Power Of The Duelist

Chapter 1: Joey Hits Rock Bottom And A Little About Me

My opponent took another glance at his hand, then took a glance at the field, his other hand kept sweeping over his cards yet not playing one just yet. He clearly was worried about my two facedown on my side of the field. Finally, he picked a card and with a triumphant 'Nyeh!' placed it on the field.

"I summon Rock Ogre Grotto #1! (800/1200) in attack mode, lets see if you can beat that". I give a small smirk and flip summoned Influence Dragon (300/900), "Hah, that card can't beat mine" said the blonde.

I shook my head as I activated one of my spell cards; Lucky Iron Axe and I chain it with Dragon Treasure causing my the Attack Points of my Influence Dragon to rise up to 1100. The 'Nyeh Master' groaned and face-planted on the table as his Life Points hit zero. Tea started to giggle as Tristan proceeded to tell Joey about how much he stinks at Duel Monsters while Yugi is busy trying to console him.

"Hey Joey" I said trying to gain his attention, "Yugi is the best Duel Monsters player out of all of us, maybe let him look at your deck to see if there are any problems or if he can give you tips".

"Yer right Daph, hey Yugi tell me what I'm doin' wrong, I gotta deck full o' kick-ass monsters, yet I can't win a game of Duel Monsters to save my life!" exclaimed Joey as he proceeds to grab Yugi and shake him around. Yugi looks extremely uncomfortable with Joey tossing him around… whoops.

I suppose I should introduce myself, my name is Daphne Watts or as Joey likes to call me 'Daph'. I most definitely have a story to tell and the most insane part is how I got here. You see, I am from I guess you could call the 'real world' as in I watched the Yugioh television shows as a kid and collected the cards.

After I entered high school I had stopped watching the shows and collecting the cards, I guess Yugioh didn't interest me anymore, but after high school and five years working as an accountant, I had found a box containing my old collection of Yugioh cards. I had time off so I decided that, 'hey why not start catching up on stuff I missed' and boy did I miss a lot.

The time I stopped watching was when fusion cards started becoming popular and that Yugioh GX television show had started, I had looked at the new cards and thought, 'how the… how did all this get created in just a few years?'. I had to practically research all these new black, white, green and brown coloured cards, their effects and how to summon them.

My local card shop had regular Yugioh nights, so I decided that I was going to need to update my decks. Business over the years has been good, so I had a stash of spare money that was supposed to be spent of stuff that I wanted and I hadn't had a chance to spend it yet. I went to my most favourite site on the entire internet… Ebay.

I am not sure what happened, but I think my mind was blown and my thought process was just a repeat of 'LOOK AT ALL THE CARDS, I WANT, I WANT.' Hey, just because I am an adult doesn't mean I can have weaknesses that make my inner child take over. I bought two grand worth of Yugioh cards… totally worth it.

I also ended up buying these card protectors and a few deck books that held sleeves to store all my spare cards in. I decided to create five different decks that I wanted to try out during the Yugioh night at the store, there was my Dragon deck, my Spellcaster deck, my Zombie deck, my Warrior deck and my Machine deck. Each deck featured at least one Xyz, Synchro, Fusion and at least two Pendulum cards.

It was after than I stored my card book and my deck boxes in a duffel bag, so that they would be easy to transport to the Yugioh night that something strange happened.

I had stored the bag in the closet before I went to sleep, but after around only three hours of sleep there was a strange light that shone in my vision that woke me up. When I was fully awake, I looked towards the closet since that was where the light was coming from.

Solid white light that was hard to look at was beaming through the cracks under the closet doors, through the middle where the doors connect to each other and through the crack on top of the doors. It was really creepy but despite my self-preservation sense going haywire I decided to open my closet.

When I threw open the doors to my closet I was greet by my card book floating in the air while being fully open and flipping through the pages. It was the inside of the card book that was giving out the bright light. I could hear something in the source of light, it was almost hypnotic and I ended up reaching my hand towards the light and everything exploded into whiteness.

There was so much noise, it had really hurt my ears, but there were multiple intelligible voice speaking of destiny and fate and 'the one who will restore the balance'. By then the noise grew so much that I fainted into blackness.

I had awoken with a start and had frantically whipped my head around trying to make sense of the my new surroundings. The place that I had woken up in happened to be an apartment… an apartment in Domino City.

I wasn't sure what was the worst part of what happened to me, it was between either having to start out completely fresh in a city that I knew nothing about due to it being part of an anime or the fact that I had de-aged… I had de-aged which meant that I would have to go through high school again!

At the very least, whoever that had brought me here had given me a good setup, I had a bank account that contained all the money I had in my 'previous life' and it had a steady replenishment rate which meant that I wasn't in any financial trouble. I had everything I needed in this apartment; clothes, appliances, food and even the rent was being paid.

The only thing that put me off was this white envelope sitting on the kitchen table. I had opened to find an acceptance letter to Domino High… which meant I was going back to school… ugh.

Going back to school in Japan wasn't as bad as I had thought it would be, you know; how everyone is strangely speaking English or the fact that there were numerous free periods for students to hang out. That was actually how I met the gang, due to me being 'foreign' student despite the fact that everyone is speaking English, the teachers decided to assign me a guide for the week so I could get used to the layout of the school.

That guide was none other than Tea Gardner herself. As it turns out; if one of the gang has to do something such as guide a new student around… all of them decide to help out.

This was also the reason that explains how Joey, Yugi and I have common ground to build a friendship on… Duel Monsters. It seems that out of all the students in this school, only Joey and Yugi are interested in Duel Monsters, sure the other students love watching live matches but none of them actually play the game themselves.

There are a few things different in this world compared to the anime that I should explain before going any further about my adventures with the gang. The first is about the Yugioh cards, for some reason I still have the newer generation cards despite the anime having only the older cards - many of which are banned in the 'real world'.

Get this, I still have my synchro, xyz and pendulum cards but they have different summoning conditions; synchros' are just summoned by using a specific monster type and any other monster card according to their levels and the card is no longer white, xyz are summoned pretty much the same way as they are normally summoned - they just don't have the black colour and the pendulum effect became a permanent part of the card despite not being in the pendulum zone and the cards are no longer partly green - a downside is that if I use the pendulum effect it means I lose two out of the five monster card zones.

I remember when I first had a duel with Yugi, even though I had a possible advantage with the new generation of cards and the new extra deck cards Yugi completely wiped me out; I had only managed to take away 100 of his Life Points and then he just completely destroyed me.

One thing I noticed about the duel was that Atem took over for a bit and I am wondering if that counts as cheating, I mean come on! Having an ancient pharaoh who had years of practice dueling against someone who has just started playing again recently is so unfair and I deny that I pouted for a while because of said cheating.

One last thing I should mention: Did I mention that I have a Duel Monster spirit that hangs around me as a companion! He is a Snow Dragon… he's so cute.

End Of Chapter

Dragon Deck List

Monster Cards

Luster Dragon #2 X2

Lancer Lindwurm

Strong Wind Dragon

Blackland Fire Dragon

Axe Dragonute

Luster Dragon X2

The Dragon Dwelling In The Cave

Snow Dragon X2

Masked Dragon X2

Blizzard Dragon

Bright Star Dragon

White-Horned Dragon

Divine Dragon Apocralyph

Lancer Dragonute

Mirage Dragon

Interplanetarypurplythorny Dragon

Snowdust Dragon

Influence Dragon

Alexandrite Dragon

Armed Protector Dragon

Twin-Headed Behemoth

Lava Dragon

Lord Of D

Keeper Of The Shrine

Divine Dragon Excelion

Divine Dragon Ragnarok

Dark Horus

Lady Of D

Trap Cards

Slip Of Fortune

Penalty Game

Strike Slash

Dust Tornado

Sinking Cave

Dragoncarnation

Dragon's Rage

Call Of The Haunted

The Dragon's Bead

Threatening Roar

Spell Cards

Banner Of Courage

Mystical Space Typhoon

Polymerization X2

Tremendous Fire

Premature Burial

Double Or Nothing!

Remove Trap

Stamping Destruction

Wonder Balloons

Pot Of Greed

Dragon Treasure

Dragon's Gunfire

Graceful Charity

Lucky Iron Axe

Dragonic Tactics

The Flute Of Summoning Dragon

Hymn Of Light

Fusion Cards

King Dragun

First Of The Dragons

Five-Headed Dragon

Synchro Cards

Black Brutdrago

Xyz Cards

Queen Dragun Djinn

Ritual Cards

Saffira, Queen Of Dragons

Pendulum Cards

None