Chapter 10- Lyoko Plus Two (12.15.07-12.22.07)
The Overbike, Overboard and Overwing entered the gray tunnel in the gray sphere. Aelita, Odd, Ulrich, William, and Yumi entered Sector 5, exiting the blue interface-ridden tunnels. “Franz, Jeremie, we’re here.”
“Good,” Franz replied. “Sorry about the Transporter. Jeremie and I just fixed it, but there’s not much use in using it now, since we can’t. Enter the Core Zone through the Skidbladnir Hangar, and leave your vehicles there. Then go to the Arena, and Jeremie and I will reprogram the Corridor for you. I closed the sky entry portal to protect the Skidbladnir, but I’ll open it up for you, and close it again once you’ve entered it.”“Okay,” Ulrich called. The three vehicles flew to the top of the huge blue sphere. A hole opened in the plating a few meters in front of them. The Lyoko Warriors headed into the Hangar.
The Overbike landed on the navy blue platform. “It’s kinda quiet,” Ulrich said, jumping off the Overbike.
“Too quiet, if you ask me,” Odd said, grinning, jumping off with Aelita.
Ulrich sighed. This conversation had been the exact one that had happened in the Mountain Sector, except that Odd and Ulrich’s dialogue was reversed. All that time back, XANA had taken control of jumping back in time to strengthen himself, and also to finally gather enough power to possess someone: Sissi. Of course, that was the first time they realized that the Return to the Past strengthened the supercomputer, and XANA, at the time.
Yumi and William jumped onto the navy blue platform as well. Once everyone was there, Aelita led the way to the elevator.
A window opened up on the supercomputer. “Hang on, Aelita,” Franz said, frowning again. “We’ve just located more activated towers on Lyoko, twenty more to be exact.”
There was silence as it sank in.
“That’s impossible!” Aelita finally exclaimed. “Unless the tower restoration program developed a bug.”
But before Jeremie or Franz could respond, another window opened.
A radar window had opened, showing a spinning Lyoko. The spinning Lyoko suddenly froze; making the sound that it had located something, like the sound the supercomputer had made right after Lyoko had been recreated. Two rectangles blinked around the “empty” part of Lyoko: the two parts where two extra sectors could have been in Lyoko. Both Franz and Jeremie gasped. Franz quickly started typing.
Aelita waited. “What is it?” she finally asked.
“The towers are in…” Jeremie stuttered. “Well, they’re…what I mean to say is that…”
“Spit it out, Jeremie!” Ulrich said.
“The activated towers aren’t in any of the sectors,” finished Jeremie. “Well, they aren’t in any of the existing sectors.”
There was silence. Odd finally broke it. “Jeremie, do you know how much you sound like when we discovered Sector 5?” he joked.
It hit everyone on Lyoko, except William, at the same time. Aelita, Odd, Ulrich and Yumi gasped at the same moment, the realization becoming clear. “You mean there’s a new sector?” gasped Aelita.
“Two, to be exact,” said Franz. “A sixth and seventh sector that neither Jeremie nor I created.”
“XANA!” exclaimed William. “But what can he want with two new sectors?”
“It’s a little too obvious,” Ulrich said, with a slight edge to his voice. “He obviously wants them so he can have more activated towers. But my question is where these two new sectors are.”
Jeremie pondered on how to explain it. “Okay,” he finally said. “You know how the Ice, Desert, Forest, and Mountain Sectors surround Sector 5 on the holomap? The two new sectors occupy the open places, still jutting out in the direction away from Sector 5. If you looked at the five sectors, when they form an ‘X’, one of the new sectors comes toward you from Sector 5. The other goes out behind it.”
“So,” Aelita asked, “say the Ice Sector is pointing up on the ‘X’, and the Desert Sector is pointing right, and if the Ice Sector represents the y-axis on a coordinate plane, and the Desert represents the x-axis, one of the new sectors represents the z-axis?”
Franz thought, picturing the image in his mind. “Very good, Aelita,” he finally replied. “That’s exactly it.”
“So,” Odd said, cracking his knuckles, “do we go and visit these two new sectors? How do we get to them, by the way?”
Franz started typing. “It seems that both can easily be programmed Transporter access,” Franz answered, “but I’d feel safer if you went to them with the Skidbladnir. We don’t know what they look like. The Skidbladnir is fully charged at this point, and I can easily program two new data tunnels to get to the new sectors.”
“Okay,” Yumi said. “Let’s go.” The five of them ran onto the Transporter Spots. Everyone reappeared in the Skid.
“Your objective for now,” Franz instructed, “is to put the two new sectors under our control, via activating the tower restoration program from the sector’s passage tower.”
“Okay,” Aelita replied. “Liftoff.” The Skidbladnir slowly rose out of its Hangar.
Hovering a few meters above the blue sphere, the Sky Portal to the Hangar closed below them. Aelita took her hands off the joysticks and put her hands in her lap, waiting patiently. “Jeremie, Franz, you can create the tunnels. We’re ready.”
Above them, a few data interfaces drew back into the mess of interfaces. A hole soon opened up. It slowly grew bigger to the same size as the normal opening. As soon as it was complete, the interfaces near the hole started flowing into it. “Aelita, it’s ready,” Jeremie called.
“Okay.” With a slight shake, the Skid rose up through the tunnel.
The opening on the gray Sector 5 access sphere was located on the top of the sphere, its symbolism significant, in a way.
The first thing Aelita, Odd, Ulrich, Yumi and William saw was red sky. The sky of the sector was a deep red that slightly faded in color as it went up. The Skid circled the gray sphere downward.
Everyone gasped in awe. The new sector looked very much like a combination of the surface sectors. The plateaus and paths were a dark lava rock gray. In fact, they were just that: they were lava rock.
Mountains, much like the ones in the Mountain Sector, floated in midair, but still were that lava rock gray. Bright, red-orange, lava-colored glows appeared often around the sector.
The plateaus were large, dark gray, and seemed quite barren, like in the Desert Sector, and also had small rock formations just like in the Desert Sector as well. The paths of the new sector were always that dark gray, but in the shape of the paths in the Mountain Sector more than anything. Cables connected to the towers sparked a white-reddish-orange.
Below the mess of plateaus, mountains and paths, the Digital Sea glowed a bright red, with the crests of the small waves white. The water flowed rather gracefully for a sector created by XANA.
The Skid hovered to sit in front of a Desert-Sector-like plateau.
“Can I name this new sector?” asked Odd.
“Sure,” Jeremie said. “Go ahead. As long as it isn’t something stupid, like ‘Melanie’, that codename you gave the Skid.”
Odd rolled his eyes. “But that name was pretty good. Anyway, it’s obvious. Sector 6 is the Volcano Sector. Even though there aren’t any visible volcanoes, it still has the feel of a volcano.”
Odd waited and listened. There were sounds and murmurs of agreement from the other NavSkids. “Wow Odd, that’s actually pretty good,” Ulrich grinned. “I didn’t know you could think that hard.”
“Hey!”
“Quit it, you two,” Jeremie said. “We’ve just located the passage tower. The direction is fifty-two degrees south by southeast.”
“Okay,” Aelita said, pulling the joysticks. The Skid rose and turned away in the direction of the tower.
A question suddenly came to Yumi’s mind. “Jeremie? Franz? I think I forgot to ask this, even when we were back in the other surface sectors. What’s the difference between a passage tower and a way tower?”
“The five, passage towers of Lyoko,” Franz explained, “one in each sector, are the ‘heart’ of each sector. They can be used to accomplish greater tasks than the other normal towers, since the passage towers have a higher capacity to redirect data from Sector 5 and the sector itself.” *
“Remember when I was…well, had an attempt at a transfer to Lyoko?” Jeremie said. “Before we materialized Aelita and had the Super Scan? Aelita had to go and retrieve and redirect memory to the three scanners to get me back to Earth. Those four towers were the passage towers.” **
Yumi murmured understanding. She had been the one that had run the transfer program to try and get Jeremie to Lyoko so that he could apologize to Aelita in person. It had ended up in a total catastrophe.
“A way tower,” Jeremie explained, “is a sort of…slang term that we use to direct you to the tower we need you to enter to transfer sectors. ‘Way’, like ‘via’, which means ‘by way of’. Which is the Latin word for road.”
Ulrich rolled his eyes. “Jeremie, save the history lesson for later, okay?”
“Fine. But just so you know, it’s Latin, not so much history.”
“We’re at the passage tower,” Aelita called. The Skid grounded to a halt in front of a large plateau. “Teleport.”
Aelita, Odd, Ulrich, Yumi and William appeared on the plateau in front of them, the tower being on the other end of it. The plateau looked like it had been moved straight from the Desert Sector. It was very large, and the edges were flat and out-jutting. The only difference was that it was the dark, lava rock gray of the Volcano Sector.
As they ran toward the tower, there were birdcalls.
There was a collective sigh. Everyone turned around to see three Flying Mantas gliding toward them.
William beckoned to Odd and Aelita. “Go. We three will take care of these…bird things.” He quickly summoned his sword in white smoke, as Ulrich drew his sabers, and Yumi her fans. Odd and Aelita ran for the tower.
Odd and Aelita fired their weapons at the tower as they ran. But instead of the shield collapsing from a few hits like it normally did, it still stayed intact.
Odd and Aelita frowned. “Jeremie, Franz, is something wrong?” Odd asked. “The shield is more powerful here. Normally it collapses after three hits.”
“It’s most likely because we freed the energy by restoring the surface sectors’ towers,” Franz said. “Not all of that power is available to XANA, but some of it is.”
“Okay,” Aelita said. She and Odd quickly resumed attacking the shield.
Suddenly, there was a gigantic rumble. The plateau trembled and shook. Aelita and Odd nearly lost their balance. Ulrich, Yumi and William stumbled, stopping in their fight against the two remaining Mantas to glance around. “What was that?” Ulrich shouted.
There was another shake. The Mantas still continued flying and firing, since they weren’t affected by whatever was shaking the ground.
There was a third shake. Odd looked at Aelita. “Earthquake?”
As the fourth shake occurred, Aelita frowned. “No,” she said. “Listen.” The shakes had a certain rhythm, or beat. “They’re footsteps.”
"Must be some pretty big feet!" exclaimed Odd.
"Um…" Jeremie's voice was shaky. "Aelita! Odd! There's something…to your left."
Odd and Aelita turned. "There's just a rock formation," Odd called. “A really huge one, almost as tall as a tower…It doesn’t look like a threat,” he said, his eyebrows raised.
"Yeah…it's what's behind it."
There was a final rumble. The ground stopped shaking. Odd yelled, and Aelita screamed. Ulrich, Yumi and William turned to look at the huge thing behind the rock formation and gasped. “Oh no!”
A huge monster stood behind the rock. Its body was made of a dark lava rock gray, with flows of orange lava decorating its body as well. It had the body of a human, although its legs were very small and highly disproportionate to its body. It looked very muscular, but it could have just been fat. One arm was a human arm, and the other arm was a sword with a few XANA eyes on it.
Its head was hideous, with two mandibles hanging and swaying from its chin in the wind, like an insect. The huge, black XANA eye sat upon its head. Dark gray "antlers" surrounded the head and pointed from sideways to upward. Even with its short legs, it was taller than a tower. It was even wider than a tower as well.
"Jeremie, Daddy…" Aelita called. Her voice was shaky and very small, like she was a kindergartener frightened to death, too terrified to make a sound. "We have a…problem…"
"We see it, Aelita," Jeremie said. "It looks like XANA was finally able to create a Hulk on Lyoko."
"What should its name be?" asked Odd, a little humor somewhat intended.
"We don't care what its name is, as long as you guys defeat it!" called Jeremie. "But…the Kolossus might be a good name for it. For its utter size."
"Odd! Aelita!" shouted William, running over. "Head back for the tower! Yumi, Ulrich and I will try to distract the Kolossus."
Odd nodded, and he and Aelita both turned and ran back to the tower. They started attacking the shield once more. Two more Mantas flew toward them, with the other two still flying nearby Ulrich, William and Yumi, and circling the Kolossus.
William, Ulrich and Yumi took the hard task of attacking the huge monster. Ulrich sprinted forward, only to slide to a halt and change direction to avoid being crushed as the monster walked toward them.
"Come and get me!" shouted Yumi, throwing her fans at it. As her fans hit the Kolossus’ arm, they made orange marks, which gradually faded. It merely ignored her, and continued its path, passing the three of them.
Yumi caught her fans. "Why can't we get its attention?"
Then Ulrich realized something. "Oh no! It's going for the Skid!"
Sure enough, the Kolossus had chosen a path directly toward the Skid, which was still floating in midair a little away from the edge of the plateau.
"Jeremie! Franz! What do we do?"
"One of you, pilot the Skid toward the tower and away from the Kolossus," Franz instructed. The other two continue attacking the Kolossus."
"I'll pilot," Yumi told the two boys. They nodded. "Good luck."
Ulrich threw a saber at the Kolossus. William flung his Zanbato at it as well, neither to avail.
Yumi reappeared at the controls in the cockpit. She quickly grasped the joysticks and pushed them in the direction of the tower. The Skid flew to the other edge of the plateau. The two Mantas followed it, the Kolossus in their wake. "Franz," Yumi called, "we may not be able to keep this game of cat and mouse up!"
"It's okay," Jeremie said. "Aelita’s entering the tower." Sure enough, the blue rings around the front of the tower were already fading, showing that Aelita was in the tower. Odd blocked and dodged shots furiously from the two Mantas firing at him, firing his own laser arrows back at them. A Manta exploded.
Aelita quickly opened up the program on the interface. After organizing the windows, she finally pressed her hand to the large window on the screen.
The plateau gave a shake. The red cables connected to the towers throughout the sector sparked blue. All of the towers turned from red to blue as the Volcano Sector was rebooted.
"Volcano Sector restored," Aelita called as her tower also turned blue.
"Nice job, Aelita," Jeremie congratulated. "All of you, get back to Sector 5 so that we can deactivate the final sector."
Aelita quickly exited the tower. Just as the Kolossus neared the Skid with its slow pace, Aelita was teleported back into the cockpit. Grabbing the joysticks, she piloted the Skid to barely avoid the Kolossus as its sword arm crashed to the ground where the Skid had been hovering over a split second ago. The four Mantas circled the Kolossus in fury of the failure.
Jeremie and Franz sighed with relief as the Skid rose back up into the sky, back towards the tunnel to Sector 5.
---
The Skid entered the Celestial Dome once more. This time Aelita piloted the Skid downward to the bottom tunnel to the final sector. The Skid turned and spun around the blue dome downward.
The Skid slowly hovered out of the tunnel. This time, the tunnel was situated on the bottom of the gray sphere.
Virtual water surrounded them. Its surface was as high as the eye could see. Sunlight came in patches through the surface, as if only some light was strong enough to penetrate the water's surface.
The bottom of the sector was a leafy green, not flat, but rather hilly. Dark, mirrored pools occurred every so often along the ocean floor. They reflected the beautiful sights above them, like the water, sunlight and just the general feel of the new sector. Light-blue-sea-colored cables linked each tower to the next.
They all stared in wonder. "Jeremie, Franz, are we still on Lyoko?" asked William.
"Yes," Franz replied. "Why?"
"I'll uplink you a visual," Aelita said. A window opened on the supercomputer, showing Jeremie and Franz exactly what they were seeing.
Both Franz and Jeremie readjusted their glasses. "Where's access to the Network?" wondered Jeremie.
"You see those mirrored pools at the floor?" asked Yumi. "Those could be it."
"Sector 7 is definitely the Sea Sector," Ulrich said. There were again murmurs of agreement.
Aelita sighed, and shook her head, to wake up from the not-understandable beauty of the second new sector. Especially since it had been created by XANA, a demonic artificial intelligence with little or no compassion for beauty or nature. "Where's the passage tower?" Aelita finally asked.
Franz opened a radar window. "Let's see…just a little northwest of your position."
"Okay." The Skid propelled itself through the water, towards the passage tower of the final sector.
Odd sighed, stretching. "After this sector's done and we've terminated XANA, I'm really looking forward to having a well-earned rest. My bones ache."
"Jeremie, what time is it?" asked William.
"It's…" Jeremie checked his wristwatch, adjusting his glasses in surprise. "It's 1 AM."
"What?" Ulrich exclaimed. "You mean we've been on Lyoko for that long?"
"Yeah," Jeremie said. "Apparently."
"We're here," called Aelita. In front of them, the tower was on a short green hill. The Skid started firing at the shield.
A mental image flashed through Ulrich's mind. He was back in his samurai suit, but it seemed rather huge from the waist down. He was standing on black cable-like things, the kind around a tower. Around him was a landscape not unlike the Sea Sector, but with a slightly Japanese, anime tinge. He was slashing at different black blobs that were trying to attack him. The tower a little ways in front of him was huge, and not its normal size. While he didn't remember doing any of this, it seemed like it was from a past life. ***
Suddenly, a torpedo blast shook the Skid, shaking Ulrich back into the present. "We've got company," Aelita called.
"Swimming" toward them were two Kongers and two Rekins, growling and showing their teeth and fangs.
“Wow,” Ulrich commented. “This is like a mini version of the Network on Lyoko. It even has the same cranky greeters.”
Yumi raised an eyebrow. "The virtual water doesn’t affect them like it usually does?"
"It does affect the normal monsters," Franz said, glancing at the window processing the data, "but it looks as if XANA was able to program a loophole for his Network monsters."
The shield in front of the Skid lit up and exploded under the fire of torpedoes.
“Princess,” Odd called, “get into the tower, but release the NavSkids first. “We’ll take care of our guests.”
“Okay, Odd,” Aelita said, slightly smiling. She pulled down the four levers in front of her left hand. “NavSkids away. And, teleport,” she called, pressing a few more buttons on the keypad. Aelita vanished, reappearing in the tower.
The four NavSkids separated from the Skid. “One for each of us,” Ulrich called. Yumi and Odd went after the Kongers, while he and William started firing at a Rekin apiece.
As the interface opened, Aelita lightly tapped the middle of it. The processing windows appeared. Aelita quickly opened up the program. “Running restoration program…” She pressed her hand to the window. “Now.”
All around the sector, cables sparked blue. The shields surrounding each tower lit up and exploded. The towers turned from red to blue.
Aelita sighed. “Sea Sector restored.”
“Great job, Aelita,” Jeremie called.
“Good job, everyone,” Franz said. “We’re done for the day. Get back to dry dock, and I’ll bring you in.”
“What?” Ulrich asked, shooting the last monster. “I thought we still have to deactivate the Sector 5 tower, and then run that program from the interface.”
“We do,” Franz said, “but there’s a problem. I forgot that the program to exterminate XANA from the Lyoko supercomputer has to run throughout the night to work out the remaining bugs. And then in the morning, we need to calibrate the program to a Lyoko tower so that the program will function to Lyoko. This program is highly advanced, and we don’t want to take the chance of their being a bug.”
The four NavSkids carefully reattached themselves to the Skid. Aelita reappeared at the controls. “It sounds good,” Aelita said. “We can spend the night in the Factory, and get some rest. It’s really late, and even though we’ve been back to Earth, essentially we’ve been in the virtual world for over ten hours.”
Everyone sighed. “Well, I’m relieved!” Odd called. “It means I’ll be able to get that sleep sooner than I expected.”
“There’s one more thing,” Jeremie said. “We have to destroy the two new sectors.”
“What?”
“Why, Einstein?” asked Ulrich. “There isn’t a problem with them.”
“In fact, there is,” Franz said. “The problem is that there’s more of a chance that XANA will have a higher chance of gaining back power. For some reason, even with sixty towers less, he’s still able to control Earth fully. But that still doesn’t mean that we should give him chances.”
“But it seems so…” William pondered. “So…perfect. I mean, with seven sectors, the total number of sectors is seven, which is also a lucky number.”
Ulrich, Yumi, Aelita and Jeremie grinned.
“Don’t even get me started on luck!” Odd called.
“But all the spaces around Sector 5, as you said, Franz,” William continued, “are full. Doesn’t that account for something?”
Franz and Jeremie turned to each other, pondering the thought. “Okay,” Jeremie said at last. “I guess we can keep them. Get back to dry dock. It’s too dangerous to try and get back to the Replika now, especially with the Skid’s low shield energy.”
“Okay,” Aelita said. The Skid flew back up through the water and up into the gray tunnel.
---
The elevator door opened. Aelita, Odd, Ulrich, William and Yumi walked back into the Lab, over to the computer where Franz sat and Jeremie leaned against the chair.
Franz turned to look at them, still typing. “Good, you’re all back.” He pressed the enter key. A new window opened up, similar to the one Jeremie had run at the time when Brynja, that Icelandic girl, had come to Kadic and caused tension in the group from liking Odd. “I’m going to run this program to tomorrow morning.”
“Each of us will take a one-hour watch period,” Jeremie said, “with another person, so that the other can wake you up if you fall asleep. During the watch, all you need to do is check that the program is running, along with checking that the Supercomputer and Scanner rooms are okay. Make sure you use the ladder, not the Elevator.”
“I’ll go first,” Ulrich volunteered.
“I’ll go with you,” Odd said. “I want to save my sleep to later in the night.”
“I’ll go with you, Jeremie,” Aelita said. Jeremie smiled, nodding.
“That leaves me with you, William,” Yumi said, smiling. Ulrich pretended not to notice.
“We’ll repeat the rotations, if necessary,” Jeremie said.
“What about you, Franz?” Odd asked.
“I know it’s not fair,” Franz said, “but my body isn’t always used to this. I think I may need to sleep throughout the night. But don’t hesitate to wake Jeremie or me if something is wrong with the supercomputer.”
“Okay,” everyone agreed. They all took up sleeping positions around the room.
There were mingled calls of “Good night!” around the room. Soon everyone was asleep, except for Ulrich and Odd.
“I’ll check the supercomputer,” Ulrich said. “You go down to the scanners. We’ll rotate in ten minutes.”
“Okay,” Odd said, nodding. Both of them walked over to the trapdoor. Ulrich pulled it open, and the two boys went down into the rooms below to keep watch for their friends.