Chapter 21, and the beginnings of romantic subplot and subsequent panicking….

Yuko13, thanks for the review(s)! Good to know you caught that—and good question! We shall have to stick around to find out….And that's a good place to be, by the way. :)

Blanket disclaimers are in Chapter 1 (I do not own Yu-Gi-Oh!, I do not own Avatar, I do own Chaos Creatures, etc., et al…).

Yugi woke up to a strange energy in the tree.

"What's going on?" he asked Kelsey, who had jauntily come in with a bundle of fruit.

"It's about that time of year again," she said.

Yugi blinked, then gained a look of consternation as what she said took on meaning. "Wait—what?"

"Not that time of year," she scolded, throwing an orange at his head. "Every year about this time Wilson comes visiting. He always brings toys and such for us."

Yugi glanced at the stuffed animals and realized where they must have all come from. "He's that important?"

"Very," Kelsey said, pulling him up. "Come on, we've got to get to the top of the tree before all the good seats are taken."

"Wait—what?"

The top of the tree was not as bad as Yugi had feared.

On the contrary, the top part of the tree trunk was big, round, and flat, making a huge plateau for Chaos to congregate. The rings made a hypnotizing effect, and one or two Chaoslings were dancing in the middle.

All around the plateau, branches big enough to comfortably support Elsie rose up, making perfect perches. The branches would split into smaller and smaller branches, with the ones up higher anchoring the floating islands.

Yugi asked Kelsey about them.

"They're floating islands," Kelsey said simply. "They float around, and some grow vines that get caught in tree branches like on this tree. Some Chaos go up there to fly off."

Yugi couldn't even begin to imagine jumping off of them. "How do they float?"

"I have no idea. Wilson would know—he's nerdy enough."

They were on a branch that sloped up then leveled off, giving a nice view of the plateau. Yugi hadn't stopped looking around since they arrived—he was currently marveling at the dense canopy keeping the light drizzle out.

"I wonder how long it took for this tree to grow this big," he mused.

In response, Kelsey slid off, pulling Yugi with her.

They spent the next hour or so trying to count the rings on the plateau. It proved to be a fruitless gesture, as Yugi kept losing count at five hundred and Kelsey refused to count much past six hundred.

"How come?" he asked her.

"Six isn't a good number for Chaos," she replied simply.

Yugi shrugged, sensing he wasn't going to get much more out of her. He crouched down near the center and looked at the rings there, too close together to even begin counting. "How does this thing grow with the center hollowed out like it is?"

"Something about Chaos living in it," Kelsey said, trying to count the rings and giving up. "You can ask Wilson when he gets here."

"This guy must know a lot," Yugi said sardonically, beginning to get sick of hearing about this Wilson guy.

"Well, he does know a lot, but it's mostly because he does a lot of," here she waffled her hand, as though she were searching for a phrase. "Research, that's it. And he asks a lot of weird questions like you do."

"He's strange even by Chaos standards," Tristan said, bounding over and crouching to see what they were doing. "What are you looking at?"

"We're trying to count the rings on the tree."

"Probably over a thousand," Tristan said, before Joey collided with him in a running tackle.

"Why that number?" Yugi asked.

They rolled, Tristan flat on the ground before answering. "Because you got to five hundred and weren't even half-way across," he supplied, sounding distinctly squashed beneath Joey. "Maybe two-thousand, since they get tighter when you get closer to the center."

Yugi blinked at the math demonstration, then decided to leave it lie. No sense in insulting these guys when he was several thousand feet off the ground. Yeesh, he couldn't even tell up here. "So when is this Wilson coming?"

"No idea," the three said at once.

Yugi blinked at them. "You said he comes around this time."

"Yeah," Joey said.

"But you don't know the day?"

"What is it with this guy and having to have an exact date for everything?" Joey muttered to Tristan.

Yugi sighed and shook his head. There was no reasoning with these people. He headed back to the branch they had vacated, but paused in a patch of sun. It felt good. It felt really good. He glanced over at the three, noted they were busy play-fighting. Good. He really didn't want anyone to see him potentially make a fool of himself.

He took a deep breath and tried to spread his wings.

He had no idea which muscles to use or how to spread them properly. One sort of slipped, then snapped back into place. He sighed and shook his head—no dice.

He felt someone watching him and turned around.

It was the new girl, near one of the knotholes used to achieve the plateau. And she looked like she was laughing at him.

"What's so funny?" he asked, tilting his head up slightly. He blinked at that—that was a distinctively Chaosian action, and the fact that he had done it without thinking probably wasn't good.

She twisted a claw in the wood next to her and smiled slightly. "Well…you act funny," she told him.

He blinked and took a few steps towards her. "And how do I act funny?"

"Just the way you walk around, and the way you look at people," she said, leaning against the wood and tilting her head at him. He was recognizing the upward head tilt as a minor challenge.

"Oh, and I'm sure that's normal," he said, indicating Joey, Tristan, and Kelsey, who had formed a knot of claws and teeth in their fight.

"Yes, actually, that's normal."

"Well, for them it is…."

"All the Chaos I knew acted like that."

Yugi was about to respond, until he realized the entirety of her statement. "I'm—I'm sorry about…."

She shook her head. "It's not like it's your fault."

Ugh. Like he could explain that. Yes, it wasn't his fault, but he couldn't help but feel that it was sort of his fault.

"Thank you, by the way," she said suddenly.

He blinked. "For what?"

"For coming to check on me."

And she gave him a light kiss on the end of his nose and bounded off.

Kelsey came over.

"You've been standing stock-still for five minutes," she observed. "What's wrong with you?"

"This is very, very bad," Yugi declared.