Chapter Text
"Barry and Jenny Nived," Cyrus Borg read out loud from the giant computer screen. He swiveled his wheelchair a bit to look at Arin for confirmation. "Correct?"
"Yes!" said Arin excitedly, looking up at the profile images of his parents on the screen with emotion. "That's them! Could you-?"
"I am pulling up their information from the database now."
As Cyrus Borg worked at the desk, Sora and Lloyd stood close to either side of Arin and gripped his shoulders, smiling in anticipation for their friend.
"While we wait for the results," said Borg, “would any of the rest of you like to use the Found Family Machine?”
“I already know where my parents are,” said Sora, holding up her hand, “and I’d rather not give them the chance to find out where I am. I like them better when they’re far away.”
“After all the misunderstandings that happened last time,” said Nya with an apologetic laugh, “I’d rather not try out one of your trendy inventions again, Mr. Borg. No offense.”
“Now that I think of it, it would be nice to know what happened to my mother,” said Lloyd. He made a face. “And my father, I guess.”
Tentatively he approached the ATM-like machine Borg had proudly introduced to them; a device that, with a DNA sample, could determine that person’s family members if they had given their own samples to the device before, and state where they had last done so. Borg had expressed his wish to install multiple stations of the Found Family Machine all over the Merged Realms, so that people could accomplish what Arin was hoping to; find their missing family members that had been separated from them all those years ago. Of course, this necessitated that both the missing persons and the people looking for them interacted with an F2 machine at some point, so it wasn’t a hundred percent reliable. But Borg had at least been able to input all the old citizens of Ninjago into it, and had already set up a station in the Crossroads, which meant Arin’s parents showed up in the results immediately when he put a coil of his hair in the slot. If they had passed by the Crossroads at any point in the past few months and used the machine there, he’d be able to find out…
While Borg ran the program on his wall-sized monitor, Lloyd approached the Found Family Machine, pulling out a golden strand of his hair. He dropped it into the dish sticking out of the middle, which then retracted. The machine dinged happily, and after a moment, the screen at the top showed a diagram with images of Lloyd and, in the square branching above him, Misako. In another square beside Misako’s, also connected to Lloyd’s, there was only a large question mark.
“Hah,” sighed Lloyd. “Guess that figures. Not much of a chance my father will be passing by anywhere civilized if he even is still alive, anyway.”
Kai clapped him on the shoulder comfortingly.
“What about you?” Lloyd asked him.
“Eh,” Kai shrugged. “Pretty sure my parents haven’t been in the Crossroads recently. I’m not worried about them, though.”
“Hey, why don’t you try it, Wyldfyre?” Sora said with sudden interest. “Maybe your parents are out there, too! Aren’t you curious about them?”
Wyldfyre snorted derisively. “Even if they are I’d be too embarrassed to find out. I just know they’re gonna turn out to be a couple of lame, boring losers.”
“Still, it couldn’t hurt to check,” said Lloyd, beckoning his hand out to her encouragingly. “Everyone deserves to know where they came from. They might be looking for you, too.”
Wyldfyre sighed and joined him and Kai at the machine. “Fine,” she said, before grinning wickedly, “but only if I get to spit instead! Spit has that DNA stuff too, right?”
“Well… yeah, I guess. If Cyrus says it’s okay–”
No sooner had Borg given a nod than Wyldfyre had hocked back a great loogie in her throat and shot it straight into the slot of the machine. Everyone made noises of disgust.
“Now I’m definitely not using it,” winced Sora.
“Not to worry,” said Borg, without looking away from his monitor as the machine dinged again. “It self-sterilizes the dish after each use. You could stick your tongue in and lick it without fear if you were so inclined. Er, but you probably shouldn’t, for etiquette’s sake.”
It was a minute before he realized everyone had gone quiet, and he turned to see them all staring at the Found Family Machine with their mouths open in dumbfounded disbelief.
“What is it…?”
Wyldfyre, Kai, and Lloyd, all standing closest to the machine, couldn’t even seem to blink, their gazes glued to the screen showing Wyldfyre’s image and, above it, the images of two very familiar people.
On the right, in a square frame helpfully labeled as “MOTHER”, were the scarlet red hair and cool features of a woman dressed in amber. Beneath the frame the name “SKYLOR CHEN” was written.
And on the left, in the box labeled “FATHER”, were the one-of-a-kind flame-like hair, cocky grin, and bright red gi of none other than…
“K… Kai?” Lloyd stuttered. He looked slowly from the screen to his old friend.
Nya, Arin, and Sora had come closer to the machine as well, each of them also turning their gazes on Kai, silently demanding an explanation.
But Kai was just as flabbergasted and confused as they were.
“No… No, that’s wrong. It has to be wrong.”
He looked at Wyldfyre, who’d gone completely pale, eyes flicking back and forth between the images of her ‘parents’ and herself, over and over. There was nothing that could be read in her expression but shock.
Kai whirled around to call to Borg. “Hey, this machine’s broken!” He laughed a little, as though it were just a silly mistake.
Borg adjusted his glasses and frowned. “It can’t be. You are the first ones to have used it. What is the issue exactly?”
“The issue is that this thing thinks I’m Wyldfyre’s dad!”
Wyldfyre flinched at Kai’s raised voice.
Borg’s frown cleared. “Oh I see…” he said. “Let me run a quick diagnostic.”
He turned back to his keyboard and typed rapidly. Kai crossed his arms and tapped his foot. He glanced at Wyldfyre out of the corner of his eye.
He gave her a small smile. “Technology, am I right?” he said. “Can’t ever count on it.”
“Y… Yeah,” stammered Wyldfyre. The caregiver bot that had raised her in the Wyldness flashed through her mind.
No one else said anything.
The F2 Machine whirred and beeped, and the monitor flickered and showed its title screen. The flat dish stuck out again, seemingly clean of saliva.
“Everything is in order,” said Borg. “Try it now.”
Wyldfyre hesitantly leaned forward to spit into the dish again, but Kai stopped her.
“Here, let me do it first.” He reached up and yanked a quill of his excessively gelled hair out, and dropped it into the dish.
The slot retracted. The machine dinged.
The screen showed a diagram connecting Ray (“FATHER”) and Maya (“MOTHER”) to the same image of Kai that had been on display for Wyldfyre’s results.
“There, see it– wait…” Kai craned his neck to get a closer look at the monitor. His eyes widened.
Beneath his image, a line connected him to a box with Wyldfyre’s picture in it, her name written below where the frame of the box was labeled, unmistakably, as:
“DAUGHTER”.
“Kai,” said Lloyd again. “It’s… It’s not a mistake…”
“No, it has to be!” Kai exclaimed, turning his back on the machine and looking at everyone with panic. “Maybe it’s because we have the same Elemental Power, it got confused…!”
But he could see everyone have the same thought he did as he trailed off, as the little mystery they’d all wondered about ever since they’d met Wyldfyre was finally explained: how someone else could be an Elemental Master of Fire, when it should only have been inherited from the previous user…
Nya took a deep breath and gave Kai her most serious, stern stare. “Kai. Is there something you need to tell us?”
“No!” denied Kai immediately. “No, look, Skylor and I haven’t even seen each other in years! Plus I’m not old enough to be a dad!”
“Kai, you’re thirty-f–” Lloyd started.
Kai cut him off, waving his hands. “Ah-bah-bup! Okay granted I could technically be one, but Wyldfyre is a teenager. She would’ve been born before the Merge. And either way it’s impossible because Skylor and I never… you know!”
“Never?” said Lloyd skeptically.
“No! Come on, what do you take me for?”
Nya and Lloyd exchanged a wary look. Arin and Sora stood back uncertainly.
Cyrus Borg cleared his throat. “Erm, I’d hate to interrupt with more… er, bad news… but the data came back from the Crossroads machine, Arin.”
Arin looked at Borg’s monitor with preemptive disappointment.
“They haven’t been there, at least not in the past few months. I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Borg,” Arin sighed heavily. “It was a slim chance anyway.”
The others seemed to wake up out of the trance Wyldfyre’s results had cast over them. Sora coughed awkwardly, and Nya scuffed her feet.
“Well,” said Lloyd. “Thanks, Cyrus. We’ll, uh… We’ll be going now.” He put a hand on Wyldfyre’s back and steered her away from the machine. “We have a lot to talk about.”
As they walked out of the room Wyldfyre looked back over her shoulder at Kai. He was shaking his head and muttering to himself.
For some reason she couldn't understand, her heart clenched painfully at the sight. She pulled away from Lloyd and walked faster, so that no one could see her face.