Ophelia finds her heartheld dream has come true, and then, to her horror, finds he has been dropped into the Yugiohverse. (Tongue-in-cheek self-insertion, because I finished my puzzle after eight years - too!)
Speech === thought words.
"Speech" === spoken words.
"Written text" === written text.
Pay attention to the in-text prompts to decide if something is written or spoken. With luck, it will be self-evident.
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THIS IS MY STORY
Ophelia sat, back bowed over her desk, body sagging over her laptop. Her head was heavy in the palm of her hand as she scrolled through page after page of uninspiring fanfiction. Her free hand tapped at the down arrow key with the insistence of a cicada. She sighed in irritation. Her eyes unfocused, and the words on the screen blurred.
Hmph, she thought to herself, gazing at the blurry lines. She wasn't going to find a good fic doing that, but she was sick of searching. Why was it all so bad?
She glanced up at the note sticky-taped at eye-level above her desk. "You're not going to find anything good like that. Write one yourself, Ophelia!" it said.
Such cheerful words. She had a folder full of half-written stories prompted by them. But she'd never finished them, and the frustration at her flighty stickability wore at her.
With an angry cry at the futility of it all, she snapped her laptop shut and pushed it to one side. She crossed her arms and glared at it, scowling and pouting. Her form slumped, and she folded down into her arms across the desk, face hidden.
She shuddered. Never gonna finish anything, she whispered to herself. Never going to achieve anything. Not even anything fun.
She rose up onto her elbows and blew at the curtain of blond hair that obscured her view of her desk. There was old frog puzzle sitting there. She'd had it for eight years now. She'd never completed it in eight years, just like Yugi.
He'd never given up, never stopped pursing his interests, not like her.
It wasn't particularly fun. And she didn't expect to complete it, and so, there was no expectation, no whispered recriminations each time the pieces failed to fit. No sense of failure when she got frustrated. Beneath her fingers, the puzzle began to take shape.
One piece, two pieces, three pieces went together. This was normal, she could get this far.
Three pieces, four. The sixth one proved the hardest of these.
Seven pieces. Only two more to go. She tried to sigh in disappointment – she'd never got beyond this. But as she looked at the pieces, and looked back at the puzzle, it looked like. She realised. It looked like they might fit.
She placed a finger on the second-last piece, hardly believing that this was happening. She placed it in place. The pattern on the tile seamlessly met the patterns of the others.
She stared at the last piece. It would fit. Hysteria burst forth and she laughed, slowly pushing the last piece of the puzzle across the desk and to its place.
"Yes!" she whispered, and lost all sense of time.
Ophelia was no stranger to disassociation, so when she blinked and felt that time had passed beneath the flutter of her eyelashes, she was only mildly discontented. Yet, something felt wrong, because she was sitting, back straight, on her bed, and she could have sworn that she was hunched over her desk not moments ago.
Even more worrisome was the fact that the frog puzzle hung from a hook on the wall in front of her. It was lay inside a plastic binder sheet. Glued, it seemed, when she got up to inspect it. Ophelia frowned, troubled.
The laptop, too, had been disturbed. It was wide open. A Microsoft Word document was open on the page, and at the bottom of the screen, in big bold letters, were words Ophelia had longed to write.
"The End."
"Huh," she breathed, and leapt over to her chair, sliding it under her. The wheeled contraption came easily, and she was soon scrolling up the page. "This Is My Story" the document titled. Indeed, it was Ophelia's story.
Just as she had imagined it in her mind.
On the screen, given words, given reality.
But how!
Above her desk, on the shelves there, there was a black-spined book with red text. She took it down and stared at the cover. It was red-orange and black, mashed together like a car-crash or a piece of old tire abandoned in red desert country.
"More Alike Than Different: Treating Severely Dissociative Trauma Survivors"
She couldn't have DID – that made no sense. But what else. Why could she not remember writing the story?
"Ophelia!" called her mother from downstairs. Ophelia gave the computer a deserving glare and listened hard for her mother's next words. "The new neighbours are here! Come meet them!"
"I'll be down in a tick!" Ophelia hollered back, certain her mother hadn't heard her. Sometimes she was sure her mother was going deaf. (It might explain why she insisted on turning the TV up so loud.)
Twenty minutes later, she was still in her room, reading and reading her new story. She still couldn't believe it. Everything was – perfect! So much better than she even thought she could have written. She frowned down at the book, which she had not yet put back.
She was not that dissociative!
There was someone on the stairs. Fearing being caught in some indefinite crime, she fumbled up her laptop and sat it down on top of the book. She looked at the incriminating gap between the laptop and the table.
That was okay, that was okay, she'd say her laptop was overheating if anyone asked.
Her door opened.
"Hi mum, I was just—" Ophelia blubbered as she swiveled around.
She stopped, mouth agape.
In her doorway stood Rex Raptor. Or Dinosaur Ryuzaki. Funny Purple hair. Red beanie. Kinda stupid look. His eyes roved around her room and then settled on her.
"Hi," he said. "Rex," He gave his name. He just stood there. Didn't move to shake her hand. Just stood there.
"I – oh – Ophe—" Ophelia croaked, and cursed her speech for failing her in her moment of need.
"Ophie—Sophie?" asked Rex.
"No," said Ophelia, shaking her head. "No no no!"
She took a deep breath.
"I'm Ophelia!"
Rex stared at her, though now he was looking at her as if she was some dorky, shallow, intrusive piece of comic relief in the television drama called life. He nodded cautiously and stepped back from the door.
"Well, I guess I'll leave you to your…" he looked at her computer, "stuff, then. I just – I'm going now."
"Oh, don't leave on my account!" Ophelia yelped, and sprang up and raced past Rex, knocking him out of the way. She needed air. She needed peace. Nice, outside, with humming flowers and pretty bees… no she got that wrong.
She needed to sort out her head. She was becoming that comic relief character.
"See ya later!" she said as she passed her mother and an adult that was a sexless blur in her haste – presumably a parent of Ryuzaki. No, Rex.
Outside, the sun was shining, the flowers were looking pretty, and she couldn't hear the sound of the bees above her own heartbeat. She strode out of the front door, down the steps, over the footpath and out the gate. There, she leant against the low iron bar fence and stared across the road.
The low iron bar fence. She didn't have a low iron bar fence. She had a high, corrugated iron fence! In fact, she lived on perfectly suburban sidestreet. Yet, not ten metres before her there was a screen of trees and noisy, busy road.
Trucks past by, cars beeped there horns. Ophelia stared. Tears or fear and frustration wet her eyes.
Yugioh, Yugioh, I'm in Yugioh! She sung to herself, and promptly told herself to shut up. That was impossible.
Oh dear. She laughed. She was a bloody invading Mary Sue, that's what she was! Crying, hopeless, lost. A rescue-me Sue. She reached up and scrubbed at her eyes, feeling the wet lines down her cheeks. The world blurred before her.
"Hey, are you alright?"
The voice was unfamiliar, and genuinely concerned. Honestly asking to help, but confused as to how to go about it. Ophelia looked up. Here they were. Yugi, Joey, Anzu and Honda. Her rescuers. Anzu had spoken. She sobbed.
"Is this your house?" Anzu asked. Ophelia looked back at the house. The colour of the roof was unfamiliar. Now, she could see the curtains in her room were yellow, not blue. She didn't know the make of the car in the driveway.
"No," she croaked. "No – I'm—I'm lo-st."
The words were difficult to force past her lips.
"No you're not," said Joey. "We've found you. You're not lost anymore."
Ophelia smiley slightly, and coughed. Her breath came quick and shallow. Joey. Joey was talking to her. What was his English name anyway – Joseph?
"My home's just up this way," Yugi said, pointing down the street. "You can use my phone to call home."
"I don't know – I don't know if – home —" Ophelia whispered, unable to explain.
"It's alright!" said Honda. Tristan?
Joey nodded and joined in. "Wherever your home is, we'll get you there! We've been to the other side of the world and back, there's no-where we can't get you! Hey, even if you fell out of the sky from another reality, we'll get you back!"
Ophelia nodded and tried to calm her breathing. She couldn't. It went on without her able to control it. She pressed a hand to her heaving chest, wishing it would just stop. A strangled noise escaped. Anzu – Tea – shoved the boys to one side and approached her. "Just breathe deeply," she said.
Ophelia nodded, and tried to do as she said. She wiped her face clean of her fresh tears, and when she could, she managed to say:
"It… it might take that."
But whatever it took, she was sure they'd get her home.
The End