Green and Black Roses
Chapter 2

The directions she'd received were a tad confusing but she'd managed with them. After all, in her line of work one needed to be able to find the treasure with a treasure map, even if the treasure map was a blank piece of paper. So foggy directions weren't too bad. At least they didn't lead her too far off track. At least she found the place.

It was pretty run down for a place in the city, she thought. Kind of looked like that old factory near her hometown. The haunted one, thought the ones who did the haunting were in fact wild animals taking roost in a place humans didn't often tread. Except this joint was haunted by something different. By desperate people. By people addicted to the thrill. By the people who came to watch – and anyone in between who didn't really mind getting on the wrong side of the law.

She spent a couple of hours just eavesdropping on the duellists and on the observers. They had a wealth of information about the city. A lot of names, a lot of faces. She wouldn't remember them all. And since she was still in the induction phase, she wouldn't need to remember them all either. If they turned out to be relevant later on, she was pretty confident that her brain would remind her.

Once she felt she'd observed enough and could make a bit of a profit, she approached the man handling the bids. Her first risk was a minor one, and she didn't get much winnings in return but she got confidence and a bit of a buffer. It was slow. It was risky. It wasn't making her much unless she wanted to risk losing it all and it wasn't a job at all. And she wasn't duelling for it. But some of the people in the underground duelling arena looked lethal, and she wasn't planning on duelling them at all.

But she didn't need to wait idly waiting for the ones she felt she could handle to become free. It was another way of playing the field, of observing, of dipping the fingers into the batter to make sure it had the right consistency and the right flavour.

And then one of her targets was free and she threw in her challenge, and got it.

She didn't commonly duel, but she knew how. She watched duels often enough, recorded them on camera, listened to their play by play afterwards and the pride in their voices. It was that which brought her here: the chance to watch and write about bigger duels, bigger duellists – the duellists at the top of the country that many growing up in all corners of the globe read about and saw and smiled. The sorts of duellists like Mutou Yugi and Jonouchi Katsuya and Kaiba Seto who saved the world and got into adventures in the process. She wanted to be a writer like Kawaii Shizuka – but she lacked the advantage of having a big brother in the big leagues.

Technically, she didn't have a brother at all, but that was beside the point. She did have a deck. And enough cash to hopefully pay the penalty off if she lost. Not that she was planning to lose. She was all for risks and all, but not when necessities depended on it. She'd tucked a couple of notes into her bra anyway, just in case. She needed something to risk for more money later. And for food.

That didn't turn out to be a problem. She did lose duels, but not that one. And when she did lose, it wasn't badly. The penalty wasn't overwhelming. It scared her a bit when she learnt what would happen if she ever lost in the first turn, but for the weeks that followed, she was able to make enough for renting out a studio apartment in the cheapest part of town and get running water too.

She didn't bother with the gas. She could survive without it. The electricity was a problem she planned on tackling in the near future, but that could wait until she nailed her induction. Until then, power points in the library and take-outs for the food worked well enough.

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It was a couple of days after finding the underground before she cracked open the file case she'd been given. It had been nagging her all that time as well, but she had to be reasonable. She couldn't expect to get a job done if she'd be forced to camp out in her car for months. A week was bad enough and once again she had to thank her lucky stars she hadn't been booked for it.

Or maybe that was more to do with Fortune Fairy Hikari. She'd drawn her on the day she'd set out and that had been the best good omen she could ask for. Though the wishes were taking a bit of a roundabout way towards getting fulfilled. She did have a way of making money, but it was pretty risky. It was even an adventure, but that hadn't been the sort of adventure she'd had in mind. And she had an article to write, but it wasn't her job. Instead, it was the ticket to her job.

Still, she took what she had and grew with it, so she flipped through the articles.

They were rather strange, and she had to reread the first couple before she believed what she'd read. Or, rather, she believed that holograms destroying property was what the witnesses saw. There had to be something beneath that. Normal holograms didn't do that after all. Not even in the underground where the spectators who thirsted for blood would've had a blast with.

Turned out the girl in the cloak in those images was the Black Rose Witch. The photos weren't particularly clear. Carly could make out two long locks of hair and a mask, but not the colour nor the pattern nor anything that would differentiate it from, say, herself if she put on a cloak and mask.

And there weren't any better photos in the rest of the papers. Nor was there a hint as to her identity – or if she even was a girl. Some boys had long hair after all. Or it could be a wig under the mask. She'd need to get a closer look before she could work any of it out.

But the pictures of her – it was easier to call her a female until proven otherwise – were clearer. There was a dragon in black scales and pink, almost red, petals. She'd never heard of it before but the name was printed: Black Rose Dragon. And then there were other plant monsters. Weak ones with handy effects. And more powerful ones. And one that wasn't even a monster. She had a list of ten cards once she was done. It showed how little the articles focused on the actual duels, otherwise she could have worked out the entire deck from those articles.

That settled it. The first order of business would be to observe her, and find defining pictures and more details about the deck. And whatever caused her monsters to become solid when nobody else's were – or the illusion to that. That was always possible too.

And to do that, she'd need to work out what areas got hit more frequently, and start hanging out at them. She'd have to buy a map for that – and plan her visits to the Underground more carefully, to give her as much free time as possible.

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She needed a bit of luck. She always sought some, before going out to find a story, and this time was no different. Except it was a much more important story. It would make her career if she wrote it, if she cracked the mystery of the Black Rose Witch that lay buried amongst some articles.

To her surprise, she drew out Royal Magical Library. She'd been hoping for one of the Fortune Fairies. Better yet, one of the low level ones because they had the most luck. Royal Magical Library was support for her deck, not a headliner… But it did have "library" in the name. Maybe that was a hint to do some more study first.

She considered, then assented. Searching on the library computers couldn't hurt. There might be more articles. More likely, there'd be things like chat rooms exploring the mystery girl and her duels. Theories which may be far or close to the truth. There were some strange ones. They linked her to real witches back in the day, to a priestess (who'd been on the other end of that war), to magicians from Ancient Egypt reincarnated, to a psychic. All of them would require some pretty hefty proof before she believed. After all, the king of games was said to have housed an Egyptian Pharaoh in his body but that still wasn't universally believed. They were all possible, she supposed. They all said she had some special power to make the duel spirits come to life.

And then there were the theories that spoke of government plots and plots from Satellite to plots from some dissident fraction attempting to overthrow Neo Domino City.

In other words, they gave her more questions than answers. She made notes anyway. who knew when she'd stumble across some piece of evidence to prove or disprove those theories?

The next stop was seeing this Black Rose Witch with her own eyes.