Recovery_
Written by_
AmericanLyokoTeam_
Thanks for a brilliant world to play with:_
Moonscoop_
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their_ respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author_ is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No_ copyright infringement is intended_
***
“So what does it say?” Aelita urged him on.
Jeremie closed up the laptop and picked a spot under the light streaming in through a broken window. “Only that he’ll contact us again when he feels he can manage it.”
Yumi continued to gaze the other way, eyes misted. Odd gripped at the pit of his stomach, wishing it were just hunger he was feeling. Ulrich fidgeted and then finally became the voice for what was on everybody’s mind.
“Can we return to the past?”
Odd shot him a dark look, “What would that do. We’ve still lost Lyoko, and William.”
Ulrich sighed, “I might as well tell you, my father was here to demand an explanation for my grades. It did not end well.”
Jeremie looked at the ground tracing lines in the dust. “It wouldn’t work anyway.”
A chorus of questions filled the air, vying for his attention.
“Whoa, slow down, I can hardly think right now anyway. The return to the past won’t work right because Lyoko was more than a virtual world; it was tied integrally to the management of the q bytes used for processing. As far as I could ever tell from his notes, Franz intended to be able to manage the system from the inside.”
“So no more return trips?” Ulrich looked almost sick.
“Oh we could make the return trip, the hardware still works, but without the processing capacity, the only thing that wouldn’t be affected would by the supercomputer itself, and XANA knows how to hide there, whereas we’d be left in the dark wondering why we we’re down William and Lyoko.”
“I hate to say it then, but I’m finished. I’ll be lucky if my father doesn’t drag me out of there by tomorrow.” Ulrich slumped by the arm of the dilapidated old couch he’d been leaning on. “I might as well go, it’s not like we can do anything anymore, right?”
Odd stretched out on the couch. “It’s a nightmare. I want to just sleep and wake up with none of this ever having happened. I don’t want to move from this spot.”
Jeremie just hummed in agreement.
Yumi’s focus was practically nonexistent, but she managed opened her mouth anyway. “Didn’t we used to fear this old place?”
“Hey, you’re right,” answered Ulrich, raising his shoulders a bit. “Guess anything is better than hanging out in that factory now though.”
“It’s terrible,” Jeremie added “Without Lyoko it’s like there is no light down there. It’s a gloomy old cave.”
Aelita had been focused the other way the entire time but she finally snapped to. “Lyoko was our guiding star whenever we fought XANA. We knew there was a light there that gave us strength to go on and fight against impossible odds. It’s gone now, and I was ready to give up too, but there is a still a small ray of light to follow.”
Jeremie’s attention perked up. “Franz Hopper.”
“This was his house, this is where I remember growing up. We don’t fear it anymore because it’s our link to the strength we got from fighting on Lyoko. Our last ray of hope is through my father.”
Even Yumi managed a weak smile “Hear, hear.”
“Well at least that explains why I don’t want to go anywhere.” Odd offered. “I’m holding onto what hope we’ve got.”
“I can’t go home, I can’t face explaining any of this to my parents.” Yumi said, almost in shock, as if just thinking of it for the first time.
“I can’t face my father now either.” Ulrich added, calmly but sadly.
“I ditched the perfect girl just to lose our world and friend.” Odd moaned.
“So let’s not go back. Let’s stay here. What does any of it matter if XANA can attack at any time and we can’t do a thing about it?” The suggestion wasn’t such a stretch, except that Jeremie was the one offering it. “Seriously, unless Franz has the freedom to bring us some way to fight back, we’re as stranded as anybody else.”
Aelita looked almost shocked. “You spend a year of your life bringing me to Earth, getting my memories back, searching for a way to send us to fight XANA, and now you’re going to give up, just like that?”
Jeremie wasn’t one for tears but it looked like he wanted to. “There are problems you can fix and problems you can’t. I can’t analyze a transfer, I can’t search Lyoko for data. William is gone. Dead.”
The word killed the room. Everybody stared intently at the pit of their stomachs, wishing for nothing so much in the whole world as for that feeling to go away.
After a long pause, Jeremie finally started again.
“You were right, Franz is the last ray of hope we have, and like them,” he gestured to the three tired and defeated warriors “I just want to sit here holding on to it.”
Aelita finally nodded in response. “All right, just for tonight though. In the morning we have to find some way to cover all of this up and move on.”
In utter mental exhaustion, they simply sat trying to hold onto the glow of the light streaming through the windows, and as the light faded, they slept.
---
Odd opened his eyes and tried to clear them, feeling the chill morning air in his bones. Aelita was standing up in front of him looking worse for the wear, her hair matted down, Jeremie was trying to straighten his out, and was dusting himself off. Odd shook Ulrich and tapped Yumi’s shoulder, rousing them slowly too.
“Eugh, Aelita, you look like hell.” Odd said, stretching in an almost catlike fashion.
“We figured out what to do and took off far earlier this morning.” She answered. “I’ve also got at least a little food.”
“Save it, I’m still not hungry” Odd frowned, utterly expecting the opposite.
“Eat it anyway, you need the strength.” She ordered as Jeremie began chattering at Ulrich.
‘It’ turned out to be a dry Danish, but Odd found after he ingested the first couple of bites it became far easier to chew and swallow, a little hunger returning to him. Between bites he finally managed to ask what had occurred that morning.
Aelita exploded in explanation, talking faster than she could think, “We determined that explaining why we were missing would be easier than- than explaining why nobody would find William. So we reported him running away on the claim he was sick of Kadic to the police. We followed it up with all of us trying to find and stop him but giving up early this morning. We can all go home again and hope this sorts itself out with minimal harassment, although I expect the authorities will be contacting us in an ongoing investigation for some time.” She paused to catch her breath.
“If it didn’t make me feel so awful, I would call it pretty clever.”
“Not really, we all have or stand to lose something from it. But the alternative is hiding out here forever. We can’t do that, XANA or not we have to get on with our lives.”
---
Hours later, in the warm well lit boarding school room of Jeremie Belpois, the same people, with grim expressions, draped across the various Spartan furniture.
“So who got it worst?” Jeremie asked, trying to encourage any activity out of them.
“My parents are furious.” Yumi barely spoke “But after the police arrived to take our testimonial, they became a little more understanding. They at least believe that we were trying to prevent something terrible from happening. I’m still not going anywhere but home and school for- forever probably.”
“At least that doesn’t matter so much anymore.” Jeremie tried to offer.
Yumi just sank back into silence.
“I’ve got nothing really.” Odd interjected, petting Kiwi. “Sam would have gone back to the coast today anyway. Odds on I never would have seen her again anyway.”
“Mercifully they didn’t look at my background too deeply” Aelita sighed. “I’m still living in fear Delmas will try to call a contact to report this.”
“I’ve got an idea to fix that, but never mind now.” Jeremie sighed, hoping for more. “And you, Ulrich?”
“It’s a real tale of woe. You don’t want to hear it.”
Yumi leaned over and tapped his shoulder. “Try us.”
He sank further to the floor, practically only his head propped up on the cheap bed frame. “My father is many things, among them not impressed by almost anything. Yesterday I finally impressed him for maybe the first time in my life, standing against what he wanted for God’s sake. Running off like that to try and prevent harm to a friend, he at least understood why I wasn’t talking.”
“So what’s the fallout?” Odd asked.
“He’s giving me till the end of the semester to prove two things. That I can get excellent standing in my class back, and that my friends and life are worth the disrespect I showed him. He’ll be here pretty often and I have to demonstrate to him, and I quote ‘That I’m part of something amazing.’”
“Is there any point in keeping it a secret anymore anyway?” Yumi asked, putting right there what was on everybody’s mind.
“How can you say that, do you know what would happen to Aelita if the authorities knew?” Jeremie snapped.
Aelita herself looked somewhat saddened.
“We keep the secret.” Ulrich answered. “We might as well, everybody else will know about XANA next time he can attack anyway, but there’s no point in causing a panic. Anyway, if I fail to meet any condition at any time, I’m gone immediately.”
“Better than where you thought you were 8 hours ago” Aelita offered.
“And that’s it then?” Odd asked, “We go back to living life like none of this ever happened until XANA ends the world?”
“No” Aelita demanded, focusing attention. “We hold on to the ray of hope that my father will get us the tools we need to continue the fight some day. In the meantime if all we can do is be boarding school students, at least we’ll be good at it.”
“I’ll put my hand in to that,” offered Odd.
“All right.” Jeremie consented
“I don’t care if I impress him or not, I am part of something amazing.” Ulrich said, putting his hand foreword.
“I can’t turn this down now.” Yumi smiled weakly, but put her hand foreword too.
“To hope in a guiding star.” Aelita said. 4 voices chorused the remark.
“I have to go now,” Yumi resumed her blank expression. “I’m not going to risk anything for a month, minimum. Guess I’ll have a lot of extra study time at least.”
“My father’s not in town again until next week, I’m going to my room.” Ulrich said, waving over his shoulder.
Odd stared for a moment at Aelita looking quite upset. He thought better of what he wanted to say though, and decided simply to leave for air.
“That was some speech.” Jeremie smiled at Aelita, “Did you mean it?”
“Maybe, maybe not, but they needed to hear it, and so did you.”
“We have every right to be down, you know.”
“I do, and don’t think I’m not as well, but we have to push foreword.”
Jeremie got out of his swivel chair, sat down next to her on the bed, and opened his arms. Like reading his mind, they shared a long close hug.
“God love you,” he finally said. “We’re all about to fall to pieces and you’ve lost more than any of us. Yet here you are being the voice of hope.”
“I guess I’m just used to getting by on less than you all by now. Hope is all I’ve had for a while.”
He finally let go and fell back. “I swear to you from now on you’ll have me to rely on as well. I’m not all that strong, and I can get discouraged, but what I can offer, I offer to you.”
Aelita stood up to go. “I know. You keep doing your best and we’ll all get through this.” Jeremie just smiled as she walked out the door.
---
Odd was far less consolable. He sat in the hallway slowly and repeatedly hitting the back of his head against the wall. Sam was a selfish dope for not telling him, but she didn’t know better and she was still perfect wasn’t she? Wham. Thanks to a world he’d been dropped in to literally by accident he had to give up one of the best chances in his life at finding somebody who really matched him. Wham. Now a really cool guy he’d looked foreword to knowing had died because of the same secret. Wham.
“Hey Della Robbia, do you mind keeping the self abuse volume level down?” It was Herve Pinceon. Odd had half a mind to get up and punch the acne ridden passerby, but cooled himself down and just ignored him, leaning back against the wall.
When people meet an experience like this, doesn’t it change their perspective on life he wondered? Then an amazing thought hit him and he got up and wandered off back toward his room. He didn’t even hear Herve’s sarcastic “thank you” chase him down the hall, lost in a blaze of thoughts.
---
Yumi blankly looked ahead through the book solving equations. It was easy this way, getting entirely distracted in work, not thinking about anything else. She succeeded in brushing off all the chatter of her little brother and when dinner came, she barely spoke, focusing the same intent on the food that she had visited on her homework. Her parents had yelled all they were going to on this earlier in the day, and while silence was uncomfortable neither side want to pursue the subject. Finally faced with bedtime, Yumi ran out of distractions and when fidgeting with the futon’s sheets finally exhausted her, tears rolled a few at a time. She took the tiniest solace that she would finally maybe feel better in the morning after crying the night through.
---
And in the same dark, what might as well have been half the world away, Ulrich Stern was feeling he had nothing left to turn to. Before Lyoko entered his life his only goal had been to impress his father through hard work, and that purpose was no longer enough to carry him. He needed a belief in the fight, and it’s explosive outlet for his force and energy. He didn’t even notice when Odd finally got back to the room and flopped to sleep immediately. He just keep kicking off his sheets, staring at the cheap ceiling material wondering where he could go from here.
---
At ease with the world, Belpois didn’t even notice until his alarm roused him that a new email had arrived on his laptop. Fumbling for his glasses, he slammed off the alarm with some force and hazarded one foot in front of the other to his desk. Hair looking terrible after 2 days of activity and no shower, he slapped himself fully awake and opened up the laptop to check the nightly Internet changes.
“What’s this? Franz Hopper?”
He clicked open the new mail
“Stages of quantum computer recovery?”
He skimmed through the instructions, his smile getting bigger. This was not a rebuilding of Lyoko by any means, but there were basics here, ways to get some functions running again. A q byte controller, memory restores for simple programs. Then just as it was getting good, it cut off.
“Every time I send you information, XANA gets access too. It can’t yet attack, but all the plans it needs are with me, so we must be careful. I leave it as an exercise to the user to solve the puzzles between my words.”
“Recovery.” Jeremie said, breathlessly. “Thank you Hopper, I’ll try to live up to whatever it is you’re expecting. I promised your daughter as much.”