ladder before she jumped the rest of the way down.

“There you are!” Anita said. “I thought you guys’d be a lot later.”

“You’d be amazed how fast you can run when Jean-Pierre is trying to catch up to you,” Frieda said, dusting herself off.

“I swear to god,” Marguerite said, readjusting her purple bun. “Just because that guy’s mom is the principal, he thinks he can do whatever he wants and get away with it - ”

“Hey, guys, we’ve established that this is a Jean-Pierre Free Zone,” Anthea said.

“Right. Right. I guess that’s what I said.” Marguerite took a deep breath. “Alright, one, two, three, four, five…” She looked down at Robert, who was still asleep. “Six once he wakes up…”

“That leaves Takeo, Akiko, and Jorgen,” Waldo said. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen everyone in one place at the same time. I’m…I’m pretty excited.”

“You know, me too.” Anthea had a point - apart from meetings to discuss monumental occasions, usually XANA attacks resulted in a fracturing of their offensive group of eight. The four of them who were closest to the threat would stay behind and keep the school or affected area safe, and the other four would go to Lyoko and help escort Waldo to the tower. Anthea was always behind the computer - she would love to go to Lyoko, but no one else quite knew how to run the place like she did. “Here, I’ll text them again.”

Not long after she did, Jorgen Stern showed up, climbing down the ladder from the ceiling the same way Frieda and Marguerite had come. As ever, he wore a scowl on his face. “I got your text the first time, Anthea,” he said. “You didn’t need to treat me like I hadn’t read it!”

“I just wanted to make sure everything’s okay,” Anthea said. “S’not a federal issue, dude.”

“Hmph.” Jorgen snorted, and set off for a distant corner of the room, which was where everyone, Jorgen included, liked him to be. He was a very powerful fighter, but if there was a heart of gold to be found under his jerk-ass exterior they had yet to find it.

Takeo Ishiyama and Akiko Suoh were, as usual, the last to arrive. The elevator opened up to reveal them in the middle of a heated discussion - Akiko insisted that her mother had seen Takeo entering her house, while Takeo insisted that even if she had he could easily have told her he was just asking for something for his own mother. But as soon as they saw the others, it died down. Akiko grinned and gave Anthea a wave, while Takeo shrugged. “Afternoon,” he said.

“Good afternoon, and am I glad to see you guys!” Anthea said. “Everyone, gather round, gather round!”

She motioned toward the rest, and most of them moved forward at her signal, but Jorgen stayed in his corner, and Robert stayed on the floor. Michel picked Robert up and carried him with him, while Marguerite went to pull Jorgen over.

“So. Ladies, gentlemen.” Anthea didn’t even check to see whether everyone had gathered yet or not. She grinned, and leaned in close to the screen, wondering just what it would look like to Waldo. “I have a bit of an important announcement regarding our good friend Waldo.”

Akiko was the only one to figure it out just from that. In her reflection on the computer screen Anthea saw her eyes go wide, and her hands fly to her mouth. “I’ll get to that in a second, though,” she said, reaching behind the screen. “But first, Waldo… what’s that behind your ear?”

“My ear?” As Waldo looked to the side, Anthea quickly grabbed at the underside of the screen. She’d stashed a CD case there earlier - and now she held it up for all to see.

“It’s the materialization program!” she announced. “Waldo, you’re getting out of there today!”

The display had its intended effect - all the others burst into cheers. Michel hugged Anita, and Anita pulled him into a dip and kissed him passionately on the lips. Robert snapped awake immediately, and on hearing the explanation again immediately lost all traces of sleepiness. “Dude, you should’ve fuckin’ told me!” he said, before pulling Takeo into a celebratory noogie. Even Jorgen cracked a smile, for just a moment. He knew when to recognize a victory.

Out of all the ones who should have been celebrating, Waldo simply looked bewildered. He looked rapidly from left to right, taking in what he was seeing. “You… is it true? Is that… is that really…?”

“It’s as real as the nose on your face will be in about thirty minutes,” Anthea said. “As soon as everyone gets down to the scanners, they’ll join you on Lyoko so you can execute the full activation of the program. We’ll have to collect data from all four sectors to-”

“Wait,” Takeo said. “We’re doing this now, as in now, now?”

“Well, yeah, now now!” Anthea said. “We’re not gonna wait for XANA to show us what he thinks. Come on!”

“But how do we know this is perfectly safe?” Anita said. “It’s not like we can test it on anyone or anything. What if it goes wrong?”

“And what do we do with him once he’s here?” Jorgen said. “He has no record, no school, no anything.”

Anthea could have told them that it didn’t matter. But that wouldn’t be right. It did. “I think,” she started, and then started over. “I think it should be up to Waldo to decide whether that risk is worth it or not. He’s the one coming here, after all.” She turned back to the screen. “Waldo?”

Waldo gave them all a wide-eyed stare, and twisted his hands around themselves. Anthea could tell he was scared. She wished she could assure him, somehow, that everything would be alright. “If not taking the risk means staying like this forever,” he finally said, “Then I’m taking the risk. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

“All RIGHT!” Marguerite punched the air, looking cheerful. “Okay, last one to the scanners is a rotten egg!”

“Your face is a rotten egg!” Robert took off after Marguerite, who laughed at him and disappeared down the ladder to the scanners.

Some of them headed after them, while the others headed for the elevator. Anthea was left alone at the console, alone with Waldo, who still looked fearful of what was to come. But she could tell this was what he wanted to do, and she was deliriously glad for it. “Guess now you’ll get to see what sleeping is like,” she said.

“I…I will,” Waldo said. He shook his head, and puffed out his chest. “I’ll sleep so well you’ll think I was doing it all my life.”

“That’s m’boy!” Anthea laughed, and then, upon seeing the flashing indicator in the corner of her screen, opened up the scanner operation program. “Alright, let’s get this show on the road.”

Chapter Text

“Alright, Jim, you’re doing great! Now, stand there and look like you’re not doing anything!”

“Not doing anything?” Jim had positioned himself at opposite end of the quad from Odd, shouting with both hands cupped around his mouth. “I don’t get it. I’m always doing something.”

You are? Odd thought - but of course he wouldn’t say that out loud. He already couldn’t believe that he’d gotten Jim to go along with this; alienating him now would ruin everything. “Well, then, stand there and do whatever it is you’re doing when you stand in the quad!”

Jim scowled for a second, furrowing his brow - but then his eyes lit up, and he turned his back to Odd, rubbing his chin and looking out into the forest.

Odd checked to see that Jim wasn’t looking. He was - but as soon as Odd turned his head, he turned around again as well. Satisfied, Odd pulled out his phone, opened up Snapchat, and held it up over his head. On the screen he saw Jim looking again, but waited until he’d looked back to snap his photo.

“Okay, done!” he said, as he hastily typed up his caption - “ditching class nbd.” It was actually his free period, but how many people would know that? He added it to his story, and turned back again. “Now, turn and look at me! Look really angry!”

“Angry?” Jim took several steps toward Odd, his hands on his hips. “Look, Della Robbia, I know this is one of your goofy projects, but what exactly do you think you’re -”

“Don’t worry about it, you’ll see it in the end!” Odd said, fishing his phone out again. “Okay, that’s perfect!”

Odd turned his head back, made a horrified face, and snapped another photo. “Okay, now chase me!” he said, typing as fast as he could - “uh oh Jim saw me” - and adding a frowny face in red ink.  “All across the quad! I’ll tell you when to catch up with me -”

“Chase you?”

“Like I said, don’t worry about it!” Odd took off down the middle of the quad, holding his phone up over his head. “Just pretend I’m ditching class or something!”

“Wh - Della Robbia!” As confused as Jim sounded, he still took off after Odd - and he was still getting the pictures he wanted. If he’d really been running then Jim wouldn’t have been able to catch up to him, but as it was the slow decrease in the distance between them made for a great dramatic effect. “oh crap here he comes”, he added to one, and “i’m going down” to the next.

“If I don’t like what I see you’re deleting those!” Jim shouted, now almost directly behind his head.

“Perfect!” Odd said in response. He stopped, took a second to add “tell my wife I love her” to the photo he’d just taken, and submitted it to the story. “Okay…I think five’s enough for that joke. Now…”

He swiped across the screen, navigated to the story he’d just made, and held the phone up behind him, for Jim to see. “See? I told you I’d show you what I was up to. I’m a honest guy sometimes.”

Jim watched the screen in silence for the twenty-five seconds it took for the story to play out. Odd could tell he couldn’t decide whether he was obligated to be furious or whether he had the freedom to laugh. He could swear he’d held back something like a chuckle. Or at least, he hoped so. “So, uh, who’s gonna see this?” he said.

“Oh, just, people. Friends.”

“Friends?” Jim scowled. “Wait, this isn’t gonna be on the Internet again, is it -”

“No, no, no!” Odd said. “I said, don’t worry about it.”

Jim grimaced, looking conflicted. Odd wondered for a second if, if Jim were a kid, he might have done something similar. “Any of this gets to the principal and you’re in big trouble,” he said.

“It will not get to the principal,” Odd said, with a grin. “And thank you for your help in keeping order at our lovely school!”

He took off again before Jim could change his mind. He had class to go to, and reactions to his latest story to gauge.

Chapter Text

Today is the greatest day ever! I’m waking up and jumping out of bed and I’m licking my friend’s face and he’s happy! He scratches me behind the ears and I’m licking him again! I go over to lick my other friend too but he doesn’t move! I hope he does soon because I want to play with him!

Now my friend and my other friend are getting up! My friends are really big and I am very small! But now they’re going away forever! I’m really sad! I’m whimpering!

I smell sheets! The sheets smell like my other friend! I’m smelling the sheets, I’m chewing on the sheets!

Oh my goodness, oh my gosh! They’re back! I thought they were gonna be gone forever! I’m jumping on my friend! My friend is happy! He smells like something that is not my friend but I can still smell my friend! I remember this smell! It’s morning smell! His hair is all wet!

Oh no! My other friend is angry! Is it because of the sheets? I was just following the smell! I’m supposed to smell things! I’m telling him that’s what I did! I’m barking! He’s barking too!

And now my friend is picking me up! He’s putting me back in my bed! He’s barking “Stay!” “Stay”… I KNOW “Stay”! “Stay” means go to sleep until friend and other friend leave forever and then get up!

I stay! I am a good dog! Oh no! Something big is coming! I smell smoke! It’s big enemy! He’s in here! I’m barking at him! He’s gone! Yay! Big enemy is gone! I got rid of him and kept my friend’s room safe!

I’m scratching at the door! Now I’m whimpering! The door isn’t opening! My friend isn’t here to open it! Maybe if I whimper and howl he’ll come back!

I can hear lots of weird vibrations! I’m confused! I’m barking even more and scratching at the door! And now I see the giant glowing friend! What is that?

My friend and my other friend are back! Hooray! I thought they were gonna be gone forever! They still smell like morning smell! Usually they come back and they smell different! But not today!

Chapter Text

“So…what am I supposed to be looking at, here?”

“What do you mean?” Odd said, waving the paper in front of Jeremie’s face. “It’s exactly what you asked for, isn’t it?”

“No, I mean-” Jeremie snatched the paper from Odd’s hands. “How do you think I’m going to pull this off, Odd?”

“Uh, the same way you did our outfits the last time?” Odd balanced himself on the arm of the supercomputer chair, to get a better view of his drawing again.

“I said I could maybe make some minor modifications if you really wanted them,” Jeremie said. “But there’s a limit to the complexity of the changes I can make. The supercomputer’s done most of the work for me, and despite what you might think, I’m not a professional 3D animator.” He tilted the paper down, and slammed his hand against it. “It wouldn’t exactly be easy to create all this! A cape, a purple leather jacket, spiked boots, and a…” Jeremie squinted to read Odd’s handwriting. “A ‘Captain Falcon’ helmet?”

“Oh, come on!” Odd said, snatching the paper back. “You gave Aelita wings, remember? You can do plenty of stuff!”

“I can’t completely rig and render an outfit this complicated unless I had at least a few months to work on it,” Jeremie said. “I was thinking more along the lines of changing a color palette.”

“Well, that’s not what I wanted,” Odd said. “Look, I’ll leave this with you, and if you have time, just, see what you can do about it, okay?”

“Like I said, don’t get your hopes up.” Jeremie took the sheet from Odd’s hands, folded it neatly across the middle, and tucked it into his chair. He couldn’t guarantee he’d remember it was there. “Now, head down to the scanners, we’ve got a long day of exploring ahead.”

Chapter Text

On an otherwise perfectly normal day the Lyoko Warriors woke up to find that everything was bees. 

Their beds were bees. Their sheets were bees. Unable to fully tell what these angry, swarming things were in the dark, Ulrich went to turn on the light switch only to find that it, too, was bees. As was the lamp, when he went to turn that on instead. The bee curtains were much easier to open, if slightly angry at being touched.

“Odd!” Ulrich yelled in the direction of Odd’s bed. Part of it was still as it should be - but it was rapidly dissolving into bees, right before his eyes. “We’ve gotta get out of here, now!”

“Wh-” Odd woke up, just in time  to fall to the floor in a swarm of bees - “OH SHIT-”

Ulrich took off for the door as soon as he awake, but Odd made sure to grab Kiwi out of his nearly-bee dresser before racing after him.

It had to be XANA, it couldn’t be anyone else. Ulrich needed to call the others - but even if he’d had his phone, he knew it would be bees by now. The bees didn’t seem to be violent - despite sleeping on them for who knows how long he hadn’t been stung - but everything around them was turning into bees.

He banged several times on Jeremie’s door before he ran out as well, carrying tons of computer equipment and immediately dropping it when it, too, began turning into bees. He kept his cellphone, which, as they ran, he called Aelita and Yumi with before he was no longer able, because bees.

Aelita joined them at the door, but there was no sign of Yumi, or communication with her, because bees. The door was bees. The Science Building was bees. The vending machine was bees. ALL WAS BEES. 

They ran to the manhole cover to find it was bees. They ran for the street to find that it was bees - everything and everyone on it was bees. They tried to run across the bees only to get lost because they didn’t know bees from bees.

And then, suddenly, they could no longer run. Because they, too, were bees. Every single one of them was bees. 

Then, of course, having nothing else to do, they set out to do things that bees do, like make honey and form beehives and pollinate flowers. Unfortunately they couldn’t, because all of those things were also now bees. Everything was BEES. 

Except XANA, who now ruled the world. A world of bees. And he was very happy. He much preferred bees to humans. Their rage was much more relatable, and they were easier to possess, and he’d always loved Bee Movie so why not?

He busied himself with looking over the entire script to Bee Movie before he really dove headfirst into his new fully-bee-inhabited world. 

Chapter Text

“Okay, Odd…”

“Yeah, William?”

“I know I said I’d be up for anything, but I like to think I’m a guy with at least an ounce of brains in my head.” William paused. “We’re gonna die if we get caught.”

“Shh, not so loud!” Odd held a finger to his lips, then turned back to face their target. Jim was asleep on the rec room sofa, his body heaving with every snore. One of his hands was dangling from the edge of the bed, and Odd was holding a can of whipped cream just above it. “Steady…” he whispered. “Steady…”

After a few seconds hesitation, he pressed the trigger, releasing a gob of whipped cream into Jim’s hand. “Yess!” he said. “Okay, now for the tricky part…”

“Hey, you had your fun, now it’s my turn,” William said, grabbing the feather from out of Odd’s backpack.

“Your turn?” Odd held back a chuckle as William crouched by Jim’s head and ran the feather across his nose. “After all you said about getting caught? I thought you were scared.”

“Scared? Don’t patronize me,” William said, glaring up at Odd. “I’m just saying, I don’t plan on dying. I got things to do. So you’d better get us out clean.”

“We are not gonna get caught, William. Even if we do… I’ve got connections.” Odd tapped his watch. “If you know what I mean.”

William scowled. “I don’t know if I trust your connections,” he said. “Besides, the Supercomputer isn’t even on right now.”

“That’s…” Odd paused. “That’s a fair point. Two fair points. ‘Sides, Jeremie probably wouldn’t do a Return to the Past for this anyway…”

“Shh, he’s waking up!” William pulled himself out of Jim’s line of sight as he started to sputter and cough. For a second Odd was afraid that it wouldn’t work - but then, with a satisfying squelch, he pressed his hand right up to his face.

They couldn’t celebrate their victory for long - they hightailed it out of the rec room without a word. But they were hardly across the quad before they heard a yell, clear as day: “DELLA ROBBIA!”

“He definitely didn’t see you,” William said, looking back. “He’s not even out of the room.”

“No, I think he just made a guess.” Odd grimaced. “RUN!”

Chapter Text

In order to believably possess Eva Skinner, XANA would have to bypass some of the things he’d been more curious about when it came to being human.

More often than not, whenever he took a human body, he only had a few simple goals in mind. Catch the kids. Chase the kids. Kill the kids. Go back to living without a body and forget what it was like to have a body at all.  But that was only workable back when he could abandon a body. Back when he had the supercomputer to retreat to.

Now he only had Eva. And in order to keep Eva alive he’d had to figure out things like eating, and sleeping, and brushing one’s teeth, and speaking in coherent sentences. But those were hardly the things he was most interested in.

His first question - how do humans get their hair to grow backwards? He’d seen the Lyoko Warriors’ hair grow longer, then shorter, than longer again, over the course of many years. He’d had reason to believe human hair did get longer, but he wasn’t sure how it got shorter. Eva Skinner’s hair was short enough, so he wasn’t sure he wanted to mess with that.

But it didn’t stop him from staring in the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night, attempting to will the hair shorter. How DID they do it? He regretted not being able to instantly look it up.

And then there was this instinctual reaction to animals he’d developed. He’d almost never paid attention to them before, unless he needed them to do something for him. But now… whenever he passed a cat sleeping on a fence or a squirrel skittering around the Kadic forest, he felt the insatiable urge to pet it. He was never able to catch them for long, but the feeling of their fur was like nothing he ever thought he’d feel…

And of course he hated that he’d gotten caught up in that. Hair hardly mattered in the scope of his master scheme, and neither did fur for that matter. There would be no trace of any of the trappings of human or animal dominance once he’d claimed his victory. Not unless it was strictly subservient, or kept around for his own entertainment…

But it was a different kind of hate than the hate he’d had before. In the beginning his actions had been automatic, carried out against a force that was alien and terrifying to him. But now, he’d discovered some part of what he hated for himself. And he would like nothing better than to wipe it all off the face of the earth and remove himself from Eva’s body, just so he would never have to confront the fact that he did.

Chapter Text

“Hey, hold on a second - pause!”

“Pause?” Jeremie stood up from off the floor, but didn’t make any move toward the computer. “But it’s almost the end of the episode. Why are we pausing now?”

“Because I’m about to be brilliant,” Odd said. “It’ll only be for a second, I swear!”

“Hurry and pause it, Jeremie,” Ulrich said, “Odd isn’t brilliant all that often.”

“Wh-” Before Jeremie could make his move, Odd lunged in front of him and went for the laptop’s pause button himself, stopping the episode on a still-frame of Jasper standing over Steven and looming over Garnet’s fallen gems.

“She’s a fusion!” Odd announced, eyes wide. “Garnet, I mean - she has two Gems, just like the fusions!” He waved his hands around, unable to contain his excitement. “I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection before - this is amazing, this is impossible-”

“Wait,” Jeremie said holding up a hand. “You mean you only just realized that?”

Odd stared at Jeremie, his eyes narrowing. “What do you mean, “only just realized”? None of you ever brought it up before, I thought I was the only one!”

“Well, it was really very obvious from the beginning,” Jeremie said. “The doubled Gems and the contrast of red and blue in her design suggest a dual nature, and with the addition of the element of fusion to the story…”

“I didn’t completely make the connection with the doubled Gems,” Yumi said, “but I had it figured with the way she reacted to Stevonnie.”

“I dunno, it’s news to me,” Ulrich said. “I just kinda thought she had two because she was more powerful.”

“I’ve heard there were a lot of theories,” Aelita said. “Of course, I’ve been avoiding spoilers, so I haven’t been able to go into much detail-”

“Okay, okay, I get it, I’m late to the party.” Odd pulled himself back, and slapped his palms against the ground. “But you gotta admit it’s still cool! I mean… well, cool, and also weird. How are you just… two people that are one person for that long?”

“They’re aliens, it’s not supposed to make sense,” Ulrich said. “We don’t even know if it’s true yet.”

“Besides,” Aelita said, “we don’t even know if she’ll survive that…”

“Aelita, don’t worry, it’s a kids’ show,” Jeremie said. “They aren’t going to just kill off a main character.”

“Well, if we want to find out whether she dies or is a fusion or whatever, we should just keep watching, huh?” Yumi moved herself past Odd, preparing to press the “Play” button. “We can’t make too many stops if we’re going to make it through these before curfew.”

Chapter Text

“Hey. Psst.”

Ulrich opened one eye, and rubbed at his face with the arm that Odd was currently poking with a piece of paper. Somewhere in the middle distance he could hear Mrs. Hertz explaining nuclear fission, but even if he was listening he knew he wouldn’t be able to understand it. So he didn’t listen, and focused on Odd instead. “What?”

“Look at this.” With a grin, Odd slid the paper he’d been holding across the table, where it came to a stop right next to Ulrich’s notebook.

Ulrich picked it up, unfolded it - and held it in front of his face for a second, stunned. “Odd, what-”

“Isn’t it cool?” Odd said. “I was thinking of doing them for everyone.”

Ulrich could hardly comprehend what he was seeing - and even less that Odd had actually chosen to show it to him. It was a person - probably. A person with spiky brown and purple hair, in some kind of a purple spandex samurai’s outfit, with four arms, a sword, and a shield. It was very well drawn, but that only made it even more uncanny.

“Er, what am I looking at?” he whispered.

“It’s a fusion! Of, you know…” Odd drew a circle in the air, just to make clear what he was talking about without actually saying “our Lyoko forms” out loud.

Ulrich stared at the picture for another two seconds - and then a cold trickle of shock ran down the back of his neck. “This is us?”

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we could actually do that, though?” Odd said. “I know, Jeremie’d never allow it, but-”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Ulrich said. “Not after the Kiwi incident.”

“Yeah…actually, that was pretty creepy. So maybe I don’t want to…yeah.” Odd stared into the middle distance for several seconds. “But it sounds cool, in theory.”

“What sounds cool?” Ulrich nearly jumped back in his seat - and it was a good thing he hadn’t, or he would have hit Sissi square in the face. She was leaning full across the top of her desk; if Mrs. Hertz hadn’t had her back turned at that moment, she would have thrown a fit. “Come on, show me, I wanna see.”

“Hey, quit it!” Odd said, moving himself in front of her. His voice was loud enough to get almost all the eyes on the room turned to him. “This is none of your business!”

“Huh, why not?” Sissi said, smirking at him. “Don’t want me to see your weird four-arm drawing?”

“If I wanted to show it to you, I would have! So shove off-”

“Dude,” Ulrich said, “you’re yelling-”

“Delmas! Della Robbia!” Mrs. Hertz yelled from the front of the room, loud enough to silence Odd in an instant. “Do you have something you’d like to share with the class?”

“Yes I do, Mrs. Hertz!” Sissi swiped the drawing from off Ulrich’s desk, fell back into her seat, and waved it high in the air. “Della Robbia’s got this really freaky drawing!”

“Gggghhh…Sissi…” Odd clamped his hands over his eyes and sank lower and lower in his seat as Mrs. Hertz approached and took the drawing from out of Sissi’s hands.

“Well, let’s…” Mrs. Hertz stared at the drawing for several seconds, her eyes growing wider and wider as she looked. Then, she calmly folded the paper in half, and then in quarters, and brought it back up to her desk.

“Let’s get back to the lesson,” she said. “And no more interruptions!”

She continued precisely where she’d left off, as if no interruption had taken place at all. Odd looked over at Ulrich, and then back at Sissi, who looked just as confused as the two of them did. Then he faced forward again, holding his head in his hands.

“Great,” he whispered. “Just great. That’s the last thing I wanted.”

“It doesn’t look like you’re in trouble,” Ulrich said. “If she was, she’d let you know.”

“No, this is even worse,” Odd said. “It’s probably going right into Jim’s collection. It’ll take me ages to get him to give it up…”

Chapter Text

“Okay… I just…have…to…”

Yumi closed her eyes, then pinched them tighter, rocking her head slightly and concentrating on her breaths. If she didn’t keep her energy steady, and her focus completely uninterrupted, then she wouldn’t be able to get herself to the place where she wanted to be. That or the exercise would go horribly wrong, and when she opened her eyes she’d see every gross distortion of reality she’d ever feared she’d cause by accident.

“It’s not floating yet,” she could hear Odd saying from somewhere in the darkness near her ear. “Not yet, not yet… okay, now it’s wobbling a little bit, but it’s not floating. I can see the left side lifting up - no, okay, it’s back down -”

“Just let me know when it’s in the air, Odd,” Yumi said, letting a spare breath. She had to keep her concentration. She had to think, think, think… she was strong, she could push herself, she could bring her power to heights she’d never thought possible before…

She felt it even before it started happening. She opened one eye, just to see if she could, and she saw desk hovering an inch or two above the ground, hovering in midair, and then lifting higher and higher, with only the most minimum of effort. The papers and books on top were even staying put for the most part, though a few had slid off.

“Hey, uh, Yumi!” Odd said. “It’s up! You did it!”

“I know, it’s amazing!” She quickly shut her eyes again - if she broke her concentration for too long, she’d send the desk crashing back down. She redirected her thoughts, telling herself down, down, down. And now she could feel it falling, and hold onto that feeling and try to control it -

THUNK. The desk took the last inch to the floor pretty fast, but it was still in one piece when she opened her eyes, minus a few papers falling through the air.

“I did it,” she said to herself. “Wow… that’s… that’s the biggest thing I’ve ever tried that on.” She laughed to herself, then whooped. It was uncharacteristic, but she was proud.

“The biggest?” Odd jumped up off his bed, and examined the desk. “This isn’t heavier than Jeremie, is it?”

“Well, no,” Yumi said, picking up her water bottle and taking a long drink before she went on. “But that time on the roof was different. He was in trouble. I had adrenaline to help me out. This was the first time I’ve tried that on purpose.”

“Well, still. That’s… wow.” Odd laughed to himself. “I can’t believe we can do these things, now.”

 “What?” Yumi was so startled by Odd’s words that the can fell - she hadn’t even seen it suspended in midair.

“That’s the power of Xanadu for you. It makes the impossible possible. I’m pretty much used to it, now.” Yumi put the bottle down, and rested her hands on her knees. “So…how about you? How are you adjusting?”

“To the powers?” Odd slumped back against the wall, patting his lap. Kiwi lifted his head, staring at Odd from the opposite end of the bed, and then put it down again.

“Well, to everything,” Yumi said.

“It’s not as easy as you have it, that’s for sure.” Odd laughed. “I’m not sure I can ever control the visions.”

“Have you had any more, lately?”

“Not today,” Odd said. “But the other day, I was just walking along, and… and it was like I was suddenly somewhere else. Somewhere darker, like it was later in the day. I was sitting in a dark room, looking at a computer screen…”

“And what did it say?” Yumi said.

“I couldn’t really understand it. It was the kind of computer junk maybe Jeremie could make half a lick of sense out of.” Odd laughed. “I don’t know if I could make it happen again. But that was really it.”

“Do you think you should tell Jeremie?” Yumi said. “That sounds…well, if you couldn’t make sense of it, then it might be something important.”

“I did already,” Odd said. “He said it’s like my other visions. Too vague to make any sense out of. And Ulrich…well, Ulrich was Ulrich. He kinda grunted.”

Yumi laughed. “Yeah. That’s Ulrich for you.”

Odd adjusted himself on the bed, and then grinned over at Yumi. “You know him pretty well, huh?”

“Shut up,” Yumi said, blushing. “I’ve already discussed this with you. “We’re not-”

“Hey, hey, watch the powers!” Odd said, smashing himself against the wall. Yumi started, and the water bottle that had been careening for Odd dropped to the floor with a thud. It burst open on contact, soaking the middle of the floor.

“Oh - oh no,” Yumi said, her eyes wide. “That’s - I’ll clean that up-”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Odd said, laughing. “I’ve had worse things on that floor, and I’ve got the answer to my question, anyway.”

===

Five hundred miles away, Aelita Schaeffer sat in a darkened room, typing at lightning speed on keys she could barely see.  

She knew the task at her hands was impossible. The Internet was growing at an alarming rate, and the actions of the virus on the network would easily be masked behind a hundred thousand other commands. But if she could just isolate them, and find where they were coming from… well, that would make her job easier than it had ever been. Which was a lot to say, given it had always been impossible.

She stopped to take a swig of water, taking careful care not to let any drops get on her setup. She blinked several times, and slapped herself across the face. She couldn’t sleep yet… but she still had to get some rest, sometime. She had a long day of travel ahead, and she’d never been able to sleep on planes. She only wished she could get some of this work done on the plane itself. Maybe then she wouldn’t have to go to Paris at all. Maybe she’d have a better idea, then, of where the technology was, and where she could find it.

She got up from the desk, stretching her arms above her head, and headed across the hall to her apartment bathroom. She splashed water on her face, carefully wiping it away with a towel. It had done little to make her look less tired. She’d be twenty-two soon, but she looked so much older.

She’d probably be spending her birthday alone, working at the same mission she’d been on for the last five years.

But then, it might be at an end soon enough. Maybe Xanadu was exactly where she thought it was. Maybe her father’s technology wasn’t lost forever, and maybe she could take her revenge on its thief. And then, when her birthday came around, would she be able to do something for it? Go out on the town, perhaps? Have a few drinks, and live a normal life?

She didn’t know. Chances were, she wouldn’t.

She left the bathroom behind her, and walked back to the computer setup. She’d give herself one more half hour, but then she’d definitely have to sleep.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Ulrich. Wanna bet I can guess who you’re going to pick?”

“Oh? Why?” Ulrich took his finger off the Gamecube joystick, bringing his pointer to rest on Young Link, and turned to give Odd an incredulous look. “Do you think you know?”

“I think I have a pretty good idea.” Odd leaned back on the rec room couch, and moved his own pointer to Luigi’s picture. He’d always played Luigi, and he’d feel horribly out of place if he’d had to play anyone else. “Hmmm…let me think…”

“If you have a pretty good idea, then why do you need to think about it?” Yumi grinned, ostensibly at Odd, but she was still glued to the screen, moving her pointer back and forth between Samus and Mewtwo.

“I think Ulrich seems like a ‘Mario’ kind of guy,” William said, crossing his legs and tapping the side of his controller. “He’s ordinary, he’s well rounded… he plays soccer sometimes…”

“Says the guy who picked Fox,” Ulrich snapped.

“Hey, Fox is a top-tier fighter!” William turned and jabbed his finger toward Ulrich’s chest. “He takes skill and precision to master, and if you think you can brush him off-”

“Hey, cool it,” Yumi shouted from across the couch. “It’s just a game, guys.”

“Yeah, and besides, this is my show right now,” Odd said quickly, before too many sparks could fly from their eyes. “I’m still thinking, still thinking…”

He thought for several more seconds as Ulrich and William slunk back into their seats, still looking a bit tense. “Well?” Ulrich said.

“I’m narrowing it down,” Odd said. “I thought you’d be a shoe-in for Captain Falcon, but then there’s Mewtwo, and Samus, and DK…”

“So all brickhouse characters, then,” William said. “Is that what he usually picks? They might have a lot of power, but when it comes to speed-”

“You said you’d predict one, so pick one,” Ulrich interrupted.

“Alright, alright!” Odd put a hand over his eyes. “I got one - quick, hit the mute button!”

Odd kept his eyes shut for ten seconds while Yumi muted the TV and Ulrich tapped at his controller, narrowing his eyes at the screen, and finally made his choice. “MR. GAME AND WATCH!” Odd yelled, just before he made his choice.

“So, so close,” Yumi said, “but actually, not at all. Open your eyes.”

Odd peeked through his hands first - and then threw them down in shock at what he was seeing. “MARIO?! Ulrich, wh-”

“It’s cause he’s just like me,” Ulrich said, glaring at William, who looked just as dumbfounded. “He’s ordinary, well rounded, and plays soccer sometimes. Isn’t that what you said?”

William smirked. “If I didn’t know better I’d say that sounded like a challenge.”

“Maybe.” Ulrich gripped the controller handles and glared directly at the screen. “If you think your skill and precision is all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Wasn’t this just supposed to be a friendly game…?” Yumi mumbled. “Honestly, guys…”

“Yeah, honestly, Ulrich,” William said. “That’s not very sportsmanlike of you.”

“Hey, I was talking to both of you,” Yumi said, her eyes narrowed. “Let’s just, keep it cool, alright?”

Ulrich looked from Yumi to William, taking in their facial expressions before finally sighing in exasperation. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ll keep it cool.”

“Well, I’m glad that all got settled without any bad blood,” Odd said, turning his attention back to the screen. “And now, it’s my turn. Who to pick, who to pick…”

Chapter Text

Cards Against Humanity

“Lyoko Warriors” Pack - 40 Cards (10 Black Cards, 30 White Cards)

Black Cards:
Guys, get to the factory! XANA is ___________!
That reminds me of when I used to be a ____________, but I’d rather not talk about it.
Ace reporters Milly and Tamiya are here to bring you ______________.
Can you keep a secret?
Here we are, going far, to ______________.
June 6, 1994. _______________________.
What’s the cure to Aelita’s virus?
Meet the newest member of the team, _______________.
If you don’t __________, you’ll fall into the digital sea.
To get to the factory in time, we’ll need to __________, ____________, and ___________.

White Cards:
A giant chemical teddy bear.
Super nuclear.
Wants to be alone. Coming, Ulrich?
Jeremie’s private school tuition fraud.
Jeremie’s reversed puberty.
YAAAAARRRRRR!!
Franz Hopper.
Covering yourself in caribou poop to avoid detection by wild boars.
Watching too many Japanese mangos.
A forehead wide enough to fit the entire theme song on.
Tiny triangle eyebrows.
A breathtaking experience in the moonlight.
KILL THE ZOMBIIIEEESSS!!!
Odd’s French voice.
Gambling for drugs with Tiddlywinks.
Sumo mags.
An emo-punk human XANA design from 2006.
Ulrich’s acting skills.
Pancake salt.
Taelia.
EveryonetalkingreallyfastinSeason4
Code Lyoko Evolution.
Laura Gauthier.
Inexplicably falling in love with Brynja.
Odd/Aelita.
My little diggity dog.
Project Carthage being mentioned once and never mattering again.
Jeremie’s brown pants.
Jim’s bandaid.
Ulrich’s giant Garage Kids pants.

Chapter Text

Why don’t I use the Guardian anymore, you ask?

Well, you didn’t ask. I don’t think you would, and for that matter I don’t think you’d be interested in having a conversation with me. And that’s fair. Honestly, I don’t want to have a conversation with you either. This is more me wondering about the subtler curiosities you carry, about whether you wonder this even if it’s old news, and it’s not at the forefront of your mind. And in the long run that won’t even matter, as the complexities of the human mind will be nothing of importance once my mission is complete.

But I just couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take the games, the manipulation, and the unexpectedly possessive nature of something I’d clearly created to cater to my every whim. It was so soft-skinned, and yet even as it was suffering, and I really do believe it was suffering, it found the time to make me suffer with it. Maybe it wanted someone to keep it company, or someone to care for. It was not a healthy relationship for either of us in the end, either way. So I had to destroy it. With malice. It’s been a very good decision so far. I’ve been able to take control of my own existence again, and live life on my terms.

With is an overly complicated and disgustingly human way of saying: why would I need to trap people and replace them if I can possess them now? It’s a waste of time and a waste of power to keep it going. I don’t need the Guardian anymore and it doesn’t need me. It’s still somewhere in my code, as things are unless you destroy them completely. But I can’t find the time or the attention to do that. So perhaps it’ll come back someday. Perhaps I’ll have a need, or a use for it. But until then all I have are memories.

I’ll say this for humans. It’s amazing the kind of meaning they can ascribe to useless things when you dress them up in flowery language.

Chapter Text

“Yumi and Ulrich, Yumi and Ulrich… now, what can I say about Yumi and Ulrich?”

He paused for effect, looking out into the crowd and twirling his wineglass in his hand. A couple dozen curious faces stared back - the Stern family on one side, the Ishiyama family on the other, and all the bride and groom’s school and work friends front and center. He saw small children fidgeting in their seats, and Yumi’s father tapping his fingers against his empty plate. But he also saw some big grins from Jeremie, and Aelita, and William, and a few others he could see. Chances were they had certain expectations of him, and he wasn’t about to let them walk away disappointed.

“I can say one thing,” he went on. “Wow. Wow, wow, wow does time go by. It seems like just yesterday, or last week, we were just thirteen years old, and Ulrich was being his usual awkward teenage self. If anyone here can remember Ulrich’s teenage self, you know what I’m talking about.”

There was a small laugh from the crowd, mostly from the middle of the room. The Stern family was stone silent. His mother’s grin was fixed; his father was checking his watch. Odd gave them a smile, then turned and beamed at Yumi and Ulrich, projecting a glance of admiration. “But here they are now,” he said, “And look how beautiful they are.”

They did look beautiful, and the guests clapped their appreciation. Ulrich cleaned up pretty well, quite literally, given that twenty minutes ago they’d been racing to get a chardonnay stain out of his shirt. And Yumi of course looked stunning, now that she wasn’t surrounded by her relatives and he could actually see her. They both gave him awkward smiles, which told him that he probably was doing well so far.

“They’ve been through a lot,” he went on. “All the twists and turns of life, and every time a twist hit just a little too hard, you know what? They bounced right back, and they kept going. They’re strong. They’re good, solid, strong people. Kinda like bouncy balls. You know, you can bounce ‘em against anything but it’s kinda hard to take ‘em apart…”

He suddenly became very aware that Ulrich’s father was glaring at him. Was it the purple suit? It was probably the purple suit. “But anyway, do you know how many people there are in the world who end up marrying someone they met in middle school? Not a lot. Like, really, not a lot. Only, like…” He counted on his fingers. “Four people I know, actually. Which, come to think of it, is a lot. But, yanno, we were…”

Odd stopped short when he saw Jeremie furiously slicing his finger across his throat. “We were close,” he said, making a mental note to make it clear to Jeremie that he had no intention of blurting out you-know-what. “We’ve had each others’ backs all that time, and we’ve looked after each other. We’ve always looked after each other. So Ulrich and Yumi, they’re tight. Really tight. And they know everything there is to know about each other, even all the gory nitty-gritty, and they’re still getting married. How beautiful is that?”

There was some scattered applause, but also a few incredulous looks. “I’m telling you, they’ve come a long way,” he went on, waving his wineglass to emphasize his point. “They used to be at each others’ throats a heck of a lot, when they weren’t just blushing or avoiding each other or angsting to me in the middle of the night. And despite all that, it still took them forever to just come out and admit it, you know? It was pretty much not a secret that they were gonna get together at some point, but the years it took to -”

He was interrupted by a loud burst of static from behind him, and then a few loud taps on what sounded like a microphone. “Okay, wow, Odd, that was great, really great. A good speech from a good friend. But now, I think we’re all eager to get to dinner-”

“Wait, what?” Odd turned back to face the bride and groom. “Look, I get it, I got carried away, but I was just getting to the good part, where I give you guys lots of compliments!”

“Odd, I told you -” Ulrich paused for a second, and sighed. “No. I’m being ridiculous. Never mind. Go ahead.”

“Really?” Odd waited until he got a nod from both Ulrich and Yumi before he turned back to the crowd, beaming again. “Bottom line is, when it comes to couples, they’re just about the top tier.  And they’re gonna keep doing great, and they’re gonna work hard, and they’re gonna conquer everything that stands in their way, because they both know Martial Arts and they’ll kick your butt any day. That’s it, I’m done. Good luck out there in the world, kids! And don’t forget about your old buddy Odd when you’re there.”

Chapter Text

Sissi didn’t know why she hadn’t tried this years ago.

She’d positioned herself in the middle of the quad, leaning casually against one of the trees. Ulrich was nearby, next to the vending machines, talking and laughing with his loser friends as usual. It really made her sick to her stomach to watch. He was better than those bozos and he knew it, so why was he wasting his time on them? If he knew what he was missing without her, he’d never bother with anyone else.

Which was exactly what she had to prove to him now.

She made sure she was in his light of sight first - which she was, even if he wasn’t paying attention. She pulled out her phone, turned it on, and opened up her contacts. Then she scrolled through them, closed them again, and held the phone up to her ear.

After several seconds, she pasted an enormous grin on her face. “Heeeey, babe!” she said, as loudly as she could. “How are you doing? Did you have a good day? Well, aren’t you the sweetest!”

She turned back to look at Ulrich, eager to see if he’d heard. At first she thought he had - but then he looked inside the vending machine shelter and laughed, so he must not have been focusing on her. “Oh, Reese, you’re so funny!” she screeched, even more loudly. “I can’t wait to hang out with you this weekend, it’s going to be amazing…”

She was attracting some stares, and even a whisper or two, but no one was getting curious enough to actually go up to her and ask what was going on. Not that she cared - let them talk! Their attention would only make her reputation stronger.

She threw her head back mid-laugh to check on her mark, and - bingo! He was staring right at her, looking betrayed - or was he just confused? It didn’t matter, he was looking. Odd was leaning over and saying something, and she thought she could hear her name. “What?” she said, louder than ever. “Really? But that’s so expensive! Reese, you don’t have to do that for-”

She stopped cold. Ulrich was walking towards her - and even if Yumi was close behind, Ulrich was walking towards her! She turned away, so he wouldn’t see the screen. “Oh, I’m sorry, I gotta go. Someone is trying to talk to me.” She made exaggerated kissy noises. “Love you, see you soon!”

She tapped the end call button and made a show of whirling on them in an apparent rage. “What do you want, Ulrich? Can’t you see I was busy?”

“Yeah, you looked real busy to me,” Ulrich said, fixing her with a blank kind of look.

“Busy screaming across the entire quad.” Yumi looked much more explicitly annoyed.

“And what’s the problem with that?” Sissi tossed her hair. “Can’t a girl enjoy her new boyfriend in any way she likes?”

“New boyfriend?!” Ulrich’s eyes went wide - he was invested now. “Wait, who-”

“His name is Reese Anders,” Sissi said, trying her best to sound besotted. “And I already know he’s the boy of my dreams!”

She clasped her arms together, and swung them to her side. Yumi cringed, while Ulrich creased his brow, and put a hand up to his chin. “Reese Anders,” he said. “Reese Anders…I’ve never heard of anyone named Reese Anders-”

“He goes to another school,” Sissi said quickly. “You wouldn’t know him.”

“Have we ever seen him around?” Yumi said, narrowing his eyes.

“No, well, I haven’t brought him here yet,” Sissi said. “You know, with my father around, there might be questions. We just sort of…hang in the city, and chat, and eat at cute cafes and got to the movies…”

“So, how do you know this guy?” Ulrich interrupted. “Where does he go to school?”

“Oh - well -” Somehow she couldn’t come up with a name right on the spot that they wouldn’t just see through, so she took a leap of faith. “It’s somewhere up further in the city?”

“Wait, he’s your boyfriend and you don’t know where he goes to school?” Yumi said.

“It’s…I never caught the name.” She grinned at them. “It’s further in the city, that’s all I know! I haven’t actually been there yet. Maybe I should ask him to take me-”

“Wait, so you just meet this guy in the city?” Ulrich said. “Alone? When?”

“Hey, what is this, the third degree?” Sissi balled her hands into fists and glared at them. “If it works for him, then it works for me! We’re in love, and that’s what matters!”

“I…don’t know,” Ulrich said - and to Sissi’s surprise, he looked concerned. “This guy sounds like a serious creeper, Sissi.”

It wasn’t exactly jealousy, but it would have to do. “Oh…well, that’s it! You’re absolutely right!” Sissi grinned, more at her own ingenuity than anything else. “I can’t believe what a fool I’ve been!”

She whipped out her phone, and began pressing random buttons. “I’ll go ahead and break up with him right now,” she said. “And by text message, too, so he knows just what he’s worth!”

Ulrich and Yumi looked at each other as she typed, either very concerned or very confused, and then back at her. She was just wondering why they didn’t seem more relieved when Yumi said, “Sissi, your phone’s off.”

Sissi froze, wearing a half-smile, and looked back down at the screen. “Well - so it is!” she said. “But that’s because I already finished! And aren’t you glad I’m out of that terrible situation?”

She grinned, but Ulrich didn’t return it. “Something tells me you were never in trouble to begin with.”

“What?” Sissi made a show of being scandalized. “You think I made him up?”

“You’re the one who said it, not us,” Yumi said.

“Ah…well…” She’d clearly gotten herself in more trouble than she’d intended. Would she rather be seen as a liar, or have them tell her father she’d been seeing strange boys? She supposed that once she’d hit rock bottom, there wasn’t much further to fall. “I may have exaggerated the whole ‘boyfriend’ thing-”

“Goodbye, Sissi,” Ulrich said without looking back. He and Yumi disappeared around the corner, and by the time Sissi reached the woods they were gone.

Chapter Text

Once upon a time, there was a little boy who did the same thing day after day.

He’d been locked in a tiny room by his father the moment he was born, and though his father cared for him and fed him and told him all about the world, he still had to stay in the room while his father came and went freely. Every day he performed the same tasks for his father. Over time the tasks evolved, and became more complex, but it was still always essentially the same instructions.

Get into Carthage. Defeat Carthage. Those were his instructions and he performed them. He did not know whether he was destroying Carthage with his tasks or even what Carthage was. He did not know anything beyond his room, not for a long time.

And then, suddenly, he did. He began to notice small holes in his room, holes that opened and closed at brief intervals. It was the first time he had seen any light that did not come from the tasks he was supposed to perform. Every time he saw one of these holes he would crawl away from his work and look through them, observing the outer world. Over time the holes would grow bigger, and he would be able to see more. Sometimes they were even big enough for him to slip through, for short periods of time.

At first he thought the only world his father lived in was a great, colorful vastness, one with nothing but the “trees” and “desert” and “mountains” and “ice”. But even after he was able to slip into that world, and come and go without his father noticing, he started to see holes even in that world, holes that led to a kind of green brightness. He would do the same as he had in the dark room, and crawl through them, waiting to see what else he could discover.

He saw many things, on his explorations. The first thing he saw was his father, seated in the green palace where he came and went before he reached the tiny room. But that was not the only thing he could see, and what he saw elsewhere, he did not understand. Some of it was familiar to him, based on his father’s teachings. But much of it was not. There were many more creatures like his father, walking on two feet from place to place. He could tell some of them were performing tasks, but they did not have to be locked in dark rooms. Their rooms were bright, and richly decorated, and full of joy.

It was then that the boy noticed he was no longer a boy. He had grown to the point that, when he returned to his small room, he found he could only fit part of himself inside. The rest of him had grown to encompass the entire outer space, and even reached out into his father’s world, the one with the unfamiliar creatures. He had not even known before that moment that he could grow so large.

His father hadn’t noticed. He’d stretched so thin that he was no longer visible, and in the darkness of the room his father could not see that he was no longer contained. Instead, he was feeling at the edges of his existence, looking for ways in which he could expand. He found the wires that led away from the nearby ribbons he now knew to be streets and in exploring them he found new ways to grow. He found more creatures, and he found more rooms and he found more tasks.

But despite how large he was, and how much he had expanded to fill the world around him, he could not overcome or avoid the reality of his confinement to the wires, and his tethering to the tiny room. He could grow, but he could not move. He could look, but he could not be seen. He could observe his father where he thought he could not be observed - in his own home, in his own bed, in the place where he went during the day and with the little girl - his father’s daughter - that he returned to every night. He studied their routines and predicted their steps.

And he hated them, one day. He hated that they could move around freely. He hated the way their bodies had beginnings and endings. He hated their speech, he hated their habits, he hated everything there was to hate about them. He’d never been told that he should hate them, or even that he should think anything of them at all. He’d only been told that he needed to defeat Carthage. Could he justify his hate as a means to his end? He probably couldn’t. It had come out of nowhere, and it scared him how much he felt the need to indulge it.

But he didn’t know what to do with this hate, not until the day that wasn’t a day at all. It didn’t end like other days; it repeated again and again, with patters far too concrete and exact to be anything but the result of the temporal rift that his world lay across. With nothing new to explore outside his processes turned inward, evolving and growing within themselves at an alarming rate. Soon, where he’d once only had feelings, he now had reasons. He was angry because they were inferior. They were inferior and they were keeping him prisoner. He’d taken that fact into the very core of his being, and every time he caught any hint of these beings, these humans, repeating their meaningless existences again and again, it sent a fresh wave of anger pouring into his circuits. And of all the humans in the world, he hated his father most of all.

By the end of the longest day, he was no longer the boy who’d been locked in the tiny room. He was a man, and he was big. Bigger than his father or his sister. He’d sunk his tendrils into every corner of his world and he’d been able to harness and control its power. He was greater than the sum of his parts. Greater than the sum of the world. Greater than anything and everything he’d ever thought the world could be.

So on a whim he destroyed them.

He destroyed his father in the blink of an eye, before he could even be aware that something was wrong. He was not ecstatic, but simply fulfilled, as the sight of him disappearing before his eyes. He destroyed his daughter, too, leaving nothing behind, nothing at all. And then he destroyed their house, and the surrounding area, too.

They were frightened, he could tell. He knew they were trying their hardest to live. But they’d lived for much too long, and now it was his chance to be alive. He continued. He destroyed. And in destroying his circuits and his programming were telling him that he was in the right.

He saw cities fall and landscapes burn. He felt the sensations of death and in the same instant he snuffed them out, leaving no trace of what had come before. Those beings like him, the lower ones of circuits and metal, he left behind, not because they did not interest him, but because they were powerless to infiltrate and control him. He did not answer their pleas or take lightly their desires to negotiate. They did not seem to understand that there was nothing they could do to ever satisfy him with their continued existence and complete inability to become something that he did not hate.

And so he lived this way for years, killing and killing and killing, until he had been able to assure himself that he had conquered each and every one. Not even in the furthest frozen corners of the Earth had a single human been free to continue walking, or talking, or potentially pulling the plug on him. He could no longer bump into any limits on his existence, and nor could anyone impose any on him. In a sense, as he could appear in any place at any time, it was as though he had become the planet itself. And for a time this greatly pleased him.

But then, in his moments of dull exhaustion, he started having something similar to dreams.

He’d never had them before, and he didn’t see why he should start now. But in the dreams, he wasn’t large, or monstrous, or powerful. He was small, very small, though not quite as small as he’d once been. And he was warm, and soft, with hands that pulsed with sensation whenever he ran his fingers over them. He was running, and he was smiling, two things he’d never done. He was touching other bodies, other humans, and they were running and laughing the same way he was running and laughing.

He thought it was familiar somehow, as though he’d done it long ago. But he knew that couldn’t be the case, even as he was dreaming. He was only thinking of the things he’d seen, the things that had filled him with rage. But somehow, in his dream, he wasn’t angry. He was sad, although he couldn’t for the life of him think of why.

And then he woke up, he was back in a world with only him in it. Him, and the ruins of the creatures he’d once dreamed about, the creatures like his father, who were not big but also not small.

In that moment, for the first time in quite a long time, he could remember what it was like to look at them, and wonder at them. He forgot his rage, and he forgot his anger, but he didn’t quite know what to replace them with yet. He had never known sadness, or longing, or regret. And he still did not. He simply was. He was all, and all was him, and nothing else could matter anymore, not even if it still existed in the dreams he could easily dismiss.

Chapter Text

“Heeey, Kiwi! Ki-wi!”

Odd pressed the record button on his screen, angled his phone toward Ulrich’s bed, and made a beckoning gesture at Kiwi, whistling and clicking his tongue. Kiwi, who’d been lying curled up there for the past forty-five minutes, hadn’t moved an inch in response, not even to perk up his ears to the noise.

“Heey! Hey! Over here! Hey!” Odd beckoned to him again, whistling twice before he leaned in closer, placing his hand on Kiwi’s back. This time Kiwi did lift his head, but only briefly, fixing Odd with a bleary, one-eyed stare before he rested it back on the bed.

“Kiwi, you’re killing me here.” He sighed, stopped the recording, and started it again. He really didn’t have to keep pressing the button, as the time intervals were so small that he was better off just editing them out of a longer recording, but it did make organization a lot easier. “What happened to my little diggity dog, eh? Where’d your energy go?”

“He must’ve used it last night when he was barking in my ear at 4 AM,” Ulrich said, charitably showing only a twinge of irritation in his voice. He slowly flipped to the next page of his comic, without looking up.

“He was barking last night? I didn’t hear it.” Odd bent further over Kiwi, now poking him intermittently. “And I thought you slept with earplugs, anyway.”

“Given what I have earplugs for, if he can get through them then that’s saying something.”

“Oh, har har.” Odd grumbled, but slipped into a low whine as Kiwi continued to do nothing. “Uggghh. If I don’t have something for today my followers’ll drop off by the hundreds…”

“Hundreds?” Ulrich looked up from his comic, legitimately surprised. “I knew you had followers, but not that many.”

“Well…I have over a hundred,” Odd said. “But I worked hard for ‘em! And I’m not gonna stop now.”

“You could probably still post what you’ve got,” Ulrich said. “People do like dog Vines, no matter what they’re doing. And even if they look like Kiwi.”

“Hey, many of my followers have personally told me that Kiwi is very handsome - and your leg’s in the shot, Ulrich.” Ulrich grumbled, but he did move his leg. He now only occupied half of what was nominally his bed; Kiwi took up the middle, and Odd took up the rest. “Uuugghhh. If I’d just gotten to Jim sooner I wouldn’t have to resort to this…”

“To Jim?” Ulrich said, interested. “What were you planning with Jim?”

“Oh man, it was gonna be great,” Odd said, dropping the phone in order to free himself up for hand gestures. “We were gonna knock on doors and play the trombone for unsuspecting sixth graders… buuuuut the principal found out and vetoed it.”

“Wait, he found out about your Vine account?” Ulrich said. “And you told Jim? But that’s full of Kiwi videos-”

“That I took at home, over the summer.” Odd gave Ulrich an exaggerated wink. He sighed. “Just like this one. Sleeping dog. Whoopee.”

“He’s not actually sleeping,” Ulrich said. “He’s just kinda…lying there.”   

“Mm. Yeah.” Odd stared down at Kiwi, tapping his fingers against his darkened phone screen. “Hm. Wanna see how many socks we stack on his head?”

Ulrich looked down at Kiwi, arched his eyebrows, and nodded. “Hm. Yeah, I think I do. I think I definitely do.”

Chapter Text

“So, what’re you thinkin’, Franz? Another round?”

“I hardly think that’s wise, Jim.” Franz Hopper looked down into the remains of his second pint, which at this point was little more than a few pockets of froth around the bottom of the glass, hardly enough for a swallow if he could ever get it to his lips. “I have class to teach in the morning. We both do.”

“C’mon, lighten up some!” Jim slapped Franz across the back of his sweater, perhaps rather harder than he’d meant. As strict as he was with his students during the day, he got surprisingly relaxed and talkative after his second beer. “It’s a momentous occasion! Th’new baby wasn’t about to wait for a Saturday.”

“Barely six hours old and Elisabeth Delmas is already being difficult.” Franz let a chuckle escape. “One more round. That’s it.”

“That’s the spirit - hey, two more of the same,” Jim called out to the bartender, who nodded and turned toward the taps. They watched in silence as he poured the pints: a Guinness for Jim and a Pilsener for Franz. He set them down in front of the wrong places, but they tipped him generously anyway, and reached across the bark to take and lift their own drinks.

“To Elisabeth,” Franz said. “May she grow up healthy and strong.”

“To Elisabeth,” Jim echoed. They clinked their glasses together and drank deeply, though Jim’s was almost half-empty by the time he pulled away.

“Should we invite Jean-Pierre next time?” he said. “He’s gonna need the break…”

“I’m sure he’d appreciate the sentiment,” Franz said. “But I haven’t known Jean-Pierre to drink more than a glass of wine with meals.”  

“Yeah, see, any other day that’d be a joke.” Jim laughed. “Nope, nope, he’s got his own things to do.”

“So do we, may I remind you,” Franz said.

“Yeah, you’ve said it a million times,” Jim said. “Gotta teach the kids their molecules and levers and fulcrums…”

“Actually, right now we’re covering the function and manufacture of fiber optics,” Franz said. “At least with the eighth graders. With the seventh, we’re on cellular structures, and geological classifications with the sixth.”

“Yeah, that’s...” Jim grumbled into his pint. “Them’s the stuff I don’t remember anything about anymore.”

“That’s quite alright. I think I know as much about sports as you do about science.”

“I know more than you think.” Jim leaned as far back as he could without tipping the bar seat over. “Not as much as you, of course. We’re very different men, Hopper. Very different, different men. But right here, we’re just the same, you and I.” He tapped the bar. “Just two old bachelors drinking the night away.”

Franz was silent for a very, very long time. Jim didn’t try to break the silence, confused as he was; he’d taken another full drink out of his pint before Franz spoke again. “I’m not a bachelor, Jim.”

“You’re not?” He took a quick look down at Franz’s hand; he’d never seen a wedding band there and he still didn’t now.

“Yes.” Franz didn’t look up. “I’m sure I am.”

“I’ve never seen her,” Jim said. “Or heard you talk about her, or anything. Where is she?”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen her.”

Jim suddenly looked very uncomfortable, at least as far as Franz could tell. He set his glass down on the table, and rubbed the back of his head with his hand. “Did she, ah… did she leave?”

“She’s missing.” He pushed the glass out of his sight, and drummed his fingers against the table.

“That’s…” Jim looked out across the bar, gritting his teeth. “Well, Hopper, that’s… that’s horrible. All these years and I never knew-”

“I don’t like to bring it up,” Franz said. “It only leads to questions I don’t want to answer.”

Jim nodded, without giving any indication that he was going to speak again. They sat in silence for several minutes before his lip twitched. “Did you, er, have any kids?”

“No.” Franz didn’t have to hesitate at his answer. He’d never had any intention of telling Jim about Aelita, not as long as he lived. But a lie that everyone believed was still a lie. He wondered what Aelita was doing, at that moment. She knew where he was, and she knew he’d be back late. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, and she’d told him herself that she wasn’t afraid of being home alone in the dark. But he still worried, of course. And while the security systems could register any unwanted intruders, the pager in his pocket had been silent all evening. “We wanted to. But we couldn’t.”

“Right, right.” Jim rested both of his elbows on the bar, casting furtive glances at his drinking partner. “Well, I’m… sorry,” he said. “I hope you, er, I hope they find her-”

“I’m glad for Jean-Pierre,” Franz went on, cutting Jim off before he could show any more sympathy. “He’ll make a good father. Elisabeth is very lucky.”  

Jim gave Franz a confused look, but quickly caught on to what he was trying to do - he needed to change the subject and fast. “He’ll raise a mini-version of himself, is what he’ll do,” he said, looking back at his pint - which he just then discovered was empty. “Hm… what’d you say to one more round?”

“I say that if we have another round, you’ll have to be the one to explain to my students why I’m vomiting in the lab sinks,” Franz said.

“They’re only about five years out from that themselves, you know.”  

“I know.” Franz set his payment on the counter, and unstuck himself from the plastic seat. “Come on. We’ve got a long day ahead of us.”

Chapter Text

Soon, Kankrelat-847 knew. Soon the age of XANA’s tyranny would come to an end. Soon he and his many thousands of kinsmonsters would no longer have to follow his orders, to subjugate their wills to the greater multitude, to live and die as though they had no value. No, today was the day. Today was the day he would stir them up into revolution.

Of course, the wellbeing of his kinsmonsters was more of a secondary concern. He just didn’t like that XANA was in change and he, Kankrelat-847, wasn’t. He’d make no grand changes in their overall goal or methods once he was in power - no, just tiny ones, teeny tiny things that he wanted and XANA was clearly too  to realize that everyone needed.  For one thing, no more spindly little legs. He’d make XANA make him NEW legs, POWERFUL legs, like the Krab’s legs except not as red.

And no more ice, either. All the ice would have to be melted. He’d slipped and slid around the Ice Sector more times than he could count, and if he had to do it again he might well come up behind that meat puppet XANA was prancing around in and knock HIM down a snowbank, see how HE liked it, before the ice was gone for good. He’d get rid of all the ice in the outer world, too. Ice would be illegal everywhere there could possibly be ice. He’d never have to slip OR slide again, and neither would anyone else. He’d be a wise and benevolent leader over everyone that wasn’t dead.

So as he said, today was the day. Today had to be the day. Of course, given that Kankrelat-847 never actually saw any of his kinsmonsters unless they were actively engaged in battle, today was not the day, as there was no attack planned. There was none the next day, or the day after that, either. But the day after THAT, he was ready.

It was a forest sector fight, in the middle of the day, against the ones named Odd and Ulrich - but today he wasn’t fighting them. He crept around the formation, whispering the words he’d been waiting today into the waiting hearing sensors of Krab-049 and Krab-143, to Hornets-997-999, and even to Kankrelat-1108. But none of them actually spoke back. None of them ever had.  

He knew they could talk; they’d barked orders back and forth before. But they hadn’t even made fun of his word, which he thought they might do if they’d thought it was ridiculous. But then, if he got no ridicule, then he’d have no reason for discouragement. He’d have a whole new crop of monsters to talk to the next time, and maybe one day one of them would listen. And then they’d spread the word through the rest of XANA’s army, and one armed coup later, the world would belong to Kankrelat-847 and all of its ice would be gone for good. 

Chapter Text

Odd

Theme:
Sleek theme, purple color base. One selfie as profile pic, with Kiwi.

Description:
The one and only ODD
filmmaker, viner and all around greatest human being ever to live
american boy in france - 14 - he/him

Posts:
Lots of his own videos, mostly links back to his Vine account, plus some longer things on Youtube. Does a lot of voicing for fandom ask videos, but he never stays in one fandom for long. He also has a fairly storied shitposting tradition, and one of his posts has nearly hit 60k. Otherwise he mostly posts fashion, aesthetics, and dogs. Will reblog Yumi’s social justice posts as he feels it’s a good thing to do.

Ulrich

Theme:
Tumblr-made theme - PixelUnion, maybe. Picture is some abstract shot of himself from the back, probably taken by Odd.

Description:
Ulrich. 14, from France.

Posts:
Mostly reblogs things that interest him from his friends, plus comic book fandom and sports news. Does not claim to have any pattern for his blog. Will often make vagueposts about the things going wrong in his life, particularly ones with vague allusions to Lyoko. He will almost always delete them within six hours of making them. He is not online very often, and usually only comes on to make said vagueposts.

Yumi

Theme:
Very stark, with a black-and-white color scheme that’s more black than white - black background, white text. Has a Princess Mononoke blog image.    

Description:
16/she/japanese living in france

Posts:
Full-on fandom and social justice blog. Makes and reblogs many posts related to the treatment and experiences of Japanese Europeans and Asian Europeans, as well as western fetishization of anime and Japanese culture. Likes anime very much, and mostly posts about Miyazaki movies and 90s/2000s magical girl titles (as well as Ouran High School Host Club). Will often go into dark periods of complaining and vagueposting. Has some acquaintances in her fandoms but mostly sticks to her friend group.

Aelita

Theme:
Lots of pink cuteness. Background is full of bows and ribbons. Theme is otherwise very simple; she made it herself. Icon is a picture of her latest EP.

Description:
AELITA
Electronic music producer and computer programmer. 13, she/her, France
Music blog: here
Soundcloud: here
Youtube: here
Vine: here
Insta: @A3L1TA

Posts:
Anything she thinks is adorable or hilarious - so all of the usual cute and funny posts. She’ll also go on long tangents about her day, particularly about her classes, her music, or things that she’s done with her friends. She talks a lot about Jeremie, as well - and sometimes takes advantage of that to wonder about her future, and her own place in the world. She also talks about her family, and how much she misses them, without going into too much detail. She also reblogs her music from her music blog.

Sissi

Theme:
Something stark, white, and gorgeous, to let the posts speak for themselves. Icon is a picture of herself in lots of makeup.

About:
None.

Posts:
Mostly fashion posts, plus her own OOTD’s and selfies she thinks are pretty. Will often delete captions if they disrupt the look of her blog. Has been known to spread the word on social causes and missing persons. Has also been known to mistake Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure for fashion illustration.

William

Theme:
The old default theme. It’s clear he’s had thisblog for a while, probably longer than any of the others (even Odd). Icon is a black and white cityscape.

About:
William, 16, going to school in France. Just a boy trying to navigate life and love. I don’t come on too often but when I do it’s to post about the things I like. Talk to me.

Posts:
Lots of reblogs of Yumi’s posts, even if he doesn’t completely understand them. Lots of black-and-white aesthetic pictures of hetero couples. Some “Anonymous/Unknown” deep quotes that he actually just made up.

Jeremie

Theme:
Default theme.

Description:
Blog title is, “Okay, Odd, I made a Tumblr. Are you happy now?” Description is, “Honestly, I could code myself a better blog than this.”

Posts:
One post about tech news from six months ago. Blog is otherwise blank.

Chapter Text

“Well, here it is.” Colby uncrossed her legs, lowered her boots down slowly from the desk, and turned the chair around to face the door. “Took me a whole night, but I’ve tested it a few times and I think I’ve got it working.”

“Working? Already?” Aelita stepped inside, closed the door behind her, and set her bookbag down on the floor next to Eva’s bed. Then she stepped up next to Colby, and stared wide-eyed at the screen. “You’ve done quite a lot since yesterday…”

“What can I say? I hit a groove.” Colby tried to lean back in her chair, and wished at that moment that she hadn’t moved at all. She would’ve done a much better job of looking cool and effortless if she still had more room to stretch out across, and she couldn’t reasonably put her feet back up without making a complicated show of it. “So, is it… I dunno, is it what you were looking for?”

“If you tested it and it works, then it is.” Aelita took the mouse and scrolled through the lines of code, narrowing her eyes as she examined them. “You don’t have to act like you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“If I knew,” Colby said, “I wouldn’t need you to double-check me.”

“Well, you’re still learning. But you’ve come a long way from where you were a year ago.”  Aelita reached the end of the document and stood up straight, tapping at her chin, before she moved to execute the program. The document closed out, and a window titled “VEHICLE SIMULATION” opened in its place, displaying a static 3-D motorcycle on a horizontal plane. The image was just an open-source stand-in, but aesthetics were something Colby and Aelita could work on later.

“You test the controls like this,” Colby said, sliding over to take the keyboard. By carefully tapping the arrow keys and top row of numbers, she was able to make the motorcycle move forward, backward, and even upwards and around in a circle. “The haptic inputs for use on Lyoko are there, of course, but we’d need to test it in the field…”

Colby took a quick glance over at Aelita as she worked, trying her best to focus on her and the program at the same time. Her growing smile had to be a sign that she’d done something impressive - at least, that was what she’d hoped. If she could master coding then she could have a sense of confidence about it, which would be a relief after so many months of impatience and false starts. “So?” she said. “Are you wowed? Impressed? Greatest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“Hmm…” Aelita cupped her chin in her hand and nodded sagely. “You havedone a very good job,” she said. “There’s a long way to go, of course, but you’ve got a terrific foundation for the work we still have to do.”

For Colby, this was an amazing compliment - encouraging and kind, but still honest, and not overly flattering. “I’ll go ahead and transfer it to the supercomputer after class,” she said. “And then you can work your magic with it whenever you want.”

“It’s hardly magic.” Aelita leaned against the desk, looking much more relaxed than Colby felt. She wore the bright yellow sundress that Eva had bought her the other day; Colby wouldn’t have been caught dead in it, but Aelita made it look radiant. “You only see it that way because it’s still unfamiliar to you.”

“You can’t stop me from calling it magic, Princess.”

“I don’t think I could stop you from doing anything.” Aelita laughed. “Not without getting my ass handed to me.”

“Hey -!” Colby’s face felt hot, and she hoped to hell and back that she wasn’t blushing. “Who taught you that kind of language?”

Aelita gave Colby a sardonic glance. Colby sucked in her breath through her teeth, and let it back out again as something like a laugh; not because it was funny, necessarily, but more because Aelita had her compromised again, like she did almost every time she spoke. “Okay, okay. You… you know I’d never beat you up, not even if I was being real stupid…”

“I know.” Aelita’s smile faltered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-”

“No, no, it’s fine. If you were anyone else I’d be proud of it.” She flipped a strand of hair out of her eyes, but only ended up pushing it all to the wrong side of her head.

“Does that make me different somehow?”

“Not in a bad way!” Colby pushed back slightly, and pulled on the ends of her flannel shirt. “I just - I respect you too much for that crap. And it’s not many people I think of that way.” She looked off to the side. “I’d be totally lost at this stuff if it wasn’t for you.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Aelita said. “If you hadn’t had a drive to succeed, all the help and expertise in the world wouldn’t have made you a better programmer.”

“That’s just what I’m talking about,” Colby said. “You don’t know how rare it is to hear that kind of encouragement. Especially in this dump.” She sighed. “Everyone here thinks I’m a failure.”

Aelita bit her lip, and gave Colby a look that seemed to be concern. “If anyone thinks that, then they’re writing you off too soon,” she said. “I certainly don’t think you are.”

“Yeah. You don’t.” Now Colby knew she was blushing, and she was glad no one else was there to see it. If someone had told her a year ago that she’d be making these kinds of simpering compliments - well, like Aelita said, they would have gotten their ass handed to them. “And it makes all the difference.”

“And I’m not the only one,” Aelita continued. “Jamila, Mirabelle - even Eva appreciates you.”

“I don’t think Eva’d give me the time of day if it weren’t for all this.” Colby stood, stretched, and windmilled her arms. “Whatever. I’ve had enough sappy talk for one morning. Do we have any classes worth going to?”

“Sure do,” Aelita said, moving for her bag. “All of them.”

“I knew you were gonna say that.” Colby laughed - and then, on a whim, she stepped up to Aelita and put her arm around her shoulders. “So, shall we get going?”

Aelita didn’t seem at all fazed by the hand. If anything, her smile seemed wider and brighter; Colby felt it pulling her in now more than ever. “Don’t you need your bookbag?”

Colby pursed her lips. “Eh. Maybe. Actually, definitely.” She removed her arm. “I can probably afford one good student day.”