Abby
I sit on the plane with my head in my one good hand. Even Yumi seems to have lost hope. It feels awful, knowing you’re going to die and have nothing to do about it. A single tear rolls down Yumi’s cheek.
“Abby… have you ever had a boyfriend?” The question startles the heck out of me. I jump, then wince from my arm.
“Umm… once. His name was…lemme think… oh yeah, Odd. He was a really ‘odd’ guy, but I liked him. A lot. He liked me back.”
“What was his last name?” Yumi asks, suddenly it seems she’s more alert.
“Uh,” I stall, trying to remember. “Odd… Della-Robbia! That was it!”
“Oh god,” the raven-haired girl moans. “How old were you?”
“It was about three years ago. Then he moved to France or whatever. It was Kedac Academy or something…”
“Kadic,” Yumi corrects. “Where I go.”
“Wow!” I say. Suddenly, questions fill my mind about Odd. “Does he have a new girlfriend? How does he look, does he still have his hair with a purple splotch? Are YOU his girlfriend? Tell me all about him!”
“Woah, woah! Calm down,” giggles Yumi. “He wears his hair differently now. He does have the purple splotch. And he’s tried numerous girls, but none of them like him back. His love life is like something out of a soap opera.”
“Well then, do you have a boyfriend?”
“I…yes. Well… what I mean to say is… I don’t know whether he’s a boyfriend, best friend, or enemy.”
“Woah, you have two?” Yumi lowers her head in defeat.
“It’s not like that.”
Author’s Note:
This takes place in season four, and William is XANAfied. Both troops of Lyoko Warriors know this. For the moment, William hasn’t attacked too much, Jeremie is trying to put up a firewall. To be more specific, this takes place after Double Take and then another mini episode I didn’t write and MoonScoop didn’t produce… yet.
“Well then?”
“It’s hard to explain.” I sigh, knowing she won’t tell me anything. I go back to my previous position, trying to concentrate on what is happening. But I feel nothing. I can’t do a thing.
Alex
I tell the others to get back to school. If we’re all gone, teachers will get suspicious. For me, it’s usual to miss gym and art, but not science. I’ll just have to take that chance.
“No way, Archimedes,” Dan contradicts. “It’s safe, because of this ‘chosen’, so why don’t you send us, too? We can find out more about Opal and Aelita.”
“That’s what Kristen is doing,” I sigh. “But fine. You can stand guard. But Dan, you’ll be missing art…”
“It’s one art lesson, Alex. I can miss it.” I hit my head once on the keyboard, frustrated.
“What…?” Suddenly, readouts come dashing up the screen. I translate them, reading them aloud. “Chosen virtualization ready. Yumi virtualization ready. XANA files open. Opal materialization ready.”
“DO IT!” They all yell. I send the info to Jeremie, quickly, then hit the enter button.
Abby
All of a sudden, I feel a whirl. And in a split second, I’m stepping out of a weird closet thing, a cylinder shape, and leaning for support on a strange wire.
“Abby?” Yumi, too, steps out of a cylinder, her knees buckling. “The Canada factory,” she hisses. Some doors open, an elevator, and Alex, Dan, and Mark step in. “Alex! What happened? And why are you showing Abby the factory?”
“Because she is ‘chosen’.”
“What?”
And then it seems that all time stops. Everything is perfectly still. Yumi stands to support herself, and whispers something into Alex’s ear. He nods, and goes back through the doors.
A minute later, the cylinder smokes, and slowly opens. And there, in front of me, is Odd. His eyes widen.
“Abby? No way!” As he breaks into a grin, I notice that his hair is spiked up. The purple splotch is still there, and he is still wearing all purple, as always. I hug him, wordless. Then, he holds me at an arm’s length. “You’ve changed. Wearing all black, like Yumi. You used to like red…”
“Yeah, well, I got sick of being color coordinated,” I laugh. It’s so good to see Odd again, after all those years. We were never sure whether we were friends or boyfriend and girlfriend. But now, it’s a mix of the two. “You, young man, haven’t changed at all,” I fake-scold. We start laughing, and Mark, Alex, and Dan stand by, having no idea what’s so funny. That’s the thing between me and Odd- we have our own sense of humor.
“Ya know, I had a dream of you. And you had a hot pink splotch in your hair,” Odd’s grin widens, taunting me.
“Would I ever stoop to that level? It’s not my fault I’m a redhead… blame Mom and-” I stop at the unpleasant memories. My parents don’t care about me at all. One summer, I had to stay at Odd’s house, for the pure reason that my parents didn’t want me at home. When I was small, my parents got a full-time babysitter and went to the movies whenever they could. Sure, Mom cooked for me and fed me, but other than that I was on my own. Odd knows all of this, and is not happy about it.
“What?” Dan asks curiously. Knowing that he doesn’t know a sensitive spot when he sees one, I answer the question.
“My parents just don’t want me, I guess. They always send me off to one of these boarding schools and pay extra for me to go to summer camp. I haven’t seen them since… well, about five years.” There’s a shocked silence. Well, Odd isn’t shocked, but he stays silent. “Umm, anyway… how did Yumi and Odd get here? They’re both from like…the other side of the planet…”
“Um, Abby? France has less than a seven hour difference. We don’t live in Japan,” Odd chides.
“How would you know?” I retort playfully. “Your brain is so scrambled we may as well be on Mars for you!
“But, you still haven’t answered my question. What’s going on?” They all stare at eachother.
“We can’t do a return. The tower hasn’t been deactivated yet, and it can’t be deactivated without Aelita,” Alex says in a low voice.
“We can still do a return… how does that change anything?” interrogates Mark.
“Think about it. A return makes you-know-who stronger, and an activated tower is a display of strenth. So if we feed his strength, who knows what he’ll do?” Mark utters a word I’d rather not repeat.
“Woah, what are you talking about now?”
“After all… you saw the readouts. She is ‘chosen’.”
“What?” asks Odd. Alex whispers something into his ear, and he whispers it to Yumi.
“What is it?!” I cry, frustrated.
“Abby, do you have any memory of…a virtual world…” suddenly, a voice echoes through the room.
“Alex, there’s some kind of form approaching! It doesn’t look like a monster…”
“Come on!” yells Alex. We all gather into the elevator, which lifts us to some weird place. There’s a monitor in the middle of the room, with a keyboard and mouse. There’s some weird colorful sphere hovering over some hole. “It’s…Abby!”
Slowly, every eye turns to look toward me.
Chapter End Notes:
A bunch of things should be bold, but something's wrong with the submit thing! I can't bold anything or stuff. Hopefully, this will get fixed soon!