SilverSphere
King of Games Haywire Edition Chapter 1
It was sometime past. Yugi and and Anzu hadn't seen each other for months. Yugi was on a business trip to Africa again, and the long absenses kept Anzu home and lonely. She kept his old deck of cards clenched close to her heart somedays, and others she roamed the house in a lost daze. Each one of his suits lay out on the ironing board, starched to perfection and neatly patted down. Now and then she would restiffen them by pouring a cup of the mess onto the garments and rewetting them, then sitting in a chair and staring at them for hours.
She reminisced, how the group used to be. Old Honda.. What was his name.. He was in a better place now. And crooked old Jonouchi! During a duel with Duke he made an error with the time magician and was sent somewhere in the future. Poor Jonouchi. Several times Yugi and Honda tried to recover him, but nobody knew where he went. His constant 'nyehs' and power kicks were missed. And after Honda went missing, that familiar black shadow behind everyone was gone, and when you stopped walking you could almost feel the air whistle pass his razor sharp hair.. and yet, not. Duke disappeared after Jonouchi's disappearance, apparently feeling some sort of guilt. He was impossible to get ahold of, and it seemed as if at times he didn't want to be answered. Yugi had become slightly crestfallen after all this. Not with his core friends, he still pursued Anzu now, but she noticed he had become more serious, or lamentuous, she couldn't figure out which. But a silent wish of hers had been granted, to know a manly Yugi. Sometimes she could not tell if she was gazing upon the stoic pharoah or the passive, enigmatic Yugi. He had made engagement to her months ago, they were planning for it sometime in January or March. Yugi had packed his bags last time, and reaching into his pocket pulled out his watch before tightening his shirt collar and walking out the door.
But it is different today.
Today was the day, today Yugi had said he was coming home. Anzu waited at the door, filled with emotions and long ideas of grandeur, meeting with her fiance after months of waiting. A small black car pulled up to the house in the afternoon in a slow fashion, the shadows of the trees sliding over the hood and cab and the glints of yellow light spattering across the chrome and mirrors. Yellow light cast across the lawn as Anzu waited on the steps in the shade, an adult Yugi slowly stepped out of the cab in a black suit, brushed the tails and slowly walked up the sidewalk with a meaningful, long smile. Their eyes and faces glowed, Yugi took a last step up the cement and bounded into Anzu's arms, and Anzu's into his, and they hugged and met their faces, slightly crying, slightly laughing. The cab slowly pulled away out of the parking spot, when a huge bang would have been heard, cutting the air and blasting the trees, the leaves shaking and shuddering. The cab stopped dead. Something silver and chrome had met the air above the road, stretched into a long streak of pinstripes and glints, something black, something silver, and the horrible noise of a jet engine, blast and fuel and exhaust, distorting the image of the trees and coming to a stop in midair and hovering, Engines loud, rumbling. Yugi held Anzu's shoulders and peered out over the street, where her gaze was already at. A large, silver and navy motorcycle sat floating in midair, levitating up and down. A figure sat saddled atop of it, wrenching the gas handlebar to neutral and swinging a leg over the seat to meet the side. The motorcycle slowly pulled down, the wheels gyrated to a roadway position and landed it semi-gracefully on the streetbed below. A short man in a white and orange suit stepped off the cycle, slightly rotund and puny with stocky, dumpy legs and a hunched posture. He stepped up to sidewalk and made his way to the house.
Yugi waited for a moment and shouted to him "I say... Who are you?"
"Hweh!" The man shot back, trudging his steps back to the doorstep. He took off his riding helmet and revealed a crusty, old man's face, with deep set eyes and a snarky expression, a bang of old blonde hair smashed across his face.
"..Grandpa?" Yugi cried, and opened his arms wide.
"No! It's me, Jonouchi, nyeeh?" And he kicked Yugi in the crotch.
While Yugi had stopped writhing in pain, and Jonouchi had stopped laughing, they embraced and cried. "Why now, why are you here?" "What is that thing!" Yugi plead. "Why, Yugi, dere's no time! There's a problem in da future!" "What, what?" Yugi replied. "What happens to us in the future?" Jonouchi waved his hand. "Nah nah, I meant ya kids, Yuug. Ya kids. There's sometin messed up widdum."
He looked around. "Listen, dere's no time.. We need fuel, we have ta go back to da fyuchah." He looked around, and saw Anzu clenching something close to her heart. "Dere! Gimme dat." And Jonouchi wrenched it from her and dumped it in the Motorcycle's exhaust, along with her potted plants and Yugi's various burgerland collectibles. Before Jonouchi had completely forced them onto the motorcycle, Anzu ran in the house and grabbed the arms of one of Yugi's old cardgame uniforms and swooped it around his body. "I thought you'd forget this..!" He looked down at it quizzically and smirked. Arcing their legs over the machine (and with Jonouchi already waiting in the seat, revving the engine) Yugi held on tight and Anzu gripped the shirt around Yugi. "Here we go!" Jonouchi lifted the Cycle slowly, his passengers braced themselves as he put on a mean face and hunkered down, and in a blur the sky sped by in a raining streaks of yellow, green and blue. Frost enveloped the metal as the red digits flicked at hyper speed on the handlebar display. Anzu looked away and clenched her eyes shut. Yugi felt in his pocket, the ring, gave it a last flick as he clenched it and sighed, his hair whipping wildly.
Kaiba sat at a terminal, figuring out the sales of last year's product. Tacking at the keyboard, he brooded in silence. Being thwarted many times before, he settled down into forming a small, safe company. Sure, he was still creating Duel Monsters devices and merchandise, but at the same time he was not trying to destroy mankind, torture people or monopolize. No, those were puberty things. Steady and strong is best, he thought. If you want to kill someone, you hire a hitman, you don't duel him with cards.
Besides.. his eyes glanced sideways. On the blue dialog on his desk it was 6:30. It was already dark outside the large pane windows of his penthouse. The room was shrouded in dark shades and blue. It felt a bit like a large, empty church, with a steepled ceiling. A church to my greatness, Kaiba thought. He sighed. Just then, a red dot on his computer started flashing. Was it the yugi-tracker he had implanted in Yugi? His heart jumped. Then subsided, realizing it was a different notice, something else. Kaiba used his right hand on the mouse to click on it, while fumbling and flipping a prototype dueler device in his left hand and grinding his teeth, looking pensive. The computer made him forget about the lonely absess of the room and made him focus what was at hand. It was a signal he had never seen before; indeed it was on a local map and a red dot was flashing on one of the main streets below a few blocks away. He immediately left the room and called his butler to ready the car. Once inside the black convertible, he sat in the backseat and looked over, expecting to see a little Mokuba shouting "In the batmobile!" But it was elsewise.. He ordered the driver to take them to the locAl, now holding a gps tracking device in his hands and steadily looking over it with his piercing, slow eyes. Bands of light passed over the glossy car's topside and windows as it left the cement garage down a ramp and out to the outside world of evening Domino City.
The car cruised under the navy and lavender sky, in no particular hurry but a businessman's pace. Kaiba looked about, his temperament permanantly chained to being silent and unamused, even if whatever it was was unexplained. No, he couldn't be excited over anything, though he just focused on the Y-shaped city lamps as they passed, and the roadside blocks passed by in textured blurs. The ride was coast and silent, not a word of what he was thinking but his mind shouted and trembled "Mokuba!"
Arriving at the destination, Kaiba slowly stepped out in his white collared attire and looked at the sidewalk. There was a small burn mark and nothing else but some debris. Nobody was around and he wondered "Why? Why now?" He knelt and cried slightly. The prototype he held in his hand he now showed.. Something white and red, and something he had tirelessly tinkered with. He had been sorry he ever treated Mokuba that way, for now he was lost. The butler stood by silently, watching and keeping the door open. Kaiba finally kept himself together and stepped back in.
The device was a puzzle, it had worked at once and now was broken. For what seemed like 8 years he had tried to repair it. It was all Mokuba's idea he thought, it was so stupid. But his mind panged for his brother, his smile, his waving dark hair.
A dimensional portal lay above Domino City, he thought. That is the only place he could have gone. Somewhere in the fields of Duel Monsters of his own design and nightmare. The shadow realm.
Something had fallen out of the sky that day, and something which had been lost had been found.
Anzu squeezed a tear and Yugi held on. Jonouchi reached the end of the trip of a large yellow portal, and Kaiba reclined back in his office chair and cried silently in white casted blue darkness.