Momoe Mutou was not pleased.
She was glaring across the kitchen table at her son and the strange foreigner who her son and father-in-law had managed to pick up God knows where. The most disturbing thing wasn't the fact that they had apparently smuggled an undocumented foreigner into the country. Though that was plenty disturbing, and she had a horrible paranoia that people from immigration were going to show up on her doorstep at any moment and arrest them all for some kind of illegal human-trafficking operation. No, the most disturbing thing was the foreign boy's face.
He was clearly a foreigner. It was easy to see. He didn't look in the slightest bit Japanese. His eyes were almond-shaped, with deep folds on the upper-lids like a Westerner. His skin was darker than the ganguro girls' that hung out around the downtown shopping centers. His hair had a startling frizziness to it that kept drawing her eye. He looked absolutely foreign. So how did he somehow look so much like her son?
Every individual feature of their faces spoke to a different race, yet somehow, when the entire face was viewed in whole, they looked like they could have been brothers. How was that even possible? It made no sense what-so-ever!
"This is ridiculous!" Momoe declared, throwing up her arms. "You need to stop this right now!"
Sugoroku sighed and set down his teacup. "I know it sounds strange, Moko, but you have to acknowledge that there are plenty of things in this word that science doesn't explain. And why shouldn't an empire that survived for thousands of years have discovered some of those secrets that we're still working on?"
"Dad, stop it! The way you're talking I'm starting to think it's time to send you to a home!" Momoe declared, slamming her hands down on the table.
Sugoroku recoiled slightly, a vaguely horrified look on his face. "This is my house! And what happened to people respecting the wisdom of their elders?" he demanded.
"Wisdom and insanity are different things!" Momoe countered. "And I am not having this! You're all going to stop making up crazy stories right now and tell me what's going on."
The foreign boy, who looked like her son but was very much not, sighed. "I'm not sure it can be explained better than we have done," he said in a calm voice in which Momoe detected just the slightest hint of condescension. "I had not finished my liturgical education when I was forced to begin this journey and my people had only the very smallest knowledge of how the Millennium Items worked. I don't understand the mechanism and I doubt any of my priests did either."
"Stop it!" Momoe demanded, starting to feel nearly hysterical in her frustration. "Stop all this foolishness about magic and tell me the truth!"
"We're really not lying, Mom..." Yuugi whined. Momoe glared at her son and he ducked his head, staring at his hands and squirming uncomfortably.
"Test me."
Momoe turned her glare back on the foreign boy. "What?" she snapped.
"I have all of Yuugi's memories. Up until a week ago, I knew everything that he knew, I received everything that he thought. Like a mental umbilical-cord." He met her eyes with an even, challenging gaze. "Test me if you don't believe us. Ask me anything Yuugi would know and I'll know it. Anything at all. I remember his entire life exactly as he does. See if you can stump me, I'm game."
Momoe's eyes narrowed. The boy wasn't taking this seriously and that only made her angrier, but he was also practically begging her to call his bluff. And she fully intended to. "What did I give Yuugi for his fourth birthday?" she demanded, feeling triumphant.
"Mom! That's not even fair!" Yuugi protested.
"Quiet, Yuugi," she snapped, and stared at the foreign boy as he gazed down at the table with unfocused eyes, appearing to think about it. "... Was the bulldozer from you or Da-er- Mister Mutou?" he asked slowly. "There was also the jigsaw... it was... Winny the Pooh, I think?"
A lucky guess. A damn lucky guess. But what four year old didn't get toy trucks and puzzles for their birthday? Momoe set her jaw and tried again. "And when he turned ten?" she challenged.
The foreign boy paused and then a gentle smile tugged at the corners of his lips. "... I can't even remember. Was it... a Gameboy? I guess... that was pretty neat, but it wasn't the important part..."
Momoe frowned and narrowed her eyes suspiciously.
"Nobody came to my- to Yuugi's birthday party. He invited his whole class, because you said he could, and Grandpa rented a helium tank and w-he was so excited. And then nobody came, except for Anzu. She came right on time, but nobody else ever even called." The slightly sullen line that had taken over his lips suddenly curved up into a warm little smile, directed at no one in particular. "And then you inhaled helium from one of the balloons and sang the Happy Birthday Song like that and you sounded like Micky Mouse and Anzu and I just couldn't stop laughing. And then you said that it was better to have a small party because a big party couldn't fit in the car for a special surprise."
He chuckled softly, and leaned his cheek against his hand, his eyes turning upwards to meet Momoe's again. This time the cold, challenging look was gone and there was a warm affection hiding in the boy's dark eyes. "You took us to the zoo, and we spent the whole day there, and we got one of those giant-elephant banana-splits, and even with all of us eating it together we couldn't finish it." His smile deepened and Momoe almost gasped as the love of a child poured out of the boy's expression, washing over her. "That was my-" he faltered and the expression dimmed as he seemed to remember himself and tried to regain his cool composure. "That was Yuugi's favorite birthday."
Momoe stared at him for what seemed like several minutes and then stood up, pushing herself away from the table and looking away. "The Gameboy was for his ninth birthday," she corrected lamely and turned towards the sink, twisting her hands in her kitchen-apron. "Well I suppose you'll be staying for dinner then."
...
...
So, uh, funny story, guys. You might be asking, "Hey, what the hell, Fictatious, what's with this out-of-context fic when you're supposed to be finishing up Final Eclipse?" Well... see... what happened there... I was downloading something on Monday night, for artistic things, and it was in a RAR folder. I opened up that RAR folder in WinRAR and set it to uncompressing, and then popped over to a message board I was chatting in on my browser. All of a sudden, both Windows and AVG start freaking the hell out going "OMG TROJAN OMG!" and I responded "OMG DELETE IT OMG!" and then the whole thing froze. Sooo... I tried to start it back up in Safe-Mode and the desktop wouldn't load. I could open up Task Manager, but couldn't get a desktop to save my life...
Long story short: I hope to have my little laptop back next Monday, and hopefully with all the cool stuff I had written on it, including a nearly finished chapter two for Final Eclipse. So... until then... Here's this thing I wrote that is part of a series of little one-shots that have been playing around in my head in recent weeks! Hooray for Google-docs saving my stuff on the internets! If only I'd had Final Eclipse somewhere besides my harddrive...
Long story short: Balls.
Oh, and in the ways of good news! Hesperadia is apparently finally getting underway. That's that Livejournal RP I mentioned a while back that I was retooling Mot to play in and since I got the news (like "Oh yeah, we're still going to do this. We didn't completely forget or give up because we're hopelessly lazy.") I've been poking around Gaia Online's art commissions area trying to find people to draw awesome pictures of Mot for me to use in icons and stuff (and just in general because he need some beauty-shots.) Check it out, first finished commission. No, he doesn't really look like Bakura or Malik, because for the purposes of the RP, I've disconnected him from Yugioh-verse and grounded him more solidly in Egyptian mythos. But y'know what would be super amazing? If any of you Yugioh-reading fanditos have within your abilities to draw in that super-angular, big-hair, crazy Yugioh style, if you could draw me a picture of Mot, I would be extra-amazing happy. Oh! And also, if any of you have a cool original character and are interested in joining my friend's RP, here's the info! Oh, and it's starting, like, a week from Saturday, I think.