Warning:
First off, to any prospective Tea and Yami fans out there, pretty much all Mystic Muse fanfics will make fun of them, including this one. Second: this is a one-shot; I won't be continuing it!
Disclaimer:
Dark Mystic Muse mumbles once again while impudently rolling her eyes, "I do not own Yugioh or the College Board. I don't know how many times I'll have to type this when everyone already knows – but I do own this story, and any original characters. Oh, and the facts here about Egypt are all true."
SAT Prep Horror
The torture chamber was composed of four wobbling chairs, one bored teacher, one suffering and shuddering Pharaoh, one brunette girl wearing so many horrible colors it looked as if she had fallen into a paint set, and one snowy-haired British boy sitting up so straight he would put any decent washboard to shame.
What was not as apparent, however, was the tomb robber quivering in a failing effort not to make any noise inside his Egyptian-styled soul room.
Another would be the fact that a tiny, doll-sized midget with the misfortune of wearing a tri-colored porcupine on his head was playing Monopoly with himself inside his soul room.
The tomb robber was smirking widely, not sure by what miracle it was possible that he was managing not to burst into laughter at the Pharaoh's stutterings and mumblings!
While his yami cackled insanely inside the chambers of his soul room, innocent Ryou Bakura waited patiently as Yami fumbled, mumbling, sweating like a punctured water balloon. Invoking the ear tugging tactic and frantic squintings feigning concentration to stall for time, Yami finally coughed out like a hairball, "Happy?"
"Sorry Yami, but that's-"
"Ha!" Maniacal laughter exploded from…erm…"Ryou's" mouth. The tomb robber had given up trying. "The Pharaoh is going to fail the SAT!"
"Bakura!" Ryou gasped at "himself". He clapped his pale little hands over his mouth and attempted to add more innocence to the already obscenely innocent smile and wide, blinking eyes.
The SAT tutor, AKA Malik Ishtar, was conveniently came down with the cold and began to cough outrageously. "Ahem, sorry, my dear Pharaoh." Malik smiled/grimaced in a desperate effort to kill a barrage of laughter at his pupil's expense. "I, uh, have the cold. But no Yami, garrulous does not mean 'happy'…Ryou, do you know the answer?" he asked unnecessarily of the British boy, who was practically having a break down trying to keep from jumping out of his seat and blurting out the answer.
"Garrulous," Ryou practically cleared his throat, "is the state of excessive talk usually accompanied by verbose language."
There was a long silence, broken only by Bakura.
"By Ra, hikari, did you swallow the dictionary?" He demanded.
Yami suddenly jumped at the chance to disproves everyone's blatant assumption that he, the great and glorious former-Pharaoh for less than a week, was an idiot. Having failed the previous…well, all the words batted his way, this was clearly a necessary thing to do. "Ha ha, tomb robber! Your hikari reads the dictionary for fun – you have a nerd for a reincarnation!"
"What did you say Pharaoh?" The former thief snapped. "At least my host isn't in the Special Eds group!" His finger whipped into the direction of the white board, where the team names "Special" and "Special Eds" were scrawled, "Special Eds" having a single, lonely line scribbled onto the white board as a tally mark. The line Tea Gardener, who sat preening beside him, had scored on.
"How is that an insult?" Yami scoffed. "Special Eds means people with Special Education." No one had bothered to inform Yami that Special Education hadn't meant education for the special geniuses out there.
In fact Malik, who was pretending to worship the ground the Pharaoh walked on like good Tomb Keeper, had just smiled slyly and told Yami, "I never knew someone who could fit the description so perfectly." The Pharaoh hadn't noticed the smirks.
Ryou blushed and melted into an undignified puddle, drenching the floors of his soul room. "That wasn't supposed to get into public, Bakura," he mumbled to the mocking floor.
In the middle of snarling something snide to cripple the puffed up Pharaoh's ego, Bakura stopped. "What!" The spirit looked as if he were choking. "Are you qualifying his statement?"
Ryou blinked, suddenly in control again. "…Oh, um…" Awkward silence. Now red enough to put a tomato to shame, he looked away. "I guess you didn't know either…"
"Hahahahahaha!" Yami roared, gasping for breath, tears streaming from his purple eyes. "My Ra! That was just brilliant! Osiris's Headdress, tomb robber, keep a track of your host's fetishes!"
The said tomb robber sulked, swearing impressively in Egyptian.
"Bakura?" Ryou prodded meekly, wandering in the corridor separating their soul rooms.
The thief shot him a death glare. "When we get home, host, that dictionary is dead. Dead!" Ryou cringed and slumped off to his happy place.
"Enlighten us, Malik," he growled, a dark glare clouding his pale complexion. "Why are you here in the first place?"
The tomb keeper gave him a dirty look. "Community service…" he mumbled incoherently, strands of golden hair showering his face, veiling the scowl twisting his lips.
"What?"
"Community service, alright!" The golden-haired Egyptian shouted, his fiery violet eyes leaping up to meet the thief's dark ones. "After stealing all those rare cards, I had to do a sentence! Besides, it was either this or a bake sale." Malik froze as the words slipped out of his mouth. By the gods, I just had to mention that, didn't I? He glowered defiantly in an effort to pretend that nothing bizarre had just been said.
Bakura blinked at his pestered friend. "A Rare Hunter bake sale? You have no idea how pathetic that sounds."
"I'm standing right here!" Malik glared, sun-bronzed fingers grinding into the sickening yellow carcasses of the flash cards in his hands. "And I told you already, there are no more Rare Hunters!" A sliver of defensiveness slithered into his protests, "I forced them to disbanded!"
Tea, the tousled girl who had since then been slouching her clothing-mismatched body over the cheap school desks, abruptly piped up. She fixed polluted-ocean blue eyes on the Egyptian, curious. "Oh! So if they weren't Rare Hunters, who were those men talking to you outside in the alley?" The room's unwanted inhabitance went quiet; Malik swooped around like a predatory eagle.
"Were you," he began incredulously, "spying on me?"
"No," the brunette denied with an insulted sniff, "I was simply following you where ever you go." They stared at her. "Were you having a Rare Hunter reunion party, then, Malik?" She drew an interesting conclusion. "That's so sweet of you!"
"Wha –? No, there are no Rare Hunters!" He practically choked.
"But you all had the capes and the cards and everything!"
"Let's just get on with the lesson!" Malik snapped, fuming. He turned to the amused thief watching the display. "And since you're smirking so much, you get to define the next word! Recluse!"
"That's easy: Malik Ishtar."
"I am not a recluse! That's not even a dictionary definition!"
"Malik, living underground for your entire life with no human contact but the characters in scrolls is a bit reclusive, don't you think?" Glowering like a cobra, Malik grudgingly slashed a solemn black line on the white board.
Before the SAT teacher could turn to him, Yami threw his hands into the air and declared, "I am a 3000 year old Pharaoh! Of course my language skills are a bit…sandy."
"It's rusty, you incompetent Pharaoh, rusty," Bakura scowled.
"Bakura, if you don't mind, I'd like to concentrate, thank you," Ryou was miffed.
"Fine!" The tomb robber resumed bathing in the riches in his soul room, tossing gold and jewels into the air with a delighted sigh. Then he polished his collection of daggers yet again, humming the whole while.
Malik tried to soothe, "Now, Yami, I know you don't like the SAT, but-"
"But nothing! I am the Pharaoh! I don't need to take the SAT!" Yami jumped up and chucked a very un-Pharaoh-like tantrum. "I don't even have a body! Yugi's my body! He has to the take the SAT. I can just watch."
"But Yami…" Yugi's tiny voice chirped for the first time.
"We made a deal, Yugi," Yami reminded his light smugly, "you do all the things involving your brain, and I play with the Heart of the Cards. See?"
"Oh by He Who Sleeps at Philae, let's just switch to the math section, shall we?" Malik moaned, exasperated. He hurled a booklet into each person's hands. "See the front?" His fingers brushed against the inky black images of cylinders, "special" triangles, and area and perimeter formulas. "These are basic facts about math that-"
Yami's eyes suddenly grew wide. "Malik! There's a mistake on my form!"
Malik frowned. "What then?" He asked, peering over Yami's shoulder. The ancient Pharaoh jabbed a triumphant finger at the pi symbol.
"This form says that pi is 3.14, but, everyone knows it's 3.16!"
Bakura snorted, flicking a thread of arctic white hair. "That was the measurement in Egypt, Pharaoh. Now it's changed. It's 3.14."
Yami snapped, "How do you know this, tomb robber? In fact, how are you even educated at all? Even at it's highest, less than one percent of Egyptians were educated, and dirty thieves like yourself were obviously not in that number!"
Bakura's dark auburn eyes glittered humorlessly. "I had my way…"
The sound of rapid flipping was heard, pages flying back and forth. The Pharaoh's light leafed through the pages, which stunk slightly with the smell of armies of paper locked up together for decades in a basement room in the College Board prison…ahem, I mean, building establishment.
Yami suddenly leaped at the strange images squirted all over the diabolical pamphlet, clearly a group of puffed up professors' ingenious plan of deciding students' lives. "What's this?" He pointed at a graph.
"That's just a graph Yami…" A lurch of queasiness churned in Malik's stomach as he suddenly realized that ancient Egypt hadn't used graphs either. It was going to be a long month of studying…
El Fine
"Alright, the story's done."
Dark Mystic Muse glares as good little Mystic Muse skips on stage.
"Hey, look who I brought!" She announces, dragging two struggling characters along with her.
Bakura smirks, deciding to be irritating, and Malik narrows his eyes. The tomb robber swiftly leafs through The Tomb Robber's Guide to the English Language, reading out loud.On page 1149, blaring at him like a caffeinated billboard, was the line: "Recluse (noun) 1. Malik Ishtar. 2. Any like-minded social pariahs by that name. Origin: Random word derived from Malik Ishtar's mumblings.
Malik makes a lunatic dive for the desk draw, where his precious Dictionary Slaying Dagger lay in wait, but good Mystic Muse merrily stops him.
Dark Mystic Muse rolls her eyes. "Well, I hoped you at least partially enjoyed that…" she mumbled and walks away. "I'm not affiliated with these people…"