Sissi Delmas and the Wonderful World of Lyoko
Chapter Four: System Errors

/

Sunlight poured in through the windows of Kadic, bringing with it a thick drowsiness whose tendrils wound around the students of Suzanne Hertz's class and lowered their heads gently to their desks.

Suzanne herself sat framed between two pillars of exercise books, one pile slowly diminishing as the other grew and the texts made the transition from 'ungraded' to, satisfyingly, 'graded'. She need only occasionally glance up to reprimand her students when the noise level grew from quiet buzz to headache-inducing clamour; a few stern words and the talking subsided into awkward stage whispers, reigned back in like the ebb of a tide. The class had just settled upon a fresh wave of quiet and even Suzanne longed for coffee; the sleepiness seemed contagious, somehow.

Ulrich rubbed his eyes. With monumental concentration he refocused his gaze on his notebook, his nose almost pressed to the page as his grip tightened stubbornly on his pencil. His messy scrawl noted down with the care the details of their experiment but as he cast a glance to his side he saw, with a twinge of irritation, that Sissi was merely resting her chin on her hands, staring off into space. Her headband had been pressing uncomfortably at her temples and now lay forgotten on the desk. She looked younger without it, her hair sweeping freely over her cheeks and framing the odd pattern of freckles that spread either side of her nose.

"Hey, Sissi," he said. His voice was hoarse with disuse. She blinked slowly and shuffled to close the distance between them. Ulrich's nose crinkled as he was hit with a waft of sweet, but slightly overbearing, perfume. When she smiled and tucked her hair coyly behind her ear, he couldn't quite resist the urge to roll his eyes.

"Yes, Ulrich?"

Her smile irritated him more than it had any right to, really. Odd's dog had been scratching and whimpering all night and the noise had snagged in Ulrich's brain, chasing away any chance of sleep. His fist tightened further around his pencil.

"Let's do some work, yeah? You're just kind of... sitting there." Then, with unnecessary spitefulness, "Use your brain for once."

Her face fell, the prettiness lost to a scowl that didn't suit her. Beneath her make-up, Sissi flushed with the self-concious humiliation of being caught out.

"Hmph," she said.

This quiet exchange sparked another round of conversation amongst the class; snatches of muttered phrases rising like puffs of smoke from all parts of the room, each conversation being the cue and the shield beneath which the others could take place. As the noise level crept upward once more, Sissi turned back to her plant diagram and dragged her eraser over a drawing of a leaf cell that hadn't come out quite right. She pressed too hard and hissed in frustration as the paper crumpled beneath her hand.

Concentration was proving difficult. Sissi saw the telltale signs of sleeplessness in Ulrich and forgave him the insult, feeling acute sympathy as she stifled a yawn under her hands. She'd been thinking about Aelita, truthfully. It was as though, these days, the planes of her thoughts were worn into thin grooves, her musings and concerns flowing perpetually down the same narrow paths. Aelita, computers, what all of it meant. There was also a sense of foreboding which lurked on the edges of her consciousness and hunted her down when she closed her eyes to sleep – her dreams were distorted and abstract, fragments of thought winding around one another, a tangle of thorny rose bushes with no distinct beginning or end and which, when she reached out to touch them, jolted her back instead into wakefulness.

Ulrich had returned to diligently copying notes on the nitrogen cycle into his notebook. The sunflowers they were growing for the project were sprouting their first optimistic shoots over on the classroom windowsill and Sissi thought he'd turned to look at them, but realised he was sneaking jealous glances from the corner of his eye to where Odd Della Robbia and Paul Gaillard were suppressing their laughter amongst a pile of discarded paper planes.

Sissi smoothed out her crumpled notepaper and sighed. Whilst Ulrich returned to his work – which was apparently more interesting than her – she surveyed the room. Odd and his partner had drawn the attention of Mrs Hertz; another minute more and someone was going to be dismissed from the room, or at the very least separated. The mingled buzz of conversations hit another volume level, as the other students worked on their projects with varying degrees of co-operation. Those lucky enough to be paired with friends were even enjoying themselves, despite the tenuous energy of the classroom.

At the very front of the class Sissi spied two blond heads bent closely toegether as Jérémie quietly explained something to Heidi, whose expression was slowly slipping into one of glazed-over vacancy. There was no hostility there, though; Sissi doubted Heidi had it in her to be mean to anyone. She found herself immensely relieved that Jérémie had ended up with a good partner, someone whose co-operation with Jérémie held no ulterior motive. Jérémie too, seemed tired, Sissi couldn't help but notice. It was impossible not to look at him and see beneath his quiet exterior the events of that one night, which seemed ever clearer in her mind even as time wore on and diminished it to a thing of the past, at least as far as Sissi was concerned.

Stomach laced through with something like guilt, she forced herself to focus on her diagram, smoothed out the piece of paper one more time and redrew in the lines she had just erased.

She purposefully avoided looking in Jérémie's direction for the remainder of the class, not that he noticed.

By the time the bell heralded the end of the lesson, Sissi had three diagrams completed and one page of variations on "Mrs Stern", "Mrs Sissi Stern", and "Elisabéth Stern" in an impressive array of cursive and colours in the back of her notebook. Standard fair for morning science classes. Ulrich filed away his things, wordlessly scraping back his chair as he did so. Whilst his peers were preparing for a rather more relaxed afternoon, the weighty sense of dread in Ulrich's stomach had him feeling more like a prisoner awaiting execution. Throughout the class he'd been thinking about it and come to the conclusion he didn't have a choice. Sissi had just hoisted her bag onto her shoulder when he cleared his throat.

"Sissi."

Her heart skipped a beat; she spun on her heel, flashed him that same winning smile.

"Ulrich, dear," she said, persistent in her endearments and, irritatingly, unphased by his earlier dimissiveness, "What's up?"

"Uh. We're running out of time to work on this project in class, you know. And neither of us seems to be getting anything done."

It was true; the slow drag of the first academic term had, all at once it seemed, gained momentum. There was talk of end-of-term tests; the leaves had begun to turn and the first glimmers of Hallowe'en merchandise began to turn up quietly in the corners of shop fronts. Ulrich felt stretched, worn thin, fighting an upwards current of permanent lethargy. Things always seemed harder as the nights grew longer; he ached for summer, the long, slow, warm days where time seemed immaterial, fluid, away from school's rigid calendar.

Sissi bit her lip. "Yeah," she said. She surprised him with her frankness. "Sorry. I did get some of the diagrams done, and I have been watering the flower thingies every day. Well, almost." Her shoulders rose and fell, a quick shrug. "We're ahead of Odd and Paul, at least?"

Ulrich's lip twitched slightly. It wasn't quite a smile, but Sissi took what she could get, embraced a momentary warm flow of triumph. It was enough to crack open the hard shell of tension encasing them, and enough to give Ulrich the resolve to say what he'd been needing to say.

"I thought we could get together later if you wanted. Maybe do a little more work together outside of class. We really need to," he conceded. "My dad will kill me if I start out the year failing a project." Much as the idea filled him with dread, and he'd shot her down so thoroughly last time the topic had come up, panic now had Ulrich swallowing his pride. He grimaced. Beneath this converstion was maths homework he hadn't done and at least three abandoned essay outlines. And always, his father's face, disappointed and unyielding.

Sissi nodded. "Yeah, Daddy hasn't been too pleased with me lately either. Ugh, parents." Comfortable side-by-side on this common ground, Sissi felt a little bolder. "There's a café I like in town that's open late. We could walk there together if you want, I just need some time ready, that's all."

Ulrich gave his own lopsided shrug of affirmation. "Sure. Make sure you bring your notes." He indicated to the papers still littering the desk. "This is going to be a productive afternoon," he warned her.

"Okay, okay." She smirked, wrapping a strand of hair around her finger. "You do owe me a date. If it has to be a study date, I guess I can work with that. See you later!"

There was a definite spring in her step as she swept her things into her arms and left the room, flicking her hair over her shoulder. Ulrich appraised her for a moment, wondering if it would be as bad as he anticipated.

She had forgotten her headband. Ulrich spotted it as his eyes fell to the desk; he hesitated over it, then reached down and put it in his pocket. When he left the empty classroom he saw Odd leaning by the doorframe, the lingering result of shameless eavesdropping. He smirked, and Ulrich pushed past him with a scowl.

It was the last of the nice days, though no one knew it yet. The evening would be chilly as the sun sunk into lavender clouds, but for now Sissi's shadow was long and the air warm on her face as she made her way through the park with her school bag bouncing at her hip.

She couldn't wait to share the good news with Aelita. She had a date with Ulrich Stern!

She repeated that to herself silently, giggling as the statement registered as solid fact in her brain. They would work hard on the project and in the meantime, away from distractions like school and the scathing remarks of Odd Della Robbia, she'd be able to shine, show Ulrich her true self. She'd show him she could be fun, and interesting – she was interested in football to an extent, there was the first fledgling common ground, and they could probably hit on some movies they both liked. It was going to be great, and nothing could ruin Sissi's day except perhaps-

"Sissi!"

She cringed, whipping around, armed with her fiercest glare. Hervé Pichon, jogging awkwardly and already slightly out of breath, hurried to close the gap between them. Nicholas ambled up behind him.

"Listen, uh, hi Sissi," he began, hands like flittering birds as they rung together and then came apart. "I was just wondering if we could talk about that programme thing you... found. It looked really interesting, and I-"

Sissi heaved a sigh, frustration turning inwards towards herself. She knew it had been a bad idea to trust Hervé. The Sissi Fanclub – a flattering idea until she learned it was comprised of only two people – had turned out to be bad enough, and now he seemed to linger constantly on the edge of her peripheral vision, a pale presence that emerged every time she rounded a corner, an awkward ghost. The only time Sissi managed to avoid him these days was when she was alone in her room, or in gym class, which he and Jérémie Belpois put an incredible amount of effort into avoiding.

"You said it was stupid, remember?" she said haughtily.

"Well, it seemed kind of far-fetched at first, and I still don't really know if I got it right, what I thought it did. Now though, I'm thinking, what if you took it to Mrs Hertz? Or, even..." His face flushed with excitement, "We could even try and send it to some theoretical physics expert! We could get famous! Imagine it, 'the Pichon Law of Time Reversion'. Or, 'Pichon-Delmas Law', I guess."

"Hervé, it's just a stupid thing I found." Sissi tried to keep her voice level. "I wanted you to look at it, you did, that's it."

"You said we could hang out after," Hervé said petulantly. "And it's been ages since then. I get the impression you're avoiding me."

"Whatever. I'm busy right now, anyway." She turned away from him.

"Where are you going?" He attempted to stand imposingly in her way but Sissi simply stepped around him and, with the advantage of longer legs and greater fitness, she began to pull away from him in quick strides. Hervé struggled to keep up, breath escaping him in sharp gasps. "Hey, Sissi!"

"I'm going for a walk!" she snapped. "Leave me alone, Hervé! For someone so smart you sure can be stupid, can't you see I'm not interested?"

He relented for a moment; within seconds she was a good few yards ahead of him.

Hervé Pichon was curious, stubborn and persistent. But he was also extremely unathletic, and knew when to cut his losses, so with sweat sticking uncomfortably to his back, he breathed deeply and sloped towards Kadic Academy once more.

There was a sudden tap on his shoulder. Hervé turned to the solemn face of Nicholas, who he'd almost forgotten was there.

"Hey, Nic." Annoyed as he was, he couldn't bring himself to be irritated with his best friend.

When Nicholas spoke it was slow, pondering, dream-like, the opposite to Sissi's rash impatience. "I was just thinking. It's a nice day, Hervé, we don't have to sit inside."

Hervé sighed. Despite everything they had in common – mostly that was simply a dorm room and 'being alone', but there were a few other things – they would always be divided on one basic idea, that being that Nicholas loved the outdoors whereas Hervé preferred to be inside at any opportunity. On the other hand...

"We might bump into Sissi when she's on her way back, I guess," Hervé said. "Okay," he added, mind made up. "We'll actually go and do something. What did you have in mind?"

Nicholas grinned.

"I have a spare fishing rod you can borrow. Let's go down to the river."

"Should be great fun..."

Hervé made a mental note to bring a book along with him, too.

/

"I'm going to take a nap," was all Ulrich said as he burst into his and Odd's shared dormitory. His room mate was sprawled on his bed. The huge headphones clamped against his ears overspilled with music, crackly muffled beats thumping almost loudly enough to make the walls shake and Ulriched wondered how Odd hadn't gone deaf.

"HEY ULRICH."

"Argh!" Ulrich threw his hands up in despair. "Turn that thing off, why don't you?"

"WHAT WAS THAT, BUDDY?"

Ulrich leaned over and pulled the headphones down from Odd's ears, flinging them onto the pillow. "If I can hear that racket when I'm not even wearing the headphones, it's a sign you've probably got it turned up too loud."

Odd leaned over and, at the press of a button, the music faded. "I guess it was a little loud."

"Yeah, right. You're as bad as that dog of yours. Kept me awake all night, sniffing and scratching."

"Aw, poor Kiwi." At the sound of his name, the dog scurried out from beneath Ulrich's bed and pressed his curious wet nose to Odd's ankles. Odd scooped him up, a now familiar gesture, and scratched his ears. "He's taking a little longer to get settled than I thought. Anyway." Odd grinned at Ulrich. "You should rest up for your big date. Finally decided to take the plunge, huh? I know you said you would, but you've been pretty determined to keep her at arm's length lately."

"It's only thanks to Hertz and her stupid project. I don't know why it takes two people to grow a bunch of sunflowers, anyway. And with all the other homework we've been getting, it keeps going out of my head." He paused for a moment, taking the time to kick off his shoes and lie on his bed. It was blissfully dark and quiet behind his eyelids. He was so tired. "So why are you so invested in me and Sissi, anyway?"

For the first time, Odd actually stopped to consider it. "Boredom, I guess," he said. "Weird how you can be at a boarding school with hundreds of students, yet it's so tough to find people to hang out with. Guess I'm taking a little longer than I thought to settle, too." He held Kiwi up to his face as he said this and examined his likeness thoughtfully, the dog's dark eyes serving as tiny, twin mirrors.

Odd had a sensation suddenly, like the world, even this box room, was too big for him. He shook his head, grinned in an attempt to restore his usual joviality, but it didn't matter – shortly after posing his question, Ulrich had fallen asleep.

Odd curled up with Kiwi close to his chest and, with an empty expression, traced out imaginary patterns on the ceiling.

/

"Aelitaaaa!" Sissi practically sang as she swung herself up into the supercomputer's chair. Aelita appeared instantly, seemingly relieved to see another face. It had been a long day, poring through databases.

"Hey Sissi. I like your hair."

Sissi ran her hand through it, pleased. "Thank you! I've lost my headband, I barely even noticed. I took it out in class, morning lessons were so slow you wouldn't believe." Despite this, a stubborn smile pulled at the corner of Sissi's mouth. She no longer bothered to repress it as she relaxed into the chair. Away from the sunlight her eyes took some time to adjust, but even the greenish glow of the factory couldn't temper her delighted expression.

"You're very cheerful today," Aelita teased.

The good news threatened to burst from Sissi, held back just long enough for her to contemplate whether she still had reservations about pouring her heart and soul into Aelita. She realised, pleased with herself, that she didn't.

"Oh, Aelita!" Sissi exclaimed. "I'm so excited. I have a date!"

This was another thing Sissi needed to explain.

"It's not quite a date, really, it's more like a study date, but it's pretty close. A date is, uh... when two people like each other, and they hang out. Though, I'm not so sure Ulrich likes me, really... I mean, I don't know, it's pretty complicated."

Aelita waited for Sissi to elaborate. The dark-haired girl found herself getting more and more flustered. It was one thing to turn this over in her mind as often as she did, yet another altogether to shape it into words, pressed from her mouth to the listening ear of a female cofident.

"This is a huge deal. I've been in love with Ulrich for a long time, you see."

Saying that out loud, rather than scribbling it in her diary, was strange. It was liberating however, to have the words out in the open.

"What does it mean, to be in love?" Aelita asked.

"Love is... when you like someone a lot. When you admire them, and when you want to spend time with them. When you just want to be with them. There's love like when you love your friends and family, and then there's romantic love, and that's the most powerful thing in the world. When two people love each other..." Sissi trailed off, and sighed wistfully. "It's a beautiful thing."

"It sounds wonderful." Aelita had leaned forward further, more enraptured than before, her smile mirroring Sissi's. "So what are you going to do on your date?"

/

Some time later, as Ulrich woke with a dry mouth and a brain replaced with compacted cotton wool and began to pull on a shirt and jeans ("Really," Odd commented cheerfully, "You could at least dress it up a little!"), Sissi threw open her own wardrobe and pulled from it armfuls of clothes, which she cast onto her bed without removing the hangers. For the moment she stood in a loose tank top and shorts, easy to slip in and out of as she tried combinations of prospective outfits.

"Jeans a shirt... or something more feminine?" Sissi mused aloud, holding up a blouse with sheer sleeves and ruffles. All her dresses seemed a little too over the top for a study date. There was her bright pink minidress, which she'd had for a year or so and now fitted a little snugly – this wasn't a bad thing in terms of what it showed off, but was in terms of how uncomfortable she'd be, sat hunched over a table in it for hours on end.

Her mind drifted to an imaginary scenario as she lined up outfits, hanging them from wardrobe door handles and spreading them out on the floor, holding pieces up against herself in the mirror. In it, Aelita sat at the foot of her bed, possibly with a mobile phone in one hand (pink, it would be pink, and Aelita would have pierced ears, two in the lobes and one at the top of her ear), her legs folded under her, absent-mindedly tossing Sissi's heart-shaped pillow up in the air and catching it again. In this imaginary scenario, Aelita was... Sissi scrambled to fill in the gap... Aelita was a new student, swept in mysteriously from Canada, and was slowly discovering all the wonders Paris had to offer. She would offer invaluable input on Sissi's outfit, just like all those groups of girl friends did in the movies.

Sissi indulged the daydream for a little while, wished for the millionth time she could pull Aelita up anywhere, on her phone or a laptop screen here in her room. She looked around her, reminded herself that the room was empty, and sighed.

Alone, Sissi decided on jeans with the blouse, and chunky-heeled boots which weren't too difficult to walk in.

There was a comforting routine in getting ready. With the pressure of choosing clothes now lifted, Sissi was free to tend to her hair which snaked in damp curls around her neck and shoulders. She brushed it absently, reaching for her hairdryer with one hand and plugging it in.

She couldn't have guessed what would happen next, nor, if she hadn't seen it with her own eyes, would she have believed it.

As the plug pressed snugly into the socket, there was a fleeting second between normality and danger; from that gap, blue sparks writhed like live eels. There emerged, too, smoke, but no smoke-smell – Sissi convinced herself later that she'd imagined this, because it was just too bizarre, but the airy substance was thick grey, almost black, and instead of curling into the air as smoke usually did, it poured from the socket in steady streams and faded when it hit the carpet.

The hairdryer in her hand shook, imbued with a fierce energy, and the electricty writhed, itself a wire, snaking around the cord of her hairdyer and reaching out hungrily for her arm. Sissi reacted just in time, hurling the hairdryer across the room where it left a series of weblike splinters in her mirror. Some of the static crackled against her skin as she reached for the door, which she flung open in panic and screamed out into the corridor.

"JIM!" Her voice rang shrill with hysteria and repetition- "JIM!"

A flurry of doors opened, heads and shoulders peering out in various states of dress. They lingered uncertainly, sensing a crisis but unable to gauge the level of urgency. At last, a girl disappeared through the main doors at an awkward jog and returned not long afterwards with Jim Moralés in tow.

"What's going on here?" His voiced rang out, reassuringly adult and ordinary.

"I have no idea what happened. My hairdryer just went crazy!" Sissi's heart was still racing, her mind replaying on a loop that fateful split-second of time that separated her from the present moment and another world where she lay lifeless on the floor, the victim of untimely electrocution. Through shallow breaths, it took Sissi a moment to explain. She tried to convey the importance of it, how deeply unsettling the entire thing had been, but one look at the exasperation strewn across Jim's face told her she had failed.

"You're not the only one." Jim wiped sweat from his brow. It was rare to see him quite so stressed – frustrated, sure, but this was a more hard-wearing stress of a man even more overworked than usual. "It's a miracle no one's been seriously injured. The bugs just seem to be getting worse and worse. Damned faulty circuits."

Sissi felt herself pressed to the corner of her own room as Jim bent down to examine the scene. The malfunction had left a blistering scorch mark across the carpet, and there was of course the broken mirror, fragments of which Jim carefully began to pick up and transfer to the wastepaper basket. Sissi, aware of her bare feet, stood well back. She felt dizzy.

"I'm stepping outside for a second, Jim."

She did so, relishing the open space of the girls' corridor. Several girls remained peering around their own doors at the commotion, gaping at Sissi standing there underdressed, with wet hair and a look of shock on her face. She didn't talk to many of them, knew them only by name and face, but relished the attention as they mulled around, hungry for gossip. As the story ran its course however, and it became apparent there was little else to do but stand around and watch Jim try to reset the mains, they drifted back to their rooms, closed the doors behind them and left Sissi alone once more.

It was a surprise then when Jérémie Belpois scurried past, an uncommon site on this particular floor. Sissi took a guess at who he might be avoiding, here in unfamiliar territory. There was a nervous energy about him, a scuttling insect-look with his hunched shoulders and his eyes huge behind his glasses. It took her a second to realise, too, that his arms were clamped possessively around a laptop. To her surprise, she found his name leaving her mouth, a pair of urgent syllables.

"Belpois."

He froze, turned and almost stumbled on his skinny, visible ankles. Like Hervé, he made a quick, cursory glance around the empty corridor as though to double-check that it was in fact Sissi who had addressed him. His eyes flickered briefly to her attire, the thigh-skimming shorts and tank top, and the faintest blush crept over his cheeks as his gaze settled determinedly on his shoes.

"Y-Yeah?" he managed to respond.

"You're good with computers, aren't you?"

He looked up again, eyes lit up with enthusiasm and a hint of indigant pride. "Pretty good, yeah," he admitted. "I could take a look. I'm kind of in a hurry, though..."

Sissi shook her head. "You know what? It doesn't matter."

So much for keeping secrets. At this rate, she was going to blab to the whole school, and she still hadn't told anyone who mattered. It was a silly fear holding her back, she realised, the desire not to tell Ulrich out of a sense of rejection, the inevitable bonding between him and Aelita. Maybe if he didn't bring Della Robbia long, if it was just the two of them... She considered briefly introducing Odd and Aelita, romantically, before she remembered the impracticalities of double-dating when one of the parties was an artifical intelligence; not too mention she would be doing a terrible disservice as a friend by putting Aelita in a situation where she had to put up with Odd.

Sissi realised she had been giving this way too much thought. The tangent ended, brought her abruptly back to the present moment where Jérémie stood, disappointed. "Okay," he said. "If you do need any help..."

"Thanks."

Suddenly the bemused, expression on the boy's face turned to one of stricken panic. Sissi found what prompted the change, and the apparent true source of Jérémie hiding on the girls' floor - Jim Moralés' head appearing around her bedroom door.

"Ah, Belpois!" he boomed. "I thought I heard your voice! Haven't seen you in a single gym class all week, and I'm not about to let you get away with it a minute longer! Except, uh... I just need to take a look at this, and I'll be out in a minute. But don't go wandering off, you hear?"

He disappeared back into Sissi's room. Jérémie exhaled relief at the brief escape.

"What bad luck, just who I came this way to avoid," he muttered.

Sissi quirked an eyebrow at the bespectacled boy, arms folded across her chest, a silent Well, what are you going to do? challenge. He stood for all of a second weighing up his options, torn between a teacher's authority compelling him to stay put and his own self-preservation, before adjusting the laptop in his arms and taking off hurriedly down the corridor, throwing over his shoulder a shy, apologetic smile.

Despite herself, Sissi found herself returning it.

Ulrich had heard about the malfunctioning hairdryer incident, and it was the first thing they discussed when he stepped up to Kadic's gates later that evening, following Sissi's lead. It was growing dark outside and they both hugged their jackets around them closely. Sissi's hair was still a little damp.

"We heard your scream from the next floor," Ulrich commented wryly, as Sissi began to pour out the finer details of what had happened.

"You weren't there. It was terrifying. Like the thing just came to life on its own."

Ulrich laughed. "And that doesn't make you sound crazy at all."

Sissi was indignant. "I'm just saying what happened. Ask Jim, even he thinks it's weird."

"He's stressed out lately," Ulrich noted.

"Tell me about it. He was chasing down Belpois for cutting gym, but his heart didn't even seem to be in it."

They followed the path around a long, winding bend. The town stretched out suddenly before them, a circuit board of bright lights and pattern. It wasn't until he stood here, at the edge of something so utterly normal, that the thought hit Ulrich, appearing in his mind fully formed as though somsone else had placed it there.

"Things have been weird at school lately. Ever since we got back, more or less." He turned to Sissi, fixed her with the full intensity of his gaze. Her breath caught in her throat; when it unstuck, the words lodged behind it came out quickly before Sissi even knew she was saying them.

"Tell me about it, I've had an interesting time of things lately, ever since-"

"Oh?" The stare intensified, questioning. Up close, Sissi could see his eyes had little flecks of darker brown in them.

"Nothing," said Sissi. "Just, like you say. Things have been weird."

The café was upon them suddenly, welcomed them in with warm lights and the permeating smell of hot chocolate and worn leather sofas. They took a large rounded table near the window and sat heavily down on squashy cushions. In time they had drinks, and settled down to business. Ulrich, with determined focus, began to spread an array of books and papers onto the table. His hand brushed something as he delved into his pocket in pursuit of pens, drew it out with vague surprise until memory caught up with him.

"Oh, here," he said, holding out Sissi's headband. "You left this in class."

She took it gratefully, pushed it back into place so that her hair was smoothed back once more from her forehead. The soft look to her face lessened slightly, the light bringing more attention to her darkly outlined eyes.

"Thanks. I did wonder where that had gone." She gave the kind of pause one does when they're hesitating to add something else and then decide the better of it. Ulrich couldn't guess; at the least he would never have guessed, "Aelita said it was a nice change, having my hair down like that."

He couldn't breach the topic without sounding vain, there was no way around it, but she had seemed less and less occupied with him lately. It was a relief, a weight lifted, but it did give him cause to wonder. Maybe she liked someone else? Odd?

He laughed aloud at this, and Sissi gave him a curt look from over her glass.

"What's so funny?" she demanded.

"Nothing!"

"You'd better not be laughing at me, Ulrich."

"No need to get so defensive."

"I wouldn't have to get so defensive if you and Odd and everyone else weren't such jerks all the time."

You don't help matters yourself, Ulrich wanted to shoot back, but the need to get his schoolwork done and not breach an argument won out. He retreated into one of his textbooks. Sissi, likewise, thought about pressing to find out what Ulrich was laughing at her for this time, but thought the better of it.

Ulrich shifted aside some papers and came upon an unfamiliar book angled towards Sissi's end of the table.

"What's that you're reading?"

Lifted accidentally from the pile of things in Sissi's bag was a book, presumably taken from Kadic's school library, its pages yellowed with age and many of them folded in different sized creases at the corners. Ulrich leaned forward to peer at the spine, reading out the title slowly.

"Feersum Endjinn. Sounds interesting." It was more a doubtful question than anything, and Sissi nodded before she could stop herself, almost immediately after turning to rummage aimlessly through her bag.

"It's nothing really," she replied with forced casualness. "It's just some dorky science fiction book I found in the library. I thought if Daddy thought I was reading something other than magazines, he'd be happier about my grades and stuff."

Ulrich would have been willing to accept that, almost did in fact, had it not been for the copies of other books he spied in her open bag later that night, as they left the café. The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Idlewild, old novels with unfamiliar front covers, nothing he recognised from Kadic's literature syllabus.

Were it not for the glossy magazine and the bulging makeup bag edged in amongst the other things, Ulrich might have thought he was speaking to a completely different person. He had the sense that maybe he was; that this strange new reading material, the preoccupied thoughts, were slowly edging out the Sissi Delmas that he knew and gently ushering in a new and undeniably intriguing girl in her place. This was a thought that stayed with him, long after time became concentrated, narrowed and shaped into an evening of study.

At last: "So now all we have to do is make sure our sunflowers don't die, and write up a conclusion. Unless you can think of anything else?"

Sissi scanned her handwritten list, with its ticks and crossing outs in bright pink ink. "That just about covers it, I think. I'm going to neaten up some of my diagrams and then we're done. A whole project on plant life and photosynthesis and the nitrogen cycle and it's only taken us..." she glanced at her phone for the time, surprised. "Hours and hours!"

"We should head back," Ulrich said, already standing up. He moved slowly, seemed content, or at least more relaxed than this morning. The pressure of school, and, imperceptibly, the pressure of Sissi Delmas, had lessened just slightly.

Sissi stretched out languidly across the table.

"I guess so."

/

It was quiet, as usual, within the tower.

Aelita sat with her hands on her folded knees, leaning forward intently to study the small interface. She had a huge project for today, and was taking a break to reexamine footage of the monsters, having found an option to replay, on a small screen, any occurrences within Lyoko. Sissi had mentioned something offhand about sights and sounds triggering memories, and Aelita wanted to know if this was the case.

She studied the monsters – they were unnamed so far; Sissi had proposed ideas but couldn't think of anything she deemed suitable, except perhaps 'Blocks' for the block-shaped ones, and that was so obvious as to be completely stupid – and tried to think about them in terms of Earth animals that Sissi had named. She had also returned to the Forest, trying to determine if the sensations surrounding the place were anything significant. She felt an affinity with it, but was it only because this was the place where she had woken up? The Ice sector felt different but also sentimental. The Desert gave her feelings of freedom, possibly due to its wide-open landscapes.

As part of the huge task she had set herself, combing through Lyoko's databases, Aelita had also come at last upon the Mountain sector. For reasons she couldn't explain, the notion that the mountaineous region existed made perfect sense to her. That they existed here, purpley-grey towering things, their tops hidden in thick clouds and their many platforms layered like cake, felt like the obvious solution to some long-forgotten puzzle. Sharing the discovery with Sissi that afternoon, Aelita had insisted she wouldn't go out there until her friend returned. And yet, as she sat there within the tower, the urge to venture beyond its walls was overwhelming.

Aelita did like the towers, in a way. She found their smoke reassuring, soft pale fronds of it curled around each tall fortress, like a protective spell. Inside, they had a calming effect as well as a healing one, settling Aelita's mind as the blue glow submerged her like a warmth bath and restored her life points.

"Oh, Sissi," Aelita said to the silence. "I hope you're having a wonderful time on your date. But I do wish you'd come back."

She stood, stretched lightly, and began to pace the small ringed platform. Calming and safe as the towers were, one could only take so much stillness.

"I could step out, just for a moment."

The thing with Lyoko was that it called out to her.

Since the very beginning, Aelita could not articulate this to Sissi. It was too abstract; trying to describe it was akin to trying to catch water through spread fingers. Lyoko called out to her, the same way she had clasped her hands and fallen to her knees and begged it for help – in return it ached to be explored, cried out for Aelita's soft touch on its ledges of rock and its mossy trees. Alone for such long spells of time, she began to feel antsy and impatient, her senses straining to satisfy this wordless desire for contact. She suspected on some level, given her origins, a programme played on a loop – felt more though, that there was something instinctive about the whole thing.

"Just one look," Aelita decided at last. "Sorry, Sissi. I'll keep safe, I promise."

She spread her arms, stepped off the tower and embraced the fall.

She slipped out of a tower wall into the Mountains, and from the instance she connected with that solid platform the feeling hit Aelita like a shockwave. She gasped, clutched her hands to her chest; had she a heartbeat, it would have been thrown into frantic sympathy with a sharp thrumming that rang from the ground.

Visibly, there was no difference. The ground didn't shake, the mountains stayed steadfast and unyielding. Yet there was something wrong here, an alien presence unlike anything in the other sectors. These surges of power beneath the surface of everything, so strong that Aelita half expected anything she touched to shoot sparks upward into her fingers.

She named them without even really naming them, the thought instead arising in her mind as though it had always been there, simply waiting to be dislodged so it could float to the surface. Pulsations, she thought. They had a certain pattern to them; the sensation came to her softly, as though she was experiencing the end ripples from a spot far away where a stone had been thrown into a pool.

"A breakthrough? Or another mystery to solve?" she whispered to herself. Then, louder, "Sissi! Sissi where are you?"

She hovered, helpless. Two options seemed equally tempting - wait for Sissi, as she had said she would... or go and explore? Despite her better judgement, her knowledge of monsters and her anxiety about the unknown, the call of Lyoko seemed almost impossible to ignore. Aelita's foot took one slow step almost without her notice; after which, like moving down a steep slope, the next step and each subsequent one became easier. Before she knew it she was walking again, footsteps providing a steady rhythmic pace against the rapid, frenetic one that had overtaken Lyoko.

She couldn't wait. Aelita had to find the source of the pulsations, was drawn inexplicably to whatever had cast them. Her eyes strained towards the horizon, hungry for its source.

A moment later, she had found it. In the distance, pressed against the open sky, a minute ember glowed on the tip of a thin, charred matchstick.

The sight was so wrong, the antithesis of her beloved fortresses, that the fresh wave of weakness in Aelita's knees was nothing to do with the pulsations and everything to do with fear.

It was a tower, turned red.

A/N: The books Sissi is reading in this chapter are all real titles, connected by a common theme. Sorry for the wait on this! I'm unworthy of such a patient readership, haha. I added an RTTP subplot which I then took out again, so this chapter isn't quite as action-packed as I thought it would be but now things are set in motion things should really pick up. Hope you all enjoyed this nonetheless.