Warnings: Um...none really. Just a bit of girl-problems. (Boys, steer clear of those, you don't need to get caught up in them. They can get ugly.)

Disclaimer: I don't own Yugioh GX


Year One: The Academic


" What was that all about back there?"

" I told you, just a shadow."

" Really?"

" Yeah, that's all." A pause, and a glance to the right. " Just a shadow…"

" You say something?"

" Nothing of importance."

" No offense, but you're a little weird."

" This from the girl sneaking around abandoned dorms late on a Friday night?"

" I have my reasons!"

A snort. " People always do."

Had Alexis been a little more sleep deprived, she might have taken Lia's comment as an insult. But she'd had a full ten hours of slumber the previous night, and Jaden had warned her on several occasions about the Academic's sarcastic tendencies, so the blonde was thankfully able to ignore the slightly cruel tone in Lia's voice and roll her eyes.

" I'm not going to tell you." She informed the other girl. Somewhere in the darkness off to her left, she swore she heard a female snicker.

" I wasn't asking." Came the calm response. Alexis supposed she had just imagined the giggle.

" Unlike everybody else." She muttered under her breath, training her light on something scuttling across the wall. " Ew."

" What?"

" Really big spider thing."

" Spider thing?"

" They aren't usually bright red, are they?"

" We're on a tropical island with oak, maple and willow trees." Lia said as she walked over to where Alexis stood. " Are you really so surprised by the wildlife?"

Alexis opened her mouth, blinked, and snapped her jaw shut again.

" I didn't think so." Lia's flashlight spun over the faded and grey interior of the hallway, before it landed and stayed on a patch of black within a doorway. Stepping closer over the creaking boards, she peered down into nothingness. Alexis sidled up next to her, her flashlight yielding nothing in the empty blackness.

" Five dollars says there's a freaky lab like in the bad science fiction movies from the '50's." Alexis grinned, and was rather shocked when Lia returned it with the same devilish one the blonde had seen right before the Rottweilers had been set loose.

" No way." Lia shook her head. " It's got to be some kind of horrible monster. It's always some kind of horrible monster."

" Okay, you're on." Alexis held up her hand for Lia to shake. " Whoever is right gives whoever is wrong five dollars, 'kay?"

Lia eyed the hand warily, and glanced back down the doorway. The wind picked up outside, and, somewhere off in the distance, a wolf gave a furious howl at the full moon.

" Fine by me." The brunette took the hand. " It's obviously a werewolf."

" You sound sure." Alexis joked as she pulled herself onto the first step. " Watch it, the stairs are a little wobbly."

"Thanks." Lia gripped the rickety railing. " Of course I'm sure. Full moon. A group of teens in a scary house. Flashlights and only one map. Monster."

" Freaky lab."

" Monster."

" Freaky lab."

" What if it's a monster in a freaky lab?"

" Then we both win, and we make Chazz pay us five bucks each."

" You don't like Chazz very much, do you?"

Alexis paused, and looked over her shoulder at Lia with a sly look.

" Oh, like you're one to talk." She looked the other girl right in the eye. " You couldn't be in the same room with him without getting into it."

" He just rubs me the wrong way." Lia muttered, and pushed passed the blonde to continue down. Alexis watched her go, a sigh on her lips that she didn't quite let leave. Lia had been making such progress in her social skills, and if Chazz undid it all with his callous remarks, Alexis swore there would be hell to pay.

" Yeah, I just can't get along with him either." She pointed her torch up ahead of Lia so the girl had more light. " I mean, he can be sweet, but only when it suits him, and-"

" Only when it serves his best interest, right?"

" Yeah." Alexis let out a disappointed smile. " If he were genuine when he was being sweet then I don't know, maybe I'd look at him the way he wants me to, but he just isn't. He just acts that way because he thinks that's what I want, and if he does it, I'll like him."

" Does he know you know?" Lia pressed against a door, and it opened with a loud creak. Alexis shook her head wearily.

" No…At least, I don't think so. I haven't really given any indication." She ran a hand through her bangs. " He covers up that he's into me with all this 'I can't stand anyone but Blues' crap, but he really tries to be in a group where I'm the only Blue, so that kinda gives it away. You know what I mean?"

" Alexis." Lia said, and she was surprised to hear a stern, bitter sound creep into the Academic's tone. " Have you taken a good look at me?" The brunette snorted. " There's very little chance I'll understand your problems."

" My problems?" Alexis felt her temper flare up. " How are my problems different than your problems?"

" Let's put it this way," the bitter tone was still there, and for the life of her, Alexis couldn't place it, " there's more separating us than dueling and not dueling."

Alexis' temper died as soon as it had blazed to life at the calm, even accepting, sound in Lia's voice. Something stirred in her, something from her earlier years, something about trying to find looser tops, about trying to keep a guy's eyes on her face and not her chest, something about wishing feverently that she had been born with a little cuter smile, and a lot less chest…

" Lia, what are you going on about?"

" Forget it." Lia said abruptly, waving away the awkwardness with the hand that was not grasping the flashlight. " It's nothing. Just forget I said anything at all."

But something in her, the something that remembered her tearing through her closet to find a shirt that didn't make her look like she was all chest and nothing else, compelled Alexis to push the subject just a little bit farther.

" No, really, what's so different about us?"

" Just leave it alone, okay?!" Lia whipped around and glared at her, hazel eyes flashing in the light from the silver object still clutched in her hand. Alexis saw her knuckles turn white from the furious grip, but she was struck by how open, even in her anger, Lia looked. The normally pale face was flushed red with rage and her eyes were almost sparking. There was the barest hint of hurt flickering across her face, coupled with a slight envy that danced so quickly through her eyes that Alexis was sure she had imagined it.

" I…sorry, I shouldn't have pried…." Alexis stammered, taking in the sagging of the vengeful face in front of her. " It isn't any of my business…"

" No, no I over reacted." Lia murmured so quietly, Alexis had to lean forward to hear it. " I just…it's a sensitive issue for me…can we forget this ever happened?"

" Yeah, sure." Alexis gave her a reassuring smile that Lia weakly returned. The narrow hallway had opened up some, and Alexis darted forward to walk side by side with the smaller brunette. Out of the corner of her eye, Alexis saw Lia begin to fiddle with the bunched up fabric of her grey sweatshirt, pulling at it and yanking it up more on her neck. She fumbled with the sagging material around her chest, and Alexis was struck by the light (no bigger or brighter than the lumincient of her flashlight) of a small epiphany.

' Lia never shows any skin.' She eyed the girl, in her sweatshirt and long jeans, covered from neck to ankle. ' I've never even seen her neck before tonight.' Alexis eyed the steadily moving pulse and the little motions of the muscles as the girl swallowed. ' All I ever see is her face and her hands. She refuses to wear the girls' uniform, although,' she glanced down at her own attire, ' I can't really blame her. But still,' she looked at the brunette, in long jeans and thick grey shirt, with a flash of green that may have been a t-shirt, ' it's an island in the tropics, it can't be that cold out.'

Alexis shook her head, and glanced at the ceiling in puzzlement.

' It's like she's trying to cover up as much of herself as possible.'

Something poked at the edge of Alexis' conscience, prodding and chattering and trying to make itself heard. It may have very well succeeded, had the passageway the two girls were exploring opened up into an expansive cave.

" Oh, wow." Alexis breathed as all thoughts died her mind. Beside her, Lia gave an exclamation in French and brought her camera up to her eye to start snapping photos.

The massive hollow space carved out of thick, blue-grey rocks reached up a staggering four or five stories, steadily growing thinner and thinner until the cone-like structure culminated in a circular opening above there heads, the diameter about as long as a fully grown man. From the hole, silvery white moonlight might have filtered in, had there not been, from what the two girls struggled to make out, a heavy grey cloud blocking it. The rock walls themselves shone slippery and cold in the spill of the light the girls had brought, and Alexis gulped as she took in the near sheer slope of the hollowed out cave. Several jagged pointed rocks erupted from the cave walls at odd and incomprehensible patterns all around the dome of rock, jutted out like spears, overhanging and guarding the smoothed center of the cave bottom.

The floor was made of the same rock that edged upwards towards the skylight many meters about them, but it was polished, smooth and slippery and as flawless as the glass mirror in her bathroom back at the Blue Girls' dorm. Alexis could make out a few think lines etched into the smooth surface, but, it stretched out wide and long, and the designs the lines may have created were lost over the plane of her vision.

A scuffling noise drew her attention, and Alexis turned to find Lia hauling herself up onto one of the fallen rocks at the edge of one of the strange lines. She balanced herself on the top most tip of the rock, and reached up, with her arms extended to their maximum, to one of the spikes jutting out over her head.

" What are you doing?!" Alexis shouted as she ran over. Lia stumbled a little, but managed to keep her balance as she reached for the spike on her tiptoes.

" You'll get yourself killed!" Alexis scolded. Lia didn't look down from her perch.

"I want to get a picture of the weird circle on the floor."

Alexis blinked, and looked over to where one of the lines seemed to be curved over.

" It's a circle?"

" Of some kind." Alexis looked over to see Lia with both her arms and one leg wrapped around the spike, and was reminded, before she could stop it, of some kind of primate in a dense rainforest, clinging to a branch as it made its way home. She bit the inside of her cheek and tried to contain her laughter, as Lia used her free leg to make her body swing gently on the spike. On the third swing, Lia used her arms to haul herself up onto the spike with great effort (if her furious grunt was anything to go by), and situated herself, as comfortably as she could, on the nearly horizontal rock, her legs curled around either side of it. With a satisfied 'ah!', Lia leaned over slightly, and brought the camera that was dangling around her neck to her face and a faint clicking noise filled the otherwise silent cave.

Alexis was caught between being impressed at Lia's drive, or shaking her head at the (supposedly) smart girl's stupidity.

" Don't fall off." She called as she wandered off to a dark space to the right. A distracted 'Got it!' was the only answer she received. She glanced down at the line she was following, seeing how it curved over and continued.

' Guess it is a circle.' She thought distantly, taking note of the second curve that was running parallel to the first. In the space between, several other lines seemed to be breaking up the space in pattern of almost rectangle shapes, save for two instances, at what Alexis assumed to be the top and bottom of the circle, where there were triangles, not the parallel lines of the other shapes. If she glanced down to the other side of the circle within the larger circle, she could see two smaller circles cut into part of the rectangle, and extending out into the disk the second line made. Two holes, one near her and one at the dead center of the circle, broke up the special patterns that seemed to have been established with the lines. Alexis moved closer to the hole in the middle for inspection, and had just glanced over at two smaller holes linked to the one at the top by criss-crossing lines that extended out over the disk and into the triangles at the other end of the circle, when a small cry of pain drew her attention.

She whipped around and darted back to where Lia sat on the spike, the cloud finally passing overhead and allowing the cave to be bathed in moonlight at last. The rocks shone blue in the light and Alexis looked up to the brunette who was carefully edging down off the rock, her feet dangling in thin air over the fallen rock she'd used to climb up. She gulped, and let go, landing on surprisingly light feet on the rock, and wobbling her way down. Alexis ran over, eyes wide with concern.

" Are you okay?"

" Oh, yean, I'm fine." Lia smiled a weak, unconvincing smile. " I just banged my head on the way down, that's all."

Alexis looked at her incredulously, eyes fixed on the way Lia's smile was just a little too bright to be entirely truthful.

" Do you want me to look at it?" She offered. Lia immediately shook her hand, and rubbed the top of it.

" No no, I'm alright." She waved it off, fiddling with her camera to avoid eye contact. " I've had much worse, trust me."

Alexis opened her mouth to dispute Lia's claim, but the pleading look in the younger girl's eyes stopped her.

" Fine." She huffed, and turned away, missing the grateful look Lia sent her. " So, did you notice anything while you were up th-"

She was abruptly cut off by a black mist slowly creeping into the cave around them.

" What the…?" Alexis whispered as the damp blackness gathered around her feet.

"Diable?!" Lia snarled, and Alexis looked over to see the mist slowly making its way up the French girl's leg and curling around her waist.

"Qu'est-ce que c'est?!" Lia squealed as the mist rose higher and higher on her body. Alexis felt a squeeze around her mid section and looked down in horror to see the mist coiling around her body as well. With frantic movement, she pushed at the surprisingly heavy substance. Her hands slipped through the billowing blackness at her waist, and suddenly felt cold and wet. She yanked them back to find them covered in a thick, dark purple slime. She stared at them in disgust until the fact registered in her mind and she shook them in a panic to rid them of the ooze. Behind her, she heard Lia stumble and fall onto the rock floor, swearing so colourfully and so fluently in French that Alexis had no chance to even try to understand what the other girl was hollering about. The mist shot up her chest and Alexis writhed on the spot, trying to dislodge it, but the thing (she refused to call it mist anymore, because mist didn't do this!) only wrapped itself tighter around her struggling body. Her blood ran cold as Lia gave a short-lived shriek, only to have it silenced with chilling suddenness. Alexis tried to turn her head back to look at the girl, but the whatever it was had reached her neck and held her head firmly where it was. Something squeezed and her air was cut off. Choking and fighting off the first stirrings of drowsiness from her body, Alexis craned her head down to see a heavy black hand curling around her throat, oozing the thick, purple slime from before.

As the hand tightened, Alexis cursed the fact that she was forced to play the damsel in distress, and let out an ear-splitting scream.

Something had clonked her on the back of the head, and she tipped forward, scream dying on her lips.

As the darkness settled in, she swore she heard a deep, humourless chuckle.

**_**

When Lia awoke, she couldn't see, couldn't move, and, most importantly, couldn't breathe.

A few quick shouts that led to muffled squawks had her coming to the conclusion that she was probably gagged. She tried to wiggle her arms and legs, and wasn't overly shocked to find that there was a certain, rough pressure on her wrists and ankles, and that, if she twisted her wrists too much, a harsh fiber dug into her sensitive skin. Blinking her eyes s few times yielded the conclusion that she wasn't blindfolded at all; it was just incredibly dark in wherever she was incarcerated.

She moved her body sideways, as much as her bindings would allow, and bumped into a padded wall with barely any wriggling. Trying the same actions on the other side led to the same confrontation with a padded, silky soft wall. She raised her hands a little off her body, and thunked them against a heavy, presumably wooden roof, resting barely a few centimeters off of her immobile body. The realization coursed through her as fast and hard as any electrical current, and once again tested her ability to remain calm.

' Je suis dans un cercueil. Je suis DANS un CERCUEIL. Je suis vivant, et je suis dans un cercueil.'

A horrible thought occurred to her that stunned her out of the urge to bang loudly against the door.

' Est-ce que j'ai été vivant enterré?' The though quelled all others, before the urge to panic returned ten fold. She took several deep breaths through her nose (the only place that she could breathe through that wasn't covered up by some cheap, rough cloth), and tried to calm her racing heart. After several long minutes of just listening to herself breathing in the small, dark space, Lia managed to allow her breathing to shallow out to a normal depth, and turned her attention to the rather urgent (but not urgent enough to make her lose her head) matter at hand.

She couldn't, not for the life of her, figure out how exactly she had ended up in a coffin.

' Le pierre, les photos, le cercle' She mulled over in her head as the dank blackness settled in over her in the padded coffin. ' La…la brume noire…'

That awful, slimy choking hand, curling around her throat and choking off her air bit by little bit, with that horrible, wet feeling of the oozing dribbling down her neck, over her collar bone and down her chest…

Lia shook her head, trying to rid herself of the image and feel of that horrible encounter.

'Vous avez des choses plus importantes à inquiéter environ maintenant!'

She reached up with her bound hands, and felt around the place where she supposed her upper lip was for the edge of the cloth that was tied around her mouth. With a tug, it came sliding off of her face, and Lia gasped in a few gulps of air. She lay there in the darkness for a little while, just staring up at where she knew the roof of the coffin to be, trying to decide what to do next. She brought her hands to her newly freed mouth, and tried to tug at the rope with her teeth, but to no avail. The knot was tight and the rope was both slippery and rough on her tongue. With a defeated sigh, she wiggled her legs around, trying to bring one ankle over the other to shift the rope around, hoping to loosen it. In the midst of her shuffling, she nearly screamed out loud when a voice cut through the depressing empty silence of her unwilling entombment.

" And now, I'll destroy your Pandemonium card!"

Jaden's voice shouted out something Lia couldn't quite follow (but it was probably one of those ridiculous attack names for the monsters that people seemed to think sounded so cool, but in her opinion were too long and unnecessary), and then there was an explosion that rocked the wherever they were, and she was thrown (rather painfully) against the side of the coffin. She supposed, when she managed to right herself, that she was grateful for the padding, but the force behind the throw still hurt. Cursing Jaden and his need for theatrics, she set to banging against the sides and roof of the coffin, shouting at the top of her lungs.

" Hey, guys!" She let her voice rise several pitches, smirking to herself as she thought about the number of eardrums she was going to pierce before she was freed. " A little help might be nice!"

There was a dead silence that worried Lia more than she'd have like to admit, and then,

" Lia!" She had never been so happy to hear Syrus' telltale squeak. " You're okay!"

" I'm in a coffin with my hands and feet bound!" She shouted into the dark. " How do you classify that as okay?!"

" Well, you're talking, aren't you, Ra Girl?" That was Chumley's slow, to the point rumble, muffled by the wall of her cage. If she hadn't been so annoyed at the lack of action going on, she would have been happier to hear it.

" I'd rather be able to move my arms!"

" Well, what can we do about that?" Syrus was back. " Jaden is dueling for you and Alexis, 'cause your souls are trapped in the Shadow Realm."

" Didn't Jay say it was a scam?"

" Well, yeah, but how can he tell?"

" I think we should trust his judgment. Maybe Titan really is just faking it."

" The only thing I'm trapped it in is this freakin' coffin." Lia said slowly, through gritted teeth. " And the only thing shadowy about it is that there is no light, because you two are too busy arguing and fawning over Jaden to get this lid off and help me!"

Though she couldn't see it, the imagined image of their shared wince over the almost dog whistle pitch her voice had reached made her smile in sadistic delight.

" …We can't." Chumley explained. He said it as slowly as he possibly could, as if to draw it out and hold off her response, because he thought the fact that no one could remove the top of the coffin she was trapped in wouldn't go over too well with the feisty French girl.

It didn't.

" What?!!?" She shrieked, and she could almost see the boys covering their ears. She tussled around with the ropes in the small space, and rolled over to face the direction of their voices. " What do you mean, 'You can't.'?!"

" Lia, that you?"

Lia took a deep breath and mentally counted to ten as she answered Jaden's casual call.

" Who else would it be, seeing as how everybody seems to not be in a coffin?"

" Lex is in one too." Jaden called, and Lia was surprised to hear a grunt escape him, and then there was the sound of another explosion, and feet running along the smooth stones. Lia heard Jaden give a shout about something, then was a 'whirring' noise that made her stomach turn over, because it reminded her of mist and ooze and dark hands clasping at her windpipe. She shook herself and pressed her ear against the side of the coffin, desperate to hear something. Running feet, shouts, a crackle of electricity and everything shook for a few seconds, and Syrus shouted Jaden's name.

And then everything was quiet.


First off, let me apologize most profoundly. *gets on hands and knees and starts crying* I'm soooooo sorry! I was super sick on Thursday night, and then I had my math exam the next morning, and I was too tired on Friday to upload anything, and well, I just kept forgettting today. But here it is! Better late than never, right? ....RIGHT?

On a more positive note, I jsut finished my first semester of the year! Grade 12 is half over! And that was pretty much the last math course I'll ever have to take! (Not that I don't like math, but I have a...rocky relationship with Advanced Functions. ....stupid First Principles...*grumbles*) Now that that's out of my system, how about some translations?

Diable?! - From what the translator told me, it's basically 'What the Hell?!' or 'What the-'

Qu'est-ce que c'est - What is this? (Do I really have to translate this?)

Je suis dans un cercueil. Je suis DANS un CERCUEIL. Je suis vivant, et je suis dans un cercueil.' - I'm in a coffin. I'm in a COFFIN. I'm alive, and I'm in a coffin.

' Est-ce que j'ai été vivant enterré?' - Have I been buried alive?

' Le pierre, les photos, le cercle... La…la brume noire…' - The cave (At least, I THINK this is what it means.), the photos, the circle...the...the black mist.

'Vous avez des choses plus importantes à inquiéter environ maintenant!' - You have more important things to be worrying about right now!

Lia covering herself up - This is important. And before you jump to conclusions, no, she is NOT a victim of domestic violence.

The five dollars - I plan on bringing this back. ...Eventually.

The rune circle - Trust me, this is important. Very important. ...Important.

Other than that, I'm feeling really lazy tonight (ah, the wind-down after exams), so that's all you're gonna get. (Again, I'm sorry, but at least this means I'll have time to finish writing Year One.) ....Half-way done grade 12!

MoS