Seating Arrangements
Chazz buys a card album.
Worst. Purchase. Ever.
Chazz did not consider himself a compulsive shopper. Like any young man from an affluent wealthy family, he liked to spend big on things he usually did not need, but he could not claim to ever have experienced any sort of buyer's regret over the useless trinkets gathering dust in storage somewhere.
And then he'd picked up that sleek black card album with the little metal lightning bolt clasp off the clearance rack in Dorothy's shop—an item bought for a very specific purpose mind—and it left him questioning his life choices harder than that time he'd sunk a family yacht in the freezing waters off the coast of North Academy.
He bought it because he liked the design. Black with a lightning bolt, it was practically made for him! He bought it because it would be useful. He had a lot of cards, most of which were bundled into decks and kept in brand name (real) leather deck boxes, but plenty more that were just there and had no real place among his duel decks.
He bought it for those rejects from the well who lived inside a dusty shoebox in his desk drawer, because he thought it would be good for them to have a proper album to dwell in.
He thought wrong.
Now he thinks he should just hurry up and stuff them all inside and then unceremoniously dump the album into the well. And seal off the entrance. For good measure.
"From the top then." Chazz rubs his temples with a heavy sigh, and reads through the chicken-scratched notepad. "The normal monsters and the effect monsters should be separate."
"Yes!" The effect monsters in one corner of the room shout.
"And the 4-star monsters want their own page."
"Unlike those scrubs, we can still be useful in a deck!" Someone from the 4-star delegation preens.
"Shut up. The first page should be reserved for those of you who were in my deck when I dueled Slade."
"You wouldn't even be here right now if not for us!" someone in that delegation boasts.
"And you wouldn't be here if not for me so you shut up too," Chazz retorts. The spirit that spoke up murmurs an apology, but it's clear that it and the rest of the monsters in its group felt a distinct sense of superiority to everyone else.
"The Dark Scorpions should be together," Chazz reads on.
"You know it, Kiddo," Don Zaloog says with a grin.
"Don't call me 'Kiddo'. Spirit of the Breeze and The Unhappy Maiden want to be next to each other."
"Yes, please," Spirit of the Breeze chirps.
"I think I'll be a little less unhappy if you allow that." The Unhappy Maiden has the faintest trace of a smile when she says that.
"Good for you. Soul Tiger and Skull Servant, you guys wanted to be back to back, right?" Chazz doesn't get that one, but they agree so he reads on.
"And Catnipped Kitty doesn't want to be anywhere near Outstanding Dog Marron." That one makes a little more sense but it's still annoying. He lists off a few more of the specific requests as the spirits around him agree or object, but there are very few objections now compared to earlier, when the words on the notepad still resembled human writing.
Still, Chazz writes down the remaining requests, and studies the resulting diagram carefully. The album is open in front of him, still empty, and the stacks of cards organized and reorganized endlessly sit around it.
"Okay, I got it!" Chazz declares and begins sliding the cards into the sleeves as the duel spirits crowd around him, watching eagerly.
There are a lot of cards so it takes a while to get them all in there, but once they're all nicely organized, Chazz leans back in his chair and crosses his arms behind his head, smiling smugly.
"Well, what do you think?"
The duel spirits exchanges glances with one another before unanimously shouting,
"Unacceptable!"
The volume startles Chazz enough for him to kick back his chair. It's too close to the bed to fall over completely, but once it hits the mattress, the rebound causes Chazz to fall off on the side. He swears as a faint jolt of pain runs through his body.
"What is it now?" he hisses.
The spirits all begin to talk at once.
"There's a 3-Star behind me!"
"Get those effect monsters off our page!"
"I should be next to Don Zaloog!"
"I don't like my neighbors."
"I said no corners!"
"The stupid dog is too close!"
"I was in the 0 Attack deck too, yaknow."
"Can I be on a front page instead? I don't like being on the reverse side."
The complaints keep on coming as Chazz listens in stunned silence at first, before his temper finally catches up to him.
"Are you rejects kidding me right now? We just spent 3 hours debating this!" he yells. "I listened to every single one of your demands."
"You didn't listen well enough," Meanae the Thorn snaps back in a snooty voice. A chorus of voices agrees with her.
"Totally unacceptable."
"Doesn't understand a thing."
"Doesn't care at all."
"Waste of our time."
As the insulting comments continue, Chazz finds his rage cooling down. It would be too easy to rise to the bait and continue the argument. That was how it stretched out to three hours to begin with.
Furthermore, the walls of the Slifer dorm are thin, and Chazz doesn't need any more bewildered classmates checking up on him because of the (from their perspectives) one-sided yelling.
So instead, he quietly picks himself up, dusts off his jacket, straightens the chair, sits down, and slowly and wordlessly begins to remove every single card from the album, one by one.
The spirits take this chance to begin reminding them of their seating preferences, but quickly quiet down upon realizing that's he isn't listening at all and watch as he simply continues to take out the cards and neatly stack them.
The heating in the Slifer dorm has never been particularly good, but now the room is absolutely frigid; even the spirits can feel it. But the silence drags on until Chazz finally takes the last card out of the album and calmly sets it down.
Then it is broken at once by the sound of him slamming his palm against the table with all of his strength. The stacks fall over, several cards are sent to the floor and the spirits jump back.
"Okay, this is how it's going to work," Chazz's voice is still calm despite the force of his slap and the reverberating sting in his palm. "I don't care about your level hierarchies. I don't care about your stupid cliques. I don't care who's an effect monster, or a normal monster, or was in my deck when I dueled Slade, or whatever. All of you bastards are forgetting one very important thing.
"You're rejects. You're vendor trash that was thrown out because no one wants weak pathetic cards, and you were sentenced to rot in that stupid hole in the ground, where, by all means, you should still be, except The Chazz came along and fished you out.
"And you were all oh-so-content sharing a dusty old shoebox, but as soon as I buy you an album and decide to actually treat you like cards should be treated, suddenly it's all rank and status and "Oooh I want to be next to this card, not that card". Well, you know what? Fine."
Chazz takes the empty shoebox out of the drawer and throws it on the table. "You have two options. Either accept my generosity and go into the book without another word, or you can go bye-bye back to the shoebox. Oh, but this time, the shoebox goes under the bed and does not come back out."
He gives them a moment for the words to sink in, then sits back down with his arms crossed and his eyes blazing. "Make your choice."
The spirits shrink back and eye each other pleadingly, begging for someone to speak. But no one wants to say the wrong thing and get banished under the bed. It smells bad and Chazz isn't particularly diligent about cleaning his room. Who knew what was down there!
"I'm waiting," Chazz prompts, impatiently tapping his foot.
There are several more pleading whimpers and shrinking back, but then Don Zaloog, ever the leader, finally steps forward.
"I guess we did go a little far…" he says sheepishly. His words spur a few others forward as well.
"Y-yeah," a Goblin Calligrapher agrees.
"W-who even cares about seating arrangements these days?" one Petit Angel shouts.
"Yeah, when we materialize, we can see whoever we want anyway!" another one points out. Now more confident, the other spirits begin to speak up.
"We should be grateful the Boss loves us enough to even get us an album!"
"Yeah, he's not the type who'd let us gather dust in a box."
"Or a dark old well!"
"Our Boss is the best!"
"Chazz it up!"
"Yeah! Chazz it up!"
Chazz rolls his eyes as the chanting and butt kissing starts, and bites the inside of his cheek to keep his expression neutral. He's still mad at them and it'll take more than that to get a smirk out of him.
"We're sorry, Boss," Marron whimpers.
"We'll leave it to you," Catnipped Kitty meows. "You can even put me next to this mutt. I don't mind."
"Good answer," Chazz says simply, and turns back to the album. "All of you go away now. I'll put the cards in on my own. And there better not be a word of criticism afterwards."
"There won't be," the spirits promise as they disappear, leaving Chazz to let out a long sigh of relief.
As soon as they're gone though, the Ojama brothers pop up.
"That's showin 'em, Boss!" Ojama Yellow cheers.
"Those knuckleheads don't even know how good they have it," Ojama Black says with a click of his tongue.
"So ungrateful," Ojama Green agrees.
"Yeah, yeah and you three are just saints, right?"
"We always show our appreciation," Ojama Yellow scoots over to Chazz's face and is immediately swatted away.
"So? Where can we reserve our seats in the album?" Ojama Green asks, eye shining.
Chazz frowns.
"What seats? You three aren't going into the album. You're in my deck!"
"But, but we want a place in the album too!" Ojama Yellow says. "Just to point at and say "this is our spot"!"
"It's the principle of the thing," Ojama Black insists.
"Yeah!" Ojama Green agrees.
Chazz feels another headache coming on.
"Fine, you can have the very last slots on the very last page."
"EH? But—
"Alternatively," Chazz cuts him off, "there is plenty of room in the shoebox."
They quiet down.
"Aww, you're no fun Boss," Ojama Yellow pouts after a moment.
"I know. Now go away and let me finish this."
They grumble a bit, but ultimately leave, and Chazz basks in the elusive silence. When he's sure no more spirits will be coming out to bother him, he picks up his notepad. It would be easy to stuff them all into the binder in whatever order and call it a night, but Chazz doesn't like easy.
"Okay, so Chaos Necromancer wants to be on the front side…"
A/N: I'm not dead! I'm sorry for the long delay between chapters, but I haven't abandoned this series and I really want to see how far I can take it. Things aren't really great for me right now, but these little fics are really fun to write, and I hope to make as many of my ideas materialize as possible!
I hope you liked this story! In my original outline, I actually wanted to put this one later on, but I wrote, I liked it, and I hope it brought a smile or chuckle as you read it :)
(I probably do need to characterize some of the individual spirits better though)