PART I
Seto was no stranger to the harsh winds of amber Egyptian sands and bits of the particles clinging onto his clothes and parts of his exposed skin. For a good half-year, he had frequented the excavation site of the late pharaoh back on earth, and when certain days were unkind, his search for the millennium puzzle was subject to delay. It was funny how the same physicalities he had felt were the same in another dimension. Predictable. But still somewhat bizarre. In this new world, however, he was alone without his employees or government officials continually and vehemently protesting a puzzle dig up.
The similarities between here and there ceased once he placed one step into the palace of the pharaoh. There was nothing in his mind to glower at the intricacies of ancient Egyptian architecture or note the different fragrances of palace perfume. He didn't come here to satiate sensorial pleasures but instead desired to complete a personal vendetta against the one sitting so calmly on an oversized throne.
Seto never could erase Atem from his mind. It was why he couldn't look at Yugi for very long anymore, as when he first saw traces of Atem in Yugi, he automatically felt impassioned mixes of unvoiced contempt and remorse. He recalled having the urge to duel the little twerp on the spot, in class during an exam.
Silently, he raised his left arm with a dramatic flair and activated his duel disk system.
Atem only rose from his throne and his action was also coupled with no words. If Seto was infamous for his poker face, then Atem surpassed him in that department, for his violet eyes were vacant and he was void of microexpressions. He didn't even step down the small flight of steps leading up to the throne.
"Do I have to greet you with a "your royal highness" or something for you to speak?" Seto asked impatiently, "Or are you afraid to face me?"
The ends of Atem's lips drew up into a small smile, as if to relish in the nearly forgotten sardonic tones of Seto Kaiba. He clutched his hands together behind his back as he carefully tread down the stairs and closer to Seto.
"You are getting really close to perfectly impersonating him, Mahad," Atem observed as a tiny laugh escaped him before continuing, "Although, I have to ask, how did you come up with such a ridiculous ensemble? I remember his outfit being hideous but it looks crazier with that weird technology down your arm and those glowing lines on the torso. Don't tell me he's making duel disks like prosthetics now."
Seto lowered his dueling arm and scrutinized the man in front of him, brandished in some unfit royal regalia. The crown on his head with the millennium eye looked chunky and ready to collapse onto the floor. His entire outfit appeared unfit for his character - from his gaudy, dated jeweled earrings to the gold chains wrapped around his arms glistening. Atem was the last person to comment on his fashion sense.
"Have you seen the mirror lately?"
Atem only laughed, this time greater than the subdued one before. He replied, "Mirrors in an Ancient Egyptian afterlife? My gods, that is exactly something ignorant Kaiba would say. Alright, Mahad, you can stop."
"I'm not Mahad," Seto argued in resignation, "Whoever that is."
"Stubborn today," Atem noted with a frown, "Well, I suppose we can duel, but it's not like you can summon the Blue Eyes White Dragon yourself. You could also pretend to lose and follow with the usual childish tangent about a rematch."
Seto became quiet. Childish tangent repeated in his head for the course of the awkward silence that had instilled between them. It added salt to the wounds of his previous losses. He questioned whether Atem ever took him seriously, but the possibility did not dismay him of his hard work to get to this point. Instead, he felt more vindictive and swore to himself for the thousandth time that he would fulfill his self-created prophecy.
"I should have been the one to send you off pharaoh," Seto grimly said, "Not Yugi. No one else is as worthy as I am."
Atem stood at a standstill with his hands still clenched behind him. His eyebrows were furrowed as he tried to understand why his good friend was so passionate in his role-playing. He questioned whether the gods were playing tricks on him.
"Why do you think you are worthy?"
He was testing Seto's sincerity. The only plausible answer would be one that only Seto could voice, one that not another could perceive. Frankly, it was frustrating on Seto's end.
"Because," Seto questioned, "Did I not bury you the first time?"
A step back ensued from Atem. His hands unclasped as he softly said, "Kaiba."
"Hello," Seto righteously said.
"You surprise me, not just by being here, but by your reason. It makes me think you might believe in our ancient history-"
A small "hmph" escaped from Seto.
"-It was custom for Set as my closest relative to bury me, and in a way, I pleaded with him to bury me again in erasing my name. Perhaps that is why you feel like it should have been you instead of Yugi. However, you really shouldn't be here."
"But I am," Seto confidently stated, "and I don't want to waste my efforts. I've provided you with a duel disk as well. Don't worry about not having a deck. I've already copied your usual one into my new Duel Links system and set it to be available offline in case the afterlife didn't have wifi."
"How thoughtful."
In that instant, Atem walked away and gestured to Seto to follow him. The latter complied with a stringing impatience, as there was still no clear answer to his duel proposal. He followed Atem across corridors and corridors filled with foreign inscriptions, embedding rich history of which he had no care for.
"I didn't come here for a house tour," Seto blurted distastefully as his eyes scanned the picturesque halls while walking. The areas they walked past were absurdly dark with only the flickering flames of torches to aid visualization. He could barely make out the stuff of legends drawn across the walls but bore no remorse in failing to dissect the content on a deeper level.
One display managed to deserve a pause from Seto.
Atem noticed his footsteps stopped and paused himself to look back. In lieu of the dimness of the environment, he wasn't sure in his observance of Seto. The other man had lifted his chin slightly and was in profile position from Atem's viewpoint. Something in the way the flames lit his face extracted a sense of gentleness in Seto's face, particularly in his normally cool steel eyes. Before Atem could walk back and view the fresco that had captured Seto's attention, Seto quickly snapped his head back towards Atem with a hardened expression, silently communicating that they should continue toward wherever Atem was directing them. Without a second thought, Atem abided in his silent sentiment and guided Seto toward a vacant and spacious room quite opposite in ambience of the dark corridors.
It was brightly lit with its lack of ceiling, allowing for the sun to be the only source of warmth and light and permitting for the occasional breeze to drift in and playfully whirl a strand or two of hair atop the pair's heads. The walls were emptied of any inscriptions as well, and there were absolutely no furnishings.
"We could have dueled in the throne room," Seto said in abject misery from having to walk a labyrinth to reach an empty room, "As amazingly realistic I've improved the system, Duel Monsters are still holograms."
"The rules of this world beg to differ," Atem voiced cautiously, "I do not want to make a war out of the throne room where it isn't required."
"Are you seriously telling me Duel Monsters are alive?"
It was a game. Only a game. The only visceral part for Seto was the competitive spirit manifesting into a vengeful hunger that ravished any common sense that other people claimed he lacked. For a game where his pride latched upon like an impudent moth to a flame, Seto still discerned the boundary between fantasy and reality. The innovative wonder that was his Solid Vision technology gleaned on the licensure of reality but did not at all wish to breathe actual life into the card game.
Real monsters were an impossibility in the eyes of a man that liked to defy the impossibility, of a man that had traversed between life and death. Atem noticed the slight hypocrisy dancing in the facial expression of Seto's disbelief.
"If they are," Atem carefully asked, "Would you deny excitement from summoning a live Blue Eyes White Dragon?"
Seto wasted no time in bluntly retorting, "It's a card. A powerful one but still a card."
Wasting no more time with excessive side talk, Seto pulled out from within his elaborate, trademark silver coat another duel disk. It was the same model that he had running down his left arm and thoroughly checked for possible malfunctions prior. He handed the duel disk to Atem, who accepted it with awe across his face.
"How brilliant-"
"I know," Seto smugly cut.
"-how brilliant you are by trying to make the game appear as realistic as possible under the guise of futuristic innovation," Atem continued with a tinge of mockery in his tone, "but you fail to believe some realities of our past."
"Enough with the philosophical talk," Seto sourly declared as he moved across to the opposite end of the room, "Let's duel."
"As you wish."
The first sign that something was wrong was when Assault Wyvern demolished Gazelle the King of Mythical Beasts in a battle sequence that was not programmed by KaibaCorp. In a normal game, Gazelle would have succumbed to defeat by simply disappearing in one glowing blast or some variation. The way his opponent's monster seemed to intellectually respond to his own by ways of complex diversion and retaliation strayed from the nearly boundless limits of Seto's technology.
If the intricate textures of Assault Wyvern's scales or Gazelle's matted fur did not add to the hyperrealism that Seto wanted to deny, then the permanent craters in the ground they stood upon from Assault Wyvern's attacks became evidence that even he couldn't deny. When Gazelle eventually crumbled underneath the superior strength of his Wyvern but in a pace so painstakingly slow that he would never have approved of even in the alpha stage of development, Seto regretfully understood Atem's forewarning.
His eyes drifted down to his left hand that held his cards. His fancy, shiny, glowy digital cards that felt miraculously and impossibly tangible, thanks to his genius invention. He wondered how Atem felt about the digital format, how impressed he was, or the opposite if he were so shamefully old-fashioned.
"When Assault Wyvern destroys a monster in battle, its effect allows me to special summon one dragon-type monster…" Seto announced but drifted off as his gaze concentrated on one particular card.
As his right index finger gingerly caressed the crisp edges of the card, an electrical impulse seemed to traverse from the neurons of his skin to his brain and generated a minute euphoria. At that moment, the child in him bloomed.
The media back home liked to poke fun at his obsession of a beast from some card game. They understood his interest to be one of power, and although that was true, the notion was not cognizant to the depth of his infatuation. Even he himself could not grasp his own irrational interest, as evidenced by unforeseen elation pumping through his circulatory system as he summoned his most loyal servant.
Seto wholeheartedly didn't know what he was expecting. He felt that he should raise his face to the vast sky of the afterlife. It was so ordinarily blue.
Blue was it? Like his favourite color and blue like the his own irises filming
atop two squishy organs on his face.
And the sides of its face, the beast he wept to bed with as an
exploited child.
And another face? Whose face?
Cirrus clouds were white and so wispy
and delicate and like elegant wings
and silvery netting-like hair…..
He wished the clouds were tangible too.
….
…
..
.
"Wake up."
"My pharaoh, I suggest a good smack on that nasty face will do."
"I'm afraid the gods will be mad if I were to so bluntly intervene."
"Well if his ba is off conversing with the gods, then that's all the more to feign ignorance in trying to wake him with a couple slaps."
"I can hear you."
Seto awoke to find himself in a disoriented consciousness, barely able to process the room he was in but enough to understand he was laid somewhere comfy and two people were conversing near him. He slowly propped himself up and scanned the room to find two hazy figures, one still recognizable as the pharaoh and the other he could not solve. The despair on his face and his glassy eyes resembled the city clubbers after a night of a voracious drinking with a tinge of illegal drugs shot up their veins. In simpler words, he looked wasted.
"I am surprised you were able to survive a backfire attack from a shadow monster without being magical yourself," said the unknown man, "Or perhaps you physically survived but your memories have been eliminated?"
Seto didn't want to answer, mainly because he felt like if he spoke more than a couple of words, he would hurl profusely. Also, he had no wish to answer to someone he did not know. His hands trembled uncontrollably as he brought them closer to his face.
They were ghastly, or rather, the mess of inscriptions tattooed across his hands in neat vertical bands were ghastly. From the back to the palm, he feverishly flipped them back and forth as if refusing to accept they were his. Hs could only distinguish the marks to be reminiscent of the ones on the palace walls.
"I'm afraid his physical body has not caught up with his reinstated conscience," Atem's voice said. The pharaoh sat in a chair as one hand of his constantly rapped against the arms and he set himself to be economical in his words. He stood up and forwardly admonished, "Kaiba. You will return to Earth in a few minutes, so heed my words carefully."
"I'm not going anywhere until we finish-" Seto promptly snapped his head towards Atem's general direction, only to be shut down by his nausea. His impassioned movement caused him to lull to the side and artfully regurgitate. The other two in the room simply looked away out of pity, and Seto found himself at least partially cured of his ailment and capable of holding more conversation.
Atem slowly returned, "You have consented to an agreement with the gods and the hieroglyphs on your hands are the physical contract. Leaving this realm is one of the conditions."
"Consent? I never enter contracts without knowing every detail."
"You do know every detail, but your body hasn't adjusted. In time, I'm sure you will remember. From what I gathered on your hands, the contract is a fair one."
Seto took one more glance at his hands, thinking he could hurl from his confusion. The roundabout manner in which Atem was communicating aggravated him to no end.
"You can't just tell me what this chicken scratch means so I don't waste my time on a guessing game?"
"I cannot speak for the gods this time, but I can tell you that Hathor in particular smiles upon you-"
"Ok and I'm supposed to know who that is."
"-and that you may return to finish what we started once you satisfy the gods' conditions. Believe me, you will understand everything once you return to Earth. It will all make sense."
There was no comfort in Atem's words. There was no comfort in failing with his original mission and having absolutely no plausible reason behind his failure. Wind whistled inside the room, filling in the silence and raising his goosebumps even underneath his clothes. Seto despised inaccuracies and especially when they were on his end. His hands dropped to the sheets, unfeeling. Questions investigating his shortcomings atomically exploded in his head. He felt the molecules in his body slowly disperse like the first moment he traveled dimensions. The first moment was not even long past, and here he was dissipating back - recoiling.
Feeling that time was running out, Seto raised his face back toward Atem. His vision cleared better as he quietly but sternly asked, "And what about you? Do you not miss your...friends? Because I am being magically whisked away unfairly, I will say that I meant to take you back if you wished."
Atem couldn't remember the last time Seto's facial expressions were as soft. The normal glint of apathetic aberration was subverted to a rare wistfulness. If he wasn't hallucinating as well, Atem believed Seto was trying to communicate another sentiment - one along the lines of "I, in particular, miss you, and I'm using your friends as an excuse to express this." If that were true, Atem did not believe Seto missed him correctly. He understood his symbolic place in Seto's life, and it would only drive Seto in a place farther than the afterlife.
"Thank you, Kaiba, but I can wait. I am sure everyone…" Atem drifted for a second as memories of his short time in the modern world resurfaced, "will meet again under the natural order."
The small hesitation caused Seto to narrow his eyes, but he had to be more careful in his words as he felt his body breakdown further. If he were to exit from this world, then he didn't want to do so bedridden. He briskly removed himself from the bed and stood tall.
"Fine then. I promise I'll make you and your gods regret cheating me out of our duel," Seto confidently voiced his last words, unafraid to stare into the abyss of Atem's blank expression and putting on his trademark smirk. As his body disintegrated, Seto wondered why at the last second, he caught Atem's face crumble into disappointment
"I'd be wary of where regret is truly due, Kaiba," Atem somberly muttered as his unwelcome guest left.
"His task is virtually accomplishable by anyone, but his character will make this harder than it really is. Ah, how the gods do like to play."
"You're enjoying this, aren't you, Mahad?" Atem lightheartedly questioned as he sideglanced his friend.
"I was never fond of Set."
"I can't believe you pretended to mistake him for me so you could mock his wardrobe choices - pharaoh?"
Atem halted in front of the same wall that had drawn Seto. A small scoff evaporated into the air from his lungs after only registering the image for one second. He softly commented, "It's all for his good."
Mahad walked to Atem's side and viewed the same image. He shook his head and cynically provided, "And not for hers."
"I'm afraid you hold bias in your heart."
"No," Mahad disagreed as he ran his hand across the wall. His hand paused above one part of the fresco, one part of an ugly blot of history. He firmly concluded, "History repeats itself."
He removed his hand, as if he had shut her eyes and bade the oddly pale woman illustrated another farewell as she languidly died in the arms of her oblivious slaughterer.