Author Notes: Hello, and welcome to a story idea that I have not seen posted on here. I always wondered about the wider world of GX, and specifically about what happened as the characters aged and moved on with their lives. Pro dueling was never fleshed out as much as I would like it to be, and thus came this idea. This story takes place 12 years after the events of season 4, and will mainly focus on Syrus and Alexis working to improve the professional circuit in America. I hope you enjoy it, and let's see what happens. I don't own Yugioh GX, and I do not seek to profit off this story.
Chapter 1: Grow the Game
12 years after she graduated from Duel Academy, Alexis had been regarded as one of the best ambassadors for dueling in America. She had taught in America for 12 years as a professor at the New York School, where she had taught hundreds of students how to improve their decks in addition to discussing professional duels to show what was happening. She was doing what she wanted, and the sport was becoming incrementally more popular with each passing year. The Pro League was getting regular time on cable television and was viewed as content that could appeal to young people. The problem was that the Pro League was viewed as the best league in the world, but the matches were tape-delayed to primetime. As a result, there was growing hunger for another league to improve that would be more homegrown and showcase a thriving culture that was starting to come into focus.
The American Dueling League was the top league in America, available to watch on the league's streaming service. This league had a hook that the Pro League refused to offer, which was team dueling. There were 20 teams in the league, and each team had 2 duelists and a Tag Duel pair that worked together to win a match duel. A match duel worked where each single duelist dueled the opponent single duelists and the tag duelists dueled each other. The single duelists would swap opponents and the winning team would be the first team to win 3 duels in the match. The Pro League had no such setup, and the rankings were determined by who knows what and the whims of the sponsors. It was rumored that Kaiba Corporation was the most powerful of all the sponsors and gamed the system. The ADL had a hardcore set of fans that tuned into matches, but building a brand was hard.
The man charged with building the brand was Syrus Truesdale. He had dueled in the Pro League for a few years before he chose to retire after falling down the ranks and dealing with the pressure of having the expectations to be as good as his brother. Syrus was offered the chance 5 years ago to run the ADL as the league commissioner, and he took it. His main accomplishments were setting up internet streaming for every match, and trying to market to Pro League fans by emphasizing that more Americans dueled in the ADL compared to the Pro League. He also made sure to schedule matches that would not interfere with major sporting events in the country, and purchased ad time on network television to emphasize the skill of his
Most of the duelists on the teams were Americans, because most of the elite graduates of the major academies wanted to work on other things or go straight to the Pro League. The ADL got college duelists or those who happened to know the game but could not get into the more elite academies. Alexis had leveraged her friendship with Syrus and her teaching skills to encourage her pupils to follow their dreams and to not be burdened with what she had been burdened with.
At the ADL offices in Chicago, Syrus was looking over the internal numbers for the previous weekend of matches. The streaming numbers were solid, with an average of 150,000 subscribers watching at any point of any of the 10 matches. He was unsure of how to get more people interested, since Kabia Corp had been unwilling to work with him on a joint exhibition tour of the United States and Japan that would have introduced each league's stars to the differing fanbases. He picked up his phone and made a call to the New York School, and asked for Alexis.
Alexis was finishing up a class, where she was teaching about field spells and how they were an important part of any deck construction. She had seen how her friends had used field spells to augment their decks and has seen numerous duels turn on the usage of these cards. It was one of her most important points to her students, that understanding your deck and knowing how to construct it was a key that many players could forget in their quest for knowledge. After her students left, Alexis went to her office when her phone rang. She closed the door, and picked up the phone.
Hello, Alexis Rhodes here. Who is this?", she said in a cheerful voice. She never got a whole lot of calls from her classmates, with all of them continuing their journeys. Jaden never called, and he was off the grid as far as she could tell.
Syrus looked out his office window and said "Hello Lex, it's me Syrus. I hope I didn't catch you at a bad time." Alexis grinned and stood up, and said "Good to hear from you Sy. I take it that you don't want to catch up on things?" Syrus giggled a bit, and said "No, I don't. Listen, have you ever considered coming out of retirement and dueling in an exhibition against one of the best duelists in the ADL?
To Be Continued.