Chapter 3: Insert Bridge Joke Here
After a long and dizzying journey through The Gate, they both came out into a small plain-colored room with no windows and minimal decorations. The only things in the room were The Gate, themselves, and a tiny box on the wall containing maps.
"Where are we?" John said, taking in the new sights around them.
"Let's find out," Umberina said.
She took a map out of the box and unfolded it wide, holding it close so John could read it as well. It was a handy map of the Observable Multiverse, complete with a marking that said "You are here." They appeared to be in some universe labelled "Yu-Gi-Oh".
She wondered what that meant, but she didn't have to wonder for long, as a door opened and two boys burst into the room. They had rididiculous outfits and even more ridiculous hairstyles. But most ridiculous of all, however, were their surprisingly high-pitched voices.
"Nyeh? I could have sworn somebody came through the...the...nyeh! What was it again, Yugh?"
"The teleporter, Joey," The other boy answered, clutching a golden pyramid hanging around their neck as they spoke. "We should turn this off before any more tourists start ruining Yu-Gi-Oh!"
Then they both looked to the ground and noticed them.
"What the nyeh? Look!" Joey said, pointing down at Umberina. "They gave us another one of them! They're like our duel monsters, but cuter..."
He reached down and patted her on the head, causing John to be knocked down onto the floor. He winced in pain, rubbing a sore spot on his back.
"...and just as real as the last one!" Joey continued, finishing his thought. "Can we keep it, Yugi?"
"No, Joey! Stop ruining Yu-Gi-Oh!" Yugi shouted in anger. "We have to turn it into a card and use it in a battl—er, children's card game, just like the last one."
Suddenly, the pyramid around his neck glowed with energy, and the light expanded to cover him completely. When the light faded, a child that looked like a younger version of the person who was just there had taken their place.
"Well, maybe you can keep one just this once..." The prepubescent doppleganger said.
"Nyeh! Thank you! I've got an exotic pet, so eveyone will be so jealous!" Joey said, picking up Umberina. "Now all I need is a tree that can grow money, and I'll really have something to brag to Kaiba about!"
Joey walked down a hallway, holding Umberina sideways while John ran behind them, nearly drowning in his own sweat as he tried to keep up. They turned at an intersection and went down a long balcony walkway. A wide ballroom-sized place was below, replete with gigantic picture windows. Umberina looked outside at the night sky, and the moon gave her strength. She was going to need it.
They left the balcony area and entered a long hallway filled with lots and lots of labeled doors. Each door there was marked with labels like "Our School", "Castle On The Island", and "That Place Where We Did The Cool Thing".
"What? A hallway full of doors? Nyeh, must be more canon derailment," Joey grumbled. "The author of this story never actually watched Yu-Gi-Oh, did they?"
After opening several doors, grumbled to himself about being unable to find something, he opened a door marked "Mobile Lodgings". A train station with a set of tracks was on the other side, and a train was chugging its way straight towards the door. He shut it quickly before it could reach them.
"Nnnnyeh! Why can't I find my bedroom!" Joey shouted, suddenly dropping Umberina so he could throw his hands up in anger. "I am now experiencing rage...rage of the Brooklyn variety!"
"I can help you look," Umberina blurted out.
"Nyeh? That thing can talk?"
"Uh, I mean—Umbreon," She said quickly.
"Nyeh, now I'm really losing it. Wait… is that it right there?"
He walked a small ways backwards, peeking in a doorway labelled "Nyeh Nyeh's NYYYEH Nyeh".
"Yep. This is it."
He led her inside, John discretely following as Joey shut the door behind them. A queen-sized bed was in the center of the room, taking up most of the space there. Playing cards, wads of American and Chinese currency, and fast food containers littered the floor of the room. Yu-Gi-Oh posters had been hung up on the walls, alongside an empty shelf marked "Duelist Trophies" and a whiteboard to-do list, on which currently read "To-do: Throw away that dog costume I still have in my closet."
He layed on the gigantic bed, placing Umberina on the sheets beside him. The two of them layed on the bed, while John watched from below, desperately trying to climb the bedpost and failing.
"You remind me of the other strange creature we got here, just a week ago," Joey said, mostly to himself as he was not expecting her to actually reply. "They had the same ears like you do, and the same eye shape, but… they had orange and gray far, and kept saying 'Flareon'. A million times more adorable, frankly."
Umberina and John frowned, both vehemently disagreeing with him. However, they continued listening, hoping he would say more.
"Well, I should be getting to sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day for us!"
He pulled the blankets over them and was soon snoring.
Umberina navigated her way out of the blankets and went to the far corner of the room to talk to John without being heard.
"Do you know why we came here?" She asked.
"No."
"I am trying to rescue my seven friends," She hastily explained. "Multiverse tourists captured them, and I don't know where they are."
John tried to think back and remember something from his education in "mythology". He had once thought that the pictures of the Eevee and their eight "eeveelutionary" forms had come from an artist's imagination. However, he now knew that the artist had been doing Realism.
"So who was Joey talking about?" John asked, breaking the silence. "Same ears, same eye shape, orange and gray fur..."
"That must be Rachrina, a Flareon and one of my friends," She said. "They must have been taken here."
John looked down at the floor. "They said something about putting us through a 'card development process'..."
Umberina's eyes widened and she started running around the room, looking at all of the cards on the floor.
"No… Wait..." He said.
But she didn't hear his tiny voice pleading. The sound waves that came from his vocal cords were so small that they could only be picked up by eardrums that were in close proximity to it.
After she had turned over all of the cards in the room without finding anything of note, she settled down again and looked to John. She was ready to listen now.
"They also said something about auctioning them off to the highest bidder."
Umberina sighed sadly.
"They're gone. They're really gone," She said sadly. "We have got to get out of this room."
"But how?"
Umberina looked up and saw a CD player on the top shelf. She eyed the cases of discs next to it, and she started to smile.
"Let's make some noise."
She took a disc and put it into the player while John turned on the power and turned up the volume. The thudding electric beat pounded through the house, causing Joey to stir in his sleep. He was even more surprised, however, when he heard his own voice, singing, from very close by.
"I wanna duel them like they do in Yu-Gi-Oh! Face up, face down, trap cards, spell cards..."
Joey jumped up from the bed in horror. "Yugi, help! The ghost of my evil clone is back!" He ran out of the room, covering his ears as he went down the hall.
John looked up at her in surprise. "Nice pick," He said. He held up his fist for her to bump, but she just stared at it blankly.
"Never mind," He said, noticing the open door. "Let's get outta here."
John rode on the back of Umberina while she searched for sales records from the auctions in an office she found. The moon cast light onto her from outside of an open window, making her black fur glimmer and the yellow circles on her skin glow a little brighter as she became filled with energy.
John quickly became disinterested watching her sift through the many drawers of papers, and there wasn't much he could do anyway at this size, so he occupied himself with trudging through her forest of fur. After a few minutes of travelling blindly, he poked his head up above to see where he was going, and realized he had almost walked right off the edge of her bushy tail.
Her tail swung back and forth slowly, not enough to throw him off, but just enough to be a potential danger. He held onto her tail tightly so he wouldn't fall down.
There was no questioning it. No matter which way he looked at it, she was the girl of his dreams. Sure, she might be a million times larger than him, and she wasn't even a human, but he didn't care. His love had no shame. The only question was, did she love him back?
"Found it!"
John ran back to the front of her body, taking a good look at what Umberina had found.
"See, here's the note," She continued, pointing to a line on the spreadsheet. "One registered Flareon, female, sold for 20 million...something...to 'Kaiba Corp'."
"Well, at least we've got some details to go on now," John said.
"Yeah," Qumbrina said sadly. "But we don't know where that is. And we need to have a plan besides just walking in and saying, 'Howdy, we arrived, please release our friends.'"
"Good point," John said, thinking for a moment. "I'm sure we'll think of something by the time we get there."
"Oh, I know! I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier!" She said. "We should—"
"Don't say it!" John said, gesturing towards the fourth wall. "An unspoken plan is more likely to work."
"What? Where did you hear that from?"
"I don't know. Just a hunch."
"Whatever you say," The Umbreon said, heading out of the room to look at the doors.
After a few minutes, they found a door labelled "The Rich Snob Office". Umberina stood on her back legs to open it, leaving it open just a crack. After they had fully prepared for the encounter, she nudged the door open the rest of the way, and they stepped through.
A/N - Wow wow, the story has now truly begun. Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Yu-Gi-Oh universe.
