Chapter 14 New York or Bust

With tears running down the side of her face, Yumi opened the door to the airplane and let her friends in. Odd closed the door, exhaling as he leaned against it.
"I-I can't believe he actually did it. They….they took over France," Jeremie said, staring out into space and shaking. Aelita consoled him.
"This isn't our fault," she said warmly.
"You're right." Jeremie looked at her. "It's my fault."
"Jeremie! Why would you say something like that? If it's anybody's fault, it's that Gibson man's."
"I'm the one who left it accessible to anyone. I left the materialization program in the disc drive. I didn't lock the factory up like I should've," Jeremie's face scrunched up as his sadness and guilt began to surface. He started sniffling. Aelita embraced him, and cried along with him. Odd walked up into the unoccupied cockpit.
"I don't suppose any of you know how to fly a plane?" he called back. It was mostly a rhetorical question. A few moments later, he poked his head out through the door again.
"Hey, guys! You'd better come see this!" Yumi gloomily slinked up the aisle. Aelita "helped" Jeremie towards the front—she was mostly dragging him, since he now refused to move. There awaited a horrid scene through the view of the cockpit window. Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. The ground was shaking violently, in the pattern of footsteps. Marching. Gigantic, terrible, ugly humanoid monsters were marching in unison like Nazi soldiers around the airport.
Suddenly, the door they went through opened again, and they heard someone running towards the cockpit. Three someones.
"Ulrich!" Yumi exclaimed. She, being very un-Yumi like, practically jumped over Aelita and tackled Ulrich. "I missed you, you little bastard!"
"Uh, hi, Yumi," he said, blushing. Yumi soon realized what she was doing, got up and backed away. She covered her face. Chuckling, Hope stepped over Ulrich who was still on the ground, set a box next to the wall, and walked up to Odd.
"Hello, Odd," she smiled.
"Hi." Hope squinted at him.
"What's wrong?"
"Nothing. I-I'm fine. I'm glad you made it. But, as you can see," he waved his arm out to indicate the view from outside the plane, "there's not a whole lot we can do right now."
Sissi was looking, wide-eyed, out at the monsters marching around the airport. Her mouth was open. She wasn't moving.
"Sissi?" Ulrich asked after getting up from the floor. He walked up to her. Yumi spontaneously moved rather close to Ulrich, without thinking or really knowing why. "Are you okay?"
Her lips were quivering. It looked like she was attempting to form words.
"B…b…." Sissi stuttered.
"Bathroom? Do you have to go?" Odd asked. Everyone looked at him. "What? It was just a guess."
He shrugged. Sissi shook her head, slowly. She pointed out of the windshield.
"Big. Big… things. Really, really big things!" she said, starting to come out of it. "What ARE those things? What's going on! I just thought what's-her-name was trying to get you guys out of the country and those Emperor people… REALLY BIG THINGS!"
She started swaying, and then collapsed and fell to the floor.
"She fainted," Jeremie said quietly, pushing his glasses up with his finger.
"Thank you for stating the obvious, Jeremie," Ulrich snapped, kneeling down to Sissi to see if she was alright. Aelita frowned.
"Ulrich… you didn't have to say it like that," she said. Hope was over in the corner, cringing wit her hand up to her forehead, rubbing her brow.
"It's already happening," She said. Hope shook her head and then turned to face the others. "We have to get out of here. There's got to be another way. Maybe we could take a boat… No… that would take too long…"
For the first time, Hope was not the perfect heroine with all the answers that always knew what to do. She was human, and she was stumped. Odd's stomach growled.
"Oooh. All that fast food is starting to catch up with me," he said, rubbing his belly. "Pardon me. The W.C. beckons."
He ran—well, more of a brisk walk—towards the back, to go to the bathroom. Strangely, the door read "occupied". Odd jingled the handle .
"Hey! It won't open!" he grunted and folded his arms. Then he started banging on the door. After a few blows, he started kicking it and doing everything he could to open it.
"Stupid door! I really gotta go!" Odd shouted. Just as he was about to enlist some aid, the doorknob started turning by itself. Slowly. The door opened, and a man fell back from the door to curling up on the floor, shaking like a frightened child. He had a pilot's uniform on.

"So you see," Hope concluded. "We really, really, really need you to fly us to New York."
"But what about all those….monstrosities out there on the runway?"
"Don't worry about those. We have a plan," Odd said. He was smiling, standing next to Hope. Yumi looked at him and remembered their conversation on the bus. She smiled too; he must have been happy to just say the word "we".
Odd took Hope over to a corner and they started whispering.
"Um… what is the plan?"
"How should I know? You're the one who said it!"
"But you always have a plan!" Hope froze for a second.
"Not this time." Odd turned towards the others. The pilot raised an eyebrow, and Aelita looked at him expectantly.
"Over here, guys," he waved them over.
"What?" Ulrich asked.
"We don't have a plan."
"…Are you serious?"
"Why would I lie?"
"Okay… um… hmm." Ulrich put scratched his chin, thinking. Jeremie suddenly had a look upon his face that seemed to say "Aha!"
"Aha!" Jeremie snapped his fingers and grinned.
"Why are you grinning? This is not a very funny situation…" said Hope.
"I have a plan."
"You do?"
"Yes."
"Err… excuse me, uh, weirdo kids? I hate to interrupt, but… the ugly robot things are starting to come straight towards us," the pilot interjected.
"Any minute now, Einstein!" Odd said frantically. But Jeremie wasn't there. "Hey… where'd he go?"
They all looked this way and that, but there was no sign of their friend.
"Under here!" he said. Jeremie was underneath the control panel, messing with a bunch of wires.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!"
"Hey, stop that! You're going to screw the whole thing up!" the pilot grabbed for Jeremie but he pulled away.
"Just wait a minute! I know what I'm doing," Jeremie rearranged one last wire, and then came out. He sat in the pilot's seat. After tapping a few buttons, he picked up the headset. "Odd. Hand me your cell phone."
"Why?" Odd asked, taking it from his pocket and handing it to the computer wizard.
"Remember that horrible, horrible ringtone you bought a while back?" Jeremie scrolled through the menu on the phone. "Well, I'm going to make it even more horrible. For the monsters."
"What's a ringtone?" Aelita asked Yumi.
"It's a noise or tune someone's cell phone makes when they receive a call. Although I don't really get why Jeremie needs one right now," Yumi explained. At the pilot's seat, Jeremie put the microphone of the headset up to the speaker on the cell phone.
"Sir?" he asked the pilot, turning around.
"What?"
"Could you contact the control tower?"
"Sure," the pilot hurried to the control panel. He flipped some switches and turned a dial. "Okay."
"GUYS!" Hope shouted, eyes wide in fear. A gigantic metal hand was about to come crashing through the windshield.
"I hope this works!" Jeremie pushed a button on Odd's cell phone. Everyone covered their ears and moaned in pain as an excruciating high pitched, loud, chaotic melody played increasingly louder and louder.
The hand stopped.
"How did….? What did…? Uh, what are you doing, Aelita?" Yumi asked. Aelita had basically glomped Jeremie. She was hugging him and he was beginning to turn funny colors.
"That was BRILLIANT! How did you figure it out?"
"Well… I remembered that time when I built that sound wave generator to clear the bees out of the way so we could get to the factory, and then I was thinking about frequency and things like that. So I figured that since the monsters had to be controlled by Dr. Gibson at the control tower, he was probably connected to Lyoko. All I had to do was contact it and then use something with a high enough frequency to jam the signal from the factory… well, I suppose it would be EMPIRE's headquarters now?" Jeremie said. Hope looked away and blushed momentarily. She felt out of place. "So anyway, doing that would immobilize the monsters. I had a hunch that they were never totally autonomous but I still needed something to 'bring the noise', so to speak. And then I remembered 'Hey, wasn't that the name of that terrible ringtone Odd tried to kill us with before?' And the rest is history."
"INGENIOUS!" Aelita exclaimed. "Of course, I'd never be able to think something like that up."
"Nonsense, Aelita. You can do anything you put your mind to."
"Really, Jeremie?"
"Really."
"Wow. I still don't think I'll be as good as you."
"I already know you're smarter than I am, if not more."
"I am? But, you know so much…"
"That's just things about the real world. Your mathematics and algebra skills are really astounding."
"Well, now, I wouldn't say that…" Aelita said, blushing "humbly". Hope nudged Yumi with her elbow.
"She's trying to get him to flatter her, isn't she?" she whispered.
"She sure is. Hmm. Maybe I should be taking notes," Yumi gazed over at Ulrich, who was now trying to awaken Sissi, and frowned.
Two black boots came into Ulrich's vision. He looked up.
"What?"
"How is Sissi doing, hmm?"
"She's still unconscious."
"I can see that."
"Then why did you ask?"
"Oh, I don't know. You seemed to be spending so much time hovering around Miss Lizzy here so I thought there might be something especially wrong with her."
Ulrich said nothing. He was now starting to get the message. Was Yumi actually mad at him? What had he been doing wrong? He was only trying to help Sissi instead of callously leaving her on the floor like everyone else…
"Are you… upset?"
"Not at all," Yumi flipped her hair, but she still kept her eyes shut and faced away from Ulrich with the same frown on her face.
"You are too!"
"What would make you think that?"
"Just because I'm trying to help somebody that kind of just FAINTED? You are extremely selfish. You should be ashamed of yourself. I can't believe you would act this way!" She snapped her head back at him, jaw agape and eyes wide. She squinted at him.
"'Remember, Mr. So-and-So, remember, I'm a lady.'" And with that, she turned on him. Ulrich frowned.
So she thinks she's ANNE FRANK now or something? What is this bull crap?
"Okay. I think the runway's all clear now. You guys had better go buckle up before they turn themselves back on. This is gonna be a close one," the pilot called to them. The kids walked back into first class and sat in the rows. Ulrich and Yumi sat as far away from each other as possible, and Hope helped him buckle Sissi into a seat. Odd, Jeremie, and Aelita sat next to each other. The brunette sat across from Odd in the other row.
The plane's engine roared as it was turned on. After maneuvering around the frozen monster, which wasn't easy without much momentum, the plane finally began to taxi. Everyone's hearts were pounding, afraid that Gibson would figure out what was going on and send the humanoids to attack at any moment. Luck seemed to be with them, though, because as the plane ascended into the air, nothing stopped them or crushed them and no missiles were shot at the aircraft.

Walking out of the bathroom, Dr. Gibson was ambushed by two younger officers."What do you want?"
"Sir! Um, did you authorize one of the airplanes to leave the grounds?"
"No… of course not!" He almost began to run to the control tower, when he stopped and a thought popped into his head. He remembered a conversation he had with a female teenaged guard not long ago.
"Ah. She must have requisitioned the plane. I don't approve of her not asking me… No matter. I might as well let it go."
"Sir? Who are you talking about?"
"NONE OF YOUR DAMN BUISNESS!" The officers stepped back.
"Go back to the control room."
"But there's one more—"
"What is it!"
"The Humanoids… there's something wrong with them."
"Of course there is. I hadn't programmed them to recognize EMPIRE employees. So she would've had to deactivate them some how…" Gibson walked back into the control room. He checked the laptop he had connected to the system there. A red "error" box was on the screen. "Disconnected? Hm. A little unorthodox, but… Oh what do I care? At least nothing was damaged."
"Are you done talking to yourself, sir?"
"Yes. I mean—hey! Don't speak to me like that, young man!"
"Oh, uh, yes sir, sorry sir!"
"Get me a mocha latte!"
"Yes sir!" The two officers scampered out of the room.

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Okay, whoo! All of the chapters have been uploaded (it's still not finished, though). By the way, in case you were wondering, this story was completely written by me (TAK). I haven't been in contact with CG in a while.. so... yeah.