The Gray
Chapter One: No One's Perfect
Timeline:Takes place after the end of the series and the Millennium Items are destroyed. Atem and the spirit of the ring make an appearance, however.
Summary:Two quirky girls from the real world find themselves in Yugioh and must hit the ground running and struggle to save the world from a disaster they unknowingly caused.
Pairings: OCxBakura, OCxSeto, and possibly others.
Note: Bakura refers to Ryou Bakura, and not the spirit of the ring.
Introducing the OCs, our heroes. Well, kinda. Well, sorta. Well, not really. But they try.
…
Take a look: there is a universe, your universe perhaps, and inside this universe there are planets, and moons, and stars. There are other galaxies, misty nebulas, and shining comets, all of them occupying their place in the deep celestial sea. The planets gravitate around the area of the largest matter, rotating around the dark of space like heavy balls on stretched black fabric and stars burn hotly in the cold depths, slowly dying a solitary death out over trillions of millennia.
Pretend that a single universe, rife with galaxies and planets as colorful and as large as Jupiter, with rich night skies and rippling stardust, could be placed in a single object, kept safely and stored away. Pretend there are other universes, like yours, that you would never be able to reach in your own universe, no matter how long or far you searched, and that they too can be stored in a single object.
And in these universes, there are a multitude of other universes, things that could have been, things that might have happened, things that did happen but happened elsewhere. Filled inside these separate universes, with their little moons and their lonely asteroid belts, is an infinity of possible multiverses, an ever-growing set of alternate universes.
Pretend again that these separate universes with multiverses that stretched out in infinite directions, were contained in something like a die. There are regular six-sided die, for perhaps regular universes, universes of no general importance, or maybe there's twenty-sided die for universes with more space, or volume, or possibility. There might even be a die for the universe you live in, or perhaps another one where a card game can take your soul.
Now… take a step away and see all the numerous die, an ongoing googleplex, an infinite infinity, scattered on some sort of ever-long surface. It can be a table, or a rug, or a bed. It can be anything, it doesn't matter. What matters is that sometimes a hand from some unknown being—a god, a monster, a demon, who knows?—reaches out and takes a die, sometimes two, and rolls them.
What good are dice for anyway, if not for rolling? There's no point otherwise, really.
The dice fall, the universe inside hurtling downwards, or upwards, rocketing dangerously past any measurable speed, faster than a heartbeat, faster than light, faster than a thought, and then… they hit another surface, and roll. And the owner of the hand is satisfied.
Sometimes though, in that drop, propelled by a dangerous force and immeasurable speed, some universes might collide into each other, and despite the safety of the die, shatter, and crack. Innate, universal forces spin out of control, swallow entire worlds they never should have been able to touch, and sometimes the two universes combine. And then, sometimes, something even more interesting happens.
Can you understand this?
Do you understand?
Good. Because all of this is complete nonsense.
Well, at least part of it is. Who knows about the other part?
The other version, well, it's hardly accurate and has no reliable witnesses, but it goes something like this:
The black desert sprawled across the landscape, nothing but towering black dunes and deep shadowy valleys for miles. And if you dug far enough down, the sand turned red.
This is where it began for Glitch and Kowareta who could no more tell you what they were doing sleeping in that desert than they could tell you what they were doing before they found themselves there; plucked by the hand of fate, or destiny, or the mysterious designs of the universe, or, as they came to call him, "that fucking jerk."
The wind was soft, gentle, warm. It stirred along the sand, rousing big, black scorpions that scampered along the midnight dunes searching for some kind of purchase away from the wind. There were no cacti and giant red-winged birds with sharp beaks patrolled the skies looking for their next meal.
One of the sleeping girls rolled over and scratched her arm.
Glitch, who had not always been known as Glitch, opened her eyes and saw the night.
"What the—?" she started. "Where am I?"
The red-headed girl scrambled to her feet, kicking sand up around her, and tripped over her still-slumbering companion in the process.
"What the hell?" said Kowareta, in a tangle of limbs, but quickly noticed the sand and the dark. She blinked, realization dawning on her, and then very slowly extricated herself from her friend. Kowareta stood up, brushing sand off her skirt.
"What is this?" she wanted to know, hands on hips, frowning as she looked around.
"A desert," Glitch managed to say with a fair amount of confidence. "A very black one."
"Gee, really? If you hadn't told me I'd have never known."
"Well, someone needs to keep you up to date," Glitch told her, grinning, hazel eyes dancing with mischief.
Kowareta rolled her eyes and kicked a scorpion away from her feet. She wore big, black high top boots with multiple buckles on them, but they were so worn and mutilated and unpolished that they might as well have been a sheet of paper against the attack of a very determined scorpion. Although, she thought, noticing a twitching leg glued to the toe of her boot, maybe not quite paper. Oh, yuck, bug goo.
"What was that?" Glitch asked, jumping upright and staring at the ground.
"Scorpion," Kowareta said coolly, eyeing the sand for more.
"Scorpion! Like… creepy-crawly scorpions with stabbity tails and poison and all those twitchy legs?"
"Are there any other kind? These ones are pretty big, so watch out. Also, they leak."
The purple-haired girl tried to wipe off her boot in the sand, which did nothing but cause sand to stick to the goo. Glitch watched the ground like a hawk, ready to stomp on any invading scorpions that dare threaten her.
"I don't think I've ever seen a black desert, have you?" Kowareta asked, watching the dunes. "I know that they're really just made of a bunch of eroded rock, so in theory if you eroded a ton of black rock you could have yourself a black desert, but I don't think I've ever seen one."
Then, as if on cue, both girls looked at the moon. And the moon looked back.
Misses Yvette Kanadawako and Raven Rashidenka, we welcome you.
The girls jumped at the voice and nearly knocked themselves over in a panic as they whirled around in search of its owner.
Up here, said the voice, and the moon bounced. It was a melodic sort of voice, Kowareta noticed, that seemed to swell and dance inside your ribcage. Each syllable turned and dashed and flowed, and you could imagine flashes of color at the edges.
"Um, what?" Glitch said, one eye on the moon, the other looking out for scorpions.
You are Yvette and Raven, are you not? The voice of the moon asked, glowing softly.
"Um. No?" Glitch told it, feeling lightheaded. She was in some dreamworld in some black desert and the moon was talking to her. The redhead knew what it was like to be drunk, this wasn't how it felt, so it must be a dream, unless she'd ingested some sort of narcotic without knowing it. But what if it wasn't a dream and someone had kidnapped them and—
There!
A scorpion!
Cherry red boots shining in the moonlight, Glitch punted the scorpion deep into the valley of a nearby dune.
What? said the voice that bubbled hotly into her ears.
"We don't have silly names," explained Kowareta, apparently ignorant of her own.
The moon seemed to think about this.
Are you kidding? Seriously? Then who the hell are you two?
Its voice fizzed and popped, and Glitch imagined bright yellow flashes of color.
Glitch and Kowareta exchanged glances.
"I'm Glitch," lied Glitch.
And the other one? asked the moon sounding strangely worried. Glitch thought she could hear the faint, feathery sounds of pages being turned in some unknown, unseen book.
"You can call me… Kowareta," said Kowareta, who would argue that she hadn't technically lied based purely on word structure. "You can call me Kowareta," she'd explain later, "but I never specifically stated that's my name."
But everyone would nail her on implication, Glitch would tell her.
Um, said the moon in the sky appearing to shrink, mind if I ask where you're from?
"Earth?" suggested Kowareta.
"England," said Glitch.
"America?" continued Kowareta.
They looked at each other then added, "College?"
Do you, either of you, have any, ah, super powers? Magic? Super-human strength? Electricity? Pyrokinesis?
"I wish," Glitch retorted. "I'm British. Does that count?"
Um, said the voice again. Can you two hold on a minute? I think I—I need to—I'll be right back.
"I think it counts," the redhead told Kowareta, who rolled her eyes.
The moon disappeared and the world turned dark. Glitch shivered and Kowareta frowned. The sky was a wash of blue, black, and purple, dotted with small salt-stains of stars that glimmered coldly and unkindly. Soon both girls were shivering and thought they could hear the scuttle of black scorpion legs on sand they could not see. The girls held onto each other. The wind picked up.
The moon returned.
Saaaay, said the voice sounding like that one person in every group of friends who no one really likes, how do you feel about jumping worlds?
The girls let go of each other.
"Where are we now?" Kowareta wanted to know, glaring at the moon. A few more seconds and she'll fold her arms over her chest, scowl, and tap her foot, thought Glitch. Oh, oh, oh, there she goes! Can she actually scare information out of a moon?
Apparently so, as the moon seemed to hesitate, its form growing and shrinking as it attempted to answer.
An in-between place, it said, an in-between world. A world between worlds. You see, it's my job, um, to move certain things from certain worlds and place them in others. You see, I believe your kind call me The Universe. I guess I, um, may have… not got it quite right and may have accidently caused some irreversible rips in the fabric of the worlds. But not to worry! I'll just ship you off to the new world, stitch up the equilibrium, and restore order.
Glitch stared at the moon.
"H-How long would we be there?" she asked incredulous. She didn't believe this. She didn't' believe any of it. She wasn't here, there wasn't a moon, and Kowareta hadn't just glared the moon into submission.
Oh, said the moon, uh, forever, probably.
"Forever!" shouted Glitch flailing her arms. The moon flinched and the stars rippled. "No way! You better fix this! I don't want to be stuck in some otherworld! Who knows what goes on there! And there might be scorpions! Lots and lots of scorpions!"
Glitch paused, looked around, then added, "And what kind of universe screws up?"
Well, no one's perfect, the Universe replied testily. Look, I thought it was every being's dream to go to another world. Here's your chance! You can have a new life! A new home!
"But I like my life," Glitch said.
Oh dear, said the Universe, then I've screwed up more than I thought.
"This is a dream," Glitch said aloud and to herself, fists clenched. "I am going to wake up in my room and I am going to do something excessively English once I do so. Like make tea."
"You do that anyway," Kowareta told her, scuffing a mutilated boot against the sand.
"I know," she said, "That way we'll know this was just a dream."
"Can I have some?"
"But you hate tea."
Umm, interrupted the Universe, look. I'm just going to stick you in the places Yvette and Raven were supposed to go. You look young enough to fit in. I'll… I'll give you a house, or something. Just… please don't be angry with me, and don't cause too much trouble, because then The Authority might get involved and I might get fired and then no one will be happy. I'll… I'll make it up to you, okay?
"This isn't real," Glitch told herself.
"Dammit, this sucks," Kowareta said.
Okay? It said, Umm. Alright then! Let's work some magic!
Darkness pressed against the girls, swirling, bright flashes of light whizzed around them, in all sorts of colors—colors they didn't even recognize, and couldn't name, colors they hadn't even seen in Color Theory class. They could feel themselves being tugged along the sway of the dark, the color, and the light. White-hot pressure folded down on them as they was swept along.
I'm sorry, said The Universe as their eyelids closed. Truly, I am.
And then the world vanished.
…
A/N: I'm kind of bummed I couldn't figure out a way to fit in the YGO characters in the first chapter, but I really hope the story itself was interesting enough to make up for that fact. They make it into the story next chapter for sure since I've already have about a quarter of it written up, I can divulge this for sure.
Thank you very much for reading! All the best to you all!
~MeriCheri~