Many thanks to The Duelist's Heiress, QueenofR, plenoptic, Bond of Flame08, xVampirexElegancex, Meowth That's Write, miaou5, lesnuitsdhiver, lxcloisennexl, and Harya for reviewing and to Aqua girl 007, phantom-phan-28, Cvaldez3563, and Diana Shadow for alerting/faving!

Magic is science we don't understand yet.

Eleven: Magic and Science

Mai brushed a loose strand of hair behind her ear before going back to work. "No offense, Kisara hun, but your feet are tough."

Kisara slurped her fruity drink, grimacing apologetically at the blonde. "I used to walk around a lot barefoot…"

"Oh, I completely understand, hun, don't worry about it. Never had a job I couldn't do." Mai continued scrubbing Kisara's foot with pumice. She was determined to make Kisara's travel-worn feet baby-soft before the night was over and had laughed when Kisara dubiously wished her luck.

"So what's it like living with the Kaibas?" A fifth girl had joined their party. Rebecca Hawkins, who was about Mokuba's age, was painting pink polish on Serenity's nails while Tea curled Rebecca's hair. Kisara wasn't sure what to make of Rebecca so far. The younger girl was very loud and outspoken, but she was also quite nice when she felt like it, and curious about Kisara's mysterious origins.

Kisara recalled the rather enjoyable way she had passed the afternoon and blushed. "It's interesting," she said lamely.

Mai's vigorous movements ceased. "Whoa, hun, what happened? Something juicy, am I right?"

And Kisara was surrounded by four girls starving for gossip. "Ah…"

Tea squealed. "You kissed, didn't you?"

Rebecca held up her hand. "We're talking about Seto Kaiba, right?"

"Mokuba's a bit young for Kisara," Serenity pointed out. The usually well-behaved redhead grinned mischievously. "Besides, it's Kaiba who always looks ready to eat her up."

Kisara hid her face behind her hair, furiously red, while the others burst in laughter at Serenity's choice of words. "What's it like kissing him?" Tea asked eagerly. Her fellow gossipers gaped at her and she rolled her eyes. "Come on, we've all wondered about Kaiba like that before."

"Maybe," Serenity mumbled.

Mai smirked. "Sure. You have to admit, Kaiba is one fine specimen of man."

"Eh." Rebecca shrugged dismissively. "Not my type."

"Tell, tell, tell!"

To think, in Egypt this kind of talk was taboo. Girls who kissed men whom they weren't married to were branded promiscuous and unworthy of a good marriage. Once again, Kisara was awed at the freedom that women had in this modern society. "Really, really good."

"Does he take it slow or just skip right to dessert?" Mai persisted.

Skip to dessert? What was that supposed to mean? "…Both?"

"He's a keeper!" Tea proclaimed.

Kisara leaned back in her seat and tuned out the other four's ensuing discussion about various boys they'd kissed. Some of the words were getting a bit too complicated for her. She really ought to start carrying one of those mini dictionary things Seto had mentioned.

Seto. The second man she had ever kissed. Like he had said, his kisses were much different than Priest Seto's, though just as full of fire and desire. Her heart fluttered at the memory of his nimble fingers ghosting across her skin. He'd said that he had a surprise for her when she got back from her girls' night –

"…Hello? Kisara? You there?" Rebecca bellowed in her ear.

Kisara jumped like a startled rabbit. "What's going on?"

Rebecca rolled her eyes. "Daydreaming about him again…" Laughter burbled from the others and Kisara spent the rest of the night dodging their insistent questions about Seto and his "various talents."

It was late when Kisara finally returned home, but Seto was still wide awake. Almost as soon as she stepped past the door, she found herself being whisked away to her room. "What is it, Seto?" They abruptly stopped, and that was when Kisara saw what Seto called a laptop sitting on her desk. "Seto, I… I don't even know how to use this!"

"I'll show you." He sat her down in the chair and immediately began explaining the more rudimentary computer skills. Kisara got the feeling that Seto liked computers. "This is a mouse. You use it to control the arrow icon on the screen."

"But it doesn't look like a mouse."

"That's just what it's called."

Kisara tilted her head, studying the "mouse" from a different angle. Maybe it did look a little like a mouse, as long as the mouse's ears and tail had been chopped off, and if its face was squashed, and if she kind of closed her eyes a bit…

No. No, she didn't see it.

"You can also use this pad here to control the arrow icon if you don't have a mouse at hand." Seto tapped a small, textured rectangular area on the laptop. "The keyboard is what you use to write on the computer. Your reading and spelling skills are good enough for you to be able to put it to use. There are a lot more things you can do on a laptop, but I can explain those some other time. Do you understand what I've told you so far?"

Physically, Kisara nodded, smiling. Mentally, she was whipping her head side to side, staring in horror and confusion at the metallic block of technology in front of her. Mouse? Keyboard? Arrow icon? Light switches and indoor plumbing she could handle, but this was in a whole other league.

But Seto looked so happy to be giving this laptop to her, she didn't have the heart to tell him that it was kind of useless to her at the moment. "Thank you, Seto."

Seto smiled and kissed her cheek, and her worries about the laptop were swept away by his attentions. "Did you miss me tonight?" Kisara nuzzled his neck. "I'll take that as a yes. What did Valentine do to you?"

"She painted my nails." Kisara waved her fingers slightly.

He grabbed her hand and examined the miniature white dragons inscribed in light blue polish. "Well, who knew Valentine was the artistic type." He kissed her palm. "Anything else?"

"She gave me something called lip gloss, to see how it looks…"

"Lovely." He covered her mouth with his own, fisting his hand in her hair that had just been meticulously styled by Serenity, not that he really gave a damn. Literally stealing Kisara's breath away, he laid his other hand on her waist while she cupped his face. But then they had to come up for air, and – unwillingly, she dared to say – he gently extricated himself from her. "Goodnight," he murmured. A swift kiss on her forehead and he was gone. Kisara propped her chin up on the back of her chair, gazing dreamily at the door he had just exited through.

"Yech. Is it over yet?"

Kisara stifled a shriek and whirled around to stare at her laptop. On the screen was a boy with green hair, covering his eyes with his hands. "Who are you?"

The boy peeked out from between his fingers, as if making sure the coast was clear, before lowering his arms and looking at her. "I'm Noah. You're Kisara, I presume?"

She nodded slowly, still in shock. "Are… are you supposed to be on my… 'laptop'?"

"It's a long story. But I have been on this computer for a while. It's a pretty good one, actually, but Seto put it in storage since he didn't really have any use for it, I guess, until you came along, so now I get to talk to an actual person again."

Kisara rubbed her eyes. "Noah" was still there. "Should I tell Seto about you…?"

"I'm quite surprised he didn't find me when he was setting this computer up for you. Guess I beat him this round, ha. Anyway…" Noah scratched his head. "I really don't want to risk him wiping me off the hard drive out of spite – we had a little sticky spot a while back – so… if you're going to tell, at least tell Mokuba first and let him decide if he wants to talk to Seto?" Kisara's confusion must have shown on her face, because Noah started looking frustrated. "Right, I heard somewhere along the network that you can't speak English fluently yet."

Hard drive, network… Her head was spinning. Wiping Noah off? He didn't look like a smudge that could be cleaned by a rag. Seto said that English had many words of phrases, speeches of phrases – oh, she didn't get this at all! Ahhhhhh…

"Are you okay?"

"I'm going to sleep." Kisara closed the laptop's lid, like she had seen Seto do, and it was only after she'd crawled into bed that she wondered if closing the laptop had somehow hurt or offended Noah.

Gah! And today had started out so nicely.

This was the tenth one Seto had received. The first one had gained a thorough reading but resulted only in confusion for the CEO. The next three merited only a skimming. Anything else following that gained only a glance at the title. Fed up, Seto finally dialed a certain number that he really ought to have on speed dial by now.

"Hi, Kaiba."

"Yugi, I don't know what you're up to, but I want it to stop."

"Kaiba –"

"I'm a gaming engineer, not a biologist. Why the hell are you sending me all these articles about cloning and Dolly the Sheep?"

A slightly static-y sigh from the other end. "After we got Kisara out of the tablet, Yami started thinking… You see, we know from Bakura that it's nearly impossible to create a body out of nothing, since his other half tried so many times, but something must've been given up in order for Kisara to have a physical body, you know?"

Seto's fingers stopped drumming against his desk. There is always a price. Was this the price his dream had told him about? What had Kisara given up? She hadn't said anything about feeling anything different, except… except… "Her dragon."

"Sorry?"

"Kisara says she can't feel her Blue Eyes anymore," Seto muttered. "Could it…?"

"The Blue Eyes is really powerful, and it explains a lot. Yami didn't think your generator alone was enough to form a body, but with the Blue Eyes… it adds up. Leaving behind the reason she was trapped in the tablet in order to escape it."

Well, that solved one problem, but there was another question that still needed an answer. "What does any of this have to do with cloning?"

"Oh. Yeah. All the talk about magic and science working together to bring Kisara out made Yami wonder if Bakura's other half had gone about attempting to make a body the wrong way, if he should've tried science instead."

"You want to clone Bakura so his insane alter ego can have a body?" And wasn't said insane alter ego dead, or wherever it was insane alter egos went after getting their asses kicked?

"No! That's not what I mean! I meant… could we make a body for Yami?"

Seto straightened in his chair. "What, you two are sick of each other now?"

He could practically hear Yugi shaking his head. "No-no-no, it's just that Yami was curious about it, and, well, we wouldn't say no if the opportunity came up. He deserves to be his own person."

"Yami had the chance three years ago to be his own person – afterlife – dead soul – whatever you call it. When he dueled you and lost. Is he regretting staying behind?"

The deeper timbre of voice told Seto that Yami was in control. "I regret nothing, Kaiba. Staying with my friends was the best decision I have ever made. But I have noticed that by lingering and still sharing a body with Yugi, I have been hindering certain aspects of his social life." Seto remained silent. He could hear Yami rolling his eyes on the other end. "Dating."

Yugi actually had a love life? He'd hit his growth spurt a while back, but he was still way on the short side. Who could he be dating, Tea? Serenity? Rebecca Hawkins? Surely not Mai, she was way out of his league, and she was supposedly going out with Wheeler. "Okay… but why are you coming to me with this? Like I said earlier, I work with computers, not DNA and cells."

"You're the only one we know with the resources to do something like this. And we figured you'd be curious to see how it turned out, too."

The CEO propped his feet up on his desk. "True, I am curious about this now." He'd resurrected a girl from a giant rock, why not clone the King of Games? "You do realize that human cloning is borderline illegal?"

"Only regarding funding, which I'm sure you'd have no problem with."

Seto contemplated the matter for a moment longer. KaibaCorp had no pressing projects at the moment. The newest Duel Disks had been recently released, so there were no demands for new Dueling technology. His own Kisara Project was done for. And it wasn't like two Yugis would be such a terrible thing, as opposed to two Wheelers or two Tea Gardners or, heaven forbid, two Pegasuses. He'd be quite interested in seeing whether or not Yugi really was better than Yami or if it was just a fluke. "It's going to take time to find a research team."

"Of course." There was a brief pause, as if Yami had stopped to listen to something Yugi was saying. "Oh? Kaiba, Yugi says that he knows someone researching cloning – human cloning in particular."

Seto resisted the urge to dramatically throw his hands in the air in exasperation. "Then why didn't Yugi ask him first to help you two out?"

"Her," Yami corrected. "And besides the fact that she's not as familiar with magic as you are, her team lacks funding, which you have. What a wonderful coincidence."

Fan-fricking-tastic. "So are you actually going to tell me who this scientist is?"

"Miho Nosaka."

Nosaka… Why did that name sound familiar? Seto recalled a head of purplish-blue hair and groaned. Miho Nosaka had been a classmate of his before transferring sometime in the eleventh grade. She'd hung out with the Geek Squad, and Tristan had been head over heels for her. Seto twitched as he remembered the short period of time Miho had a crush on him, but thankfully that had gone away pretty quickly. "Are you sure? From what I remember, she isn't exactly the brightest crayon in the box."

"She's actually really smart!" Yugi was back on. "She was specially selected to be on a cloning research team at UPenn."

"I'll judge her for myself," Seto said coolly. But Miho's acceptance to an Ivy surprised him. She'd always acted so flighty and flirty, he'd dismissed her as just another airheaded fangirl. "You're lucky you convinced me to take on this cloning thing at all. Don't press me about who I'm going to have to work with. Now if you'll excuse me, it's getting late." Yugi barely managed a goodbye before Seto hung up.

He clasped his fingers together, deep in thought. Yet another project had landed on his table, completely unrelated to gaming. Kisara's project had been different, he'd had a much more personal interest in it and he'd been able to keep it quiet. But cloning – not only would this be much more expensive and definitely get the attention of his board, but the researchers and scientists would want to publish their work. And this project could not go public. Not the part with Yugi and Yami, at least. But money could usually buy silence. He'd have to work out some kind of contract with the team before anything happened.

Seto turned to his computer and looked up Miho Nosaka. Automatically skipping past her Facebook and Formspring accounts, he clicked on a prospective link to the University of Pennsylvania website. The page listed the dozen or so people on the research team, and he started from the top.

The team was led by Professor Neal Singh, who was an astonishing twenty-six years old. Then again, Seto had taken over KaibaCorp at age sixteen, so perhaps not that astonishing. Singh had very impressive credentials and accomplishments to his name, and countless research papers. Seto opened a separate window and looked up the esteemed professor, glancing through the extensive list of biology essays the search provided. He was about to exit when a link at the bottom of the page caught his eye.

As Seto read, his eyebrows rose higher and higher. Integral to the War… reportedly the mastermind behind the rebels… refused every offer from both government and media to reveal what happened behind the scenes… could have been set for life…

Now that begged a different question. Singh couldn't be bought over by money, which Seto admired, though it made things that much more difficult for him. But would Singh keep quiet if there was sufficient reason for his silence? Seto knew now that he wanted Singh on this project, but could they risk telling the professor about Yami and the Puzzle? Scientists didn't believe in magic.

Then again, there had been plenty of fervent, though unproved, reports of supernatural forces at work during the War. Seto hadn't given much thought to them at the time, but perhaps they did have some grain of truth. If Singh really had been so important, he would've had to come in contact with this so-called paranormal activity sometime.

After all, Seto Kaiba had been convinced that there were some things above human comprehension. Surely such a "liberal, open-minded, revolutionary biologist" could be, too.

Say hi to Noah! I wanted to fit him in the story somehow and this is what happened. ^^ Kudos to Bond Of Flame08 for almost guessing the new project. I've noticed most stories just say "Yami and Yugi have separated bodies, the end, moving on." No explanation how they separated. So tada!

For those of you who don't know, Miho Nosaka is from "Season 0" of Yu-Gi-Oh, which only aired in Japan. I've never seen any of the episodes myself, to tell the truth, so from what I can gather from my internet searches, Miho was kind of silly, flirtatious, and capricious. Well, three, four years can change people, can't they? She'll be coming into the story soon.

Neal Singh is an original character (whose appearance and interest in science I borrowed from a supportive friend of mine). He'll make his debut next chapter, and I really hope you all like him!

Upcoming: More Noah drama, and Seto and Yugi learn from Neal Singh himself the true reasons for the War.

Review please!