I've had the idea for this story for a little over a year now, since a few months after I found out about Yu-Gi-Oh. My first introduction was to the first series anime (commonly known as "Season 0") produced by Toei Animation, and I admit I fell in love with it. I didn't start writing Submersion until after I saw an absolutely marvelous AMV that kick-started my inspiration. Below is the URL for that AMV, if you'd like to watch it:

www dot youtube .com (slash) watch? v= wrQerUydryo (just take out the spaces and such).


Rating: T
Genres: Suspense, horror, hurt/comfort

Full preview: Season Zero + early manga AU. First year high school student Yuugi Mutou is an avid gamer, an unfortunate social pariah, and the shortest kid in his class. Aside from that, though, he's a relatively normal teenager. A relatively normal teenager who has just solved the Millennium Puzzle, a supposedly magical Egyptian artifact, in the hopes that by doing so, he will be granted his wish for friends. Amazingly, his wish is granted. He's gained two new friends! But they're not all he's gained, and as he comes to realize, the price he must pay is horribly steep. By completing the puzzle, he has unknowingly unleashed a spirit of the shadows, and it has chosen the boy as its host. Darkness is descending on Domino City.

(Or: The loss of identity and the sands of time force the Puzzle spirit into a near-animalistic mindset, a dark soul clings too tightly to the light, and no one reacts well to realizing they're possessed.)

Disclaimer: Any recognizable characters, ideas, etc. belong to someone else. I'm just playing with them.


Submersion

By: The Half-Blood Guardian


Chapter 1: The Beginning Part 1

The spirit had been alone for so very, very long; long enough that all memories of having ever lived another life had been lost to the never-ending flow of time. A cold, dark, empty, and overwhelmingly lonely stretch of years, spanning not only centuries but millennia.

In all that time, there had been next to nothing to disrupt the maddening stillness and silence. In fact, the spirit had all but forgotten that a world even existed outside of its labyrinthine prison: a shadowy dimension contained within the pieces of a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, sealed inside a small golden box and hidden behind a stone wall in an underground tomb in the middle of the desolate, lifeless deserts of Egypt.

Its only company were the Shadows that infested its prison. They used to torment it, the spirit recalled, back before it had figured out how to communicate with them. And even after it had, they still fought against it, refusing to be tamed or controlled in any way. Eventually, though, as the spirit had grown stronger and stronger, their stubborn refusal had been swallowed up in its power, and they'd had no choice but to submit to its will. Throughout another undetermined stretch of time, they came to accept and even relish in their servitude, such as it was. There wasn't much for them to do, after all, even if the spirit had sent them off to complete every tiny, pointless task it could come up with.

Restless and discontent with the lack of activity and stimuli, the Shadows had eventually settled into a sort of hibernation, and continued to remain in that state of dormancy unless their master forcefully called upon them. It had been a long time since the spirit had managed to summon the will and energy to do so, and the longer it went without even the meager companionship they provided, the closer it felt itself slipping towards something it thought was called "insanity." Or maybe it had already reached that point and simply hadn't realized it. The spirit wasn't sure what the exact definition of "insanity" was, but it got the feeling that it wasn't anything good.

Though the spirit didn't know it, three thousand years had passed since it had been sealed away. But it didn't need to know the exact number of years to know that after such a long time, the chances of its puzzle ever being found and solved were slim to none.

So when it felt the first tiny vibration shake its box, it was surprised at the sensation but passed it off as a small tremor of the earth, since those had been the only things besides the Shadows that it could remember ever interrupting the eternal monotony. The idea that it could have been anything else did not cross its mind. But it started to question its previous assumption when the tremors continued, travelling in waves through the stone pedestal and up into the golden box that rested upon it, coming at uneven intervals and getting stronger every time there was another wave. The spirit's Shadows, which had been dormant as usual, began to stir as well, and they quickly became more alert the longer the racket persisted.

Then something broke through the wall concealing the space where its box was hidden. Though the spirit couldn't truly see or hear what was going on in its surroundings, another of its senses (one that was unnamed as of yet) vaguely identified the thing as part of a thin, sharp object.

A tool, whispered an obscure corner of its mind.

The spirit wasn't sure how it knew this, but it didn't particularly care right now because something was happening, something was interrupting the endless monotony and it felt too excited to be thinking about such a silly thing as how it had come to know a certain word.

Then the tip of the "tool" was pulled from the hole it had made in the wall, and the spirit, who had been without external stimuli for three millennia, was bombarded by several sensations. A flood of foreign emotions and desires and ambitions came rushing in from the beings that had apparently been on the other side of the wall. Selfishness, the greedy desire for power and money, and sly plans of betrayal for the purpose of increasing personal gain crashed over it, and it could feel something burning its artifacts, but there were no flames, only a stream of something and the spirit thought it might be called "light" and it would've been wondering how it knew this as well if all these sensations weren't being forced into it, if everything wasn't hurting it.

The tool was thrust into one of the cracks in the weakened wall and the small hole became a gaping crevice. Every feeling was amplified, and the spirit wished it had a corporeal body to release its silent screams at the intensified agony. All of the elation it had first felt at finally, finally having something to preoccupy itself with had long since vanished, and it could vaguely sense its Shadows reacting as well, writhing in pain and squealing soundlessly.

Then one of the beings reached out and touched its box, and the spirit used the Shadows to lash out, knowing nothing but the need to get rid of that filthy, greedy human's touch and the whirlwind of evil thoughts and pain.

It didn't let up until it could no longer sense the presence of the beings that had invaded its domain with their greedy hearts. The "light" was still falling over the spirit's box, but it didn't hurt as much as before and unlike the other beings' thoughts, it was slowly becoming more and more tolerable for it.

Just when the spirit had finally gotten used to it, the light started to wane, until it was nearly as dark as it had always been. The spirit found itself feeling bereft.

Night, whispered the same strange voice in its head that had given it the names for "light" and "tool" and "betrayal" and "greed."

Luckily, not much later (or at least, not much later from the spirit's perspective) the light returned, the darkness fading out the same way it had faded in. Day, the voice whispered this time.

So, the spirit thought to itself, when my surroundings are dark, it is night, and when my surroundings are light, it is day? Has it always been night before this? Has day only recently come into existence? Somehow, it didn't think that was the case.

Before the spirit could ponder any more on this subject, it suddenly sensed more of the same type of beings that had come for it the previous day.

Humans, the voice called them, and the spirit realized angrily that these "humans" were the ones bringing the light with them.

Shadows hissed their disapproval, remembering the pain that they and their master had felt because of the last humans to enter. The fact that their arrival had brought with it light and sorely needed change did not matter; it had caused them pain. It had caused their master pain, too, and that was an offence that was simply unpardonable!

The spirit was only too willing to allow its Shadows to do as they pleased with the new humans.

They gathered in the corners of the room and began to reach for their prey. All at once, the same feeling of apprehension flared from each of the new humans, as well as varying levels of fear. Then one of them spotted the spirit's golden box. The apprehension and fear of this human were suddenly squashed down to a mere shade of what they had been, and in their place there arose an ugly wall of all too familiar greed.

This time, instead of being crippling, the feeling merely gave an irritating prick. But that small prick managed to enrage the spirit and its Shadows more than crippling pain ever had, and together they let out identical silent snarls.

Oblivious to this, the human barked something at the others, and soon their fear was diminished as well. The spirit's rage grew stronger with each new feeling of greed that emerged from the group.

The other humans paused for only a short time at the threshold of the room before following their apparent leader.

These intruders made it less than half as far as those from the last batch had before they too were engulfed in a furious swarm of living darkness.


This pattern repeated itself a few more times – a group of humans entered, the greed inside their hearts ignited the anger of the spirit and Shadows, and the humans were destroyed because of it. After each of these times, the spirit felt its Shadows becoming weaker. Eventually, their growing weakness allowed one of the humans to escape relatively unharmed – with the spirit's box in hand. Were it not for their drained energy, the Shadows would never have paused long enough to realize that underneath the fear that was so prevalent, this human was feeling a sense of adventure, rather than the pure gluttony all the others had felt. Curious about this seemingly new type of human, the spirit and Shadows ceased their aggressive actions and allowed themselves to be taken from their dark chamber.

As the human took the box farther and farther from its original resting place, the spirit noticed that the light it had gotten used to was starting to get brighter. Nervous about the new intensity of the light they had only recently begun venturing into and severely weakened by their many attacks on intruders, the Shadows faded out of physical existence and reappeared in the safety of the spirit's labyrinth dimension.

Then they turned one last corner, and a vast expanse of unending openness stretched wide before them.

The sky, the voice told an amazed spirit, just before the human stepped fully out of the stone passageway. The light that had been getting stronger suddenly became dazzling in its brilliance. Something up there in the "sky" was creating that light, and the spirit was overcome with awe at the sheer radiance being emitted by whatever that something was.

The sun, said the voice. At the same time, it gave an overlapping whisper of Ra.

Both filled the spirit with a sense of wonder, the second more so than the first, to the point that the word almost caused it to shy away. Uncomfortable with the feeling of submissiveness, the spirit decided to use the first word, "sun," to refer in its mind to the sky's maker of light.

Once the human had taken the box out of the full light of the blinding orb called the "sun," the spirit was able to think more clearly again. Which meant that it realized that the sense of adventure it had felt from the human when they were in the tomb had faded a fair amount, and just as the spirit had come to expect, the feeling of greed had grown up in its place.

Why can this human not be different from the others? It thought.

For a split second, a feeling rose inside the spirit; one that a human had never caused it to feel before: "disappointment."

Then rage, accompanied by indignation, flooded in again, the strongest it had ever felt.

Despite the Shadows' current weakness, they reached out to tear at the human who had upset their master. Their lack of power made them incapable of solidifying even halfway, though, and rather than wrapping around flesh, their dark tendrils grabbed something else. Something inside the human was also intangible, and when they gripped it, they and the spirit could sense the thoughts and intentions of the human on a much deeper level than they'd been able to even through physical touch. The Shadows squeezed the intangible thing a bit tighter. A little trickle of their former power returned to them.

The human had gone completely still, eyes wide and body beginning to shiver. If it had known how, the spirit would have cackled at the reaction. It didn't know how, so it simply gave the Shadows an order it only half understood, excited for reasons it understood even less. And although the Shadows were similarly uncertain about what was about to happen, they too felt excited.

A soul, the voice in the spirit's mind named the intangible thing as the Shadows began dragging it from the human's body, tearing into it. The human dropped to the ground, shrieking and seizing. Energy leaked from the rips in the "soul," and the Shadows latched onto it, hungrily lapping up every drop and slashing at it to further widen the lacerations. Bit by bit, they regained their former strength.

A soul, the spirit repeated dazedly to itself, shuddering at the wonderful, ambrosial backlash it felt through its link to the starving Shadows as they continued to feast.

The human went from screaming and writhing to twitching and whimpering, before finally falling completely silent and still. The soul was gone, having been fully consumed by the Shadows. They lazily exited the human, returning to their master. The spirit welcomed them back, feeling something that the voice called "lethargy," as well as the deep-seated senses of satisfaction and contentedness that were better than anything else it had ever experienced.


Now that the puzzle box had been brought out of the underground chamber and to the surface, a place where multitudes of humans roamed, many of those humans had begun to spot the spirit's artifact, and each immediately became interested. This wouldn't have been a problem if that interest had been contained to simple curiosity, but it was not. Their interest was polluted with the voracious desire to take the spirit's golden box and keep it for themselves. Whenever someone managed to do so, it never stayed in their possession for very long. The spirit had little tolerance for such annoyances.

The hearts of so many of the individuals that came near the box were saturated with greed and selfishness, and each time it felt one of them trying to handle its box the spirit fended them off just as it had with the first humans to find it – albeit much less violently a great deal of the time, as it had since become acclimatized to sensing their hearts and had realized that none of them knew the spirit existed, and therefore were not actually intent on hurting it.

Sometimes though, when the spirit was feeling especially fed up with being passed around from one wealthy, self-centered human to another, it slipped up when it was teaching them a lesson and accidentally gave the Shadows more freedom than it normally would have to terrorize whatever unlucky individual was being punished. Those individuals generally ended up in a broken, psychotic state, some of them silent and unresponsive as they just sat and rocked from side to side, while others were jumpy, skittish, and prone to bouts of thrashing and screaming as they were tormented by horrors that only existed within their own heads.

The spirit couldn't technically see or hear the humans, having no eyes, no ears, and no body, but it still had a good idea of what had happened to them. Sometimes a slight itch in its thoughts made itself known, and if the spirit had bothered to give the itch more than a passing thought, it might have realized the feeling was actually a faint, vague sense of regret for the fact that its Shadows always played too roughly with the humans' fragile minds.

But even more unfortunate than those individuals were the ones who angered the spirit during the times when it and its servants were beginning to grow weak. At these times, the spirit purposely released the Shadows, allowing them to devour the soul of whatever greedy human was unfortunate enough to have been causing the spirit's agitation at the time.

Ever since having its strength restored by that first soul, the spirit had realized that if it didn't wish to waste away, it was essential for it and its Shadows to consume souls on occasion to replenish the energy they expended while penalizing guilty humans.

It didn't take all that long for the spirit to get used to its dependence on the energy it drained from human souls for sustenance. At least, not all that long by the spirit's reckoning. Two years, five years, ten years, twenty years; it didn't make much difference to the spirit, who had existed for far, far longer than any human.

Still, for being such a small fraction of its existence, the time after the spirit's puzzle was found seemed to take up a strangely large part of its memory, so much so that it could sometimes scarcely believe there had ever been a time when it hadn't weighed the hearts of the wicked. Perhaps this was because nothing had ever really happened in all the time beforehand.

Yes, that is probably the reason, the spirit thought.


More years passed, and eventually the small golden case and the puzzle within made their way into the possession of one who the spirit could sense was of an age that was old by human standards. The essence of the human felt male.

The old man, like all the other humans who had come across the spirit's artifacts, was very interested in them. However, this interest was different from that of the rest; rather than being centered around greed and thoughts of profit, the old human's interest was innocuous in nature. It was also mixed with caution and respect, and the spirit could feel the honesty and goodness in the man's heart. It could sense a light inside the man as well, weary with age but still burning strong.

The spirit found it odd that, as a being of darkness it instinctively and intellectually knew itself to be, it was not repulsed by the light. In fact, it seemed that the exact opposite was true; the spirit was strangely drawn to it. It realized that its Shadows were being similarly drawn in when a few of them tentatively but curiously reached towards the soft glow of the man's soul, ready to either attack or retreat back to their master's side at a moment's notice should the light cause them any harm.

The spirit watched them carefully as they drew closer and closer, just as cautious as they were. The Shadows hesitated briefly when they were almost touching the edge of the light before slowly resuming their movement and closing the small gap.

The very tip of one tendril of darkness faintly brushed a tiny section of the light. The spirit was baffled when, rather than recoiling violently upon coming in contact with the light, the Shadows instead became a bit more adventurous. More of them approached the light when it became clear that it was safe, and soon there was a multitude of dark tendrils reaching out to touch it. The light started to pulse a bit more brightly in response to the harmless touches, seeming just as comfortable with the Shadows as they were with it.

But that wasn't the only surprise. Energy, the kind that the spirit and Shadows could normally only get by shredding and draining a soul, slowly seeped into the dark tendrils, strengthening the Shadows, and therefore strengthening their master as well.

Startled at suddenly feeling a sensation so similar to what it felt while feeding, the spirit was at first worried that its servants were harming the light, but soon realized that somehow, despite them receiving nourishment from it, the man's soul wasn't being drained at all. In fact, its glow looked a little "healthier" than it had already been.

The spirit felt no discomfort through its connection with the Shadows, only safety, warmth, and… something else… Satisfaction, perhaps? No, not quite, though that was definitely part of what it was feeling, as it was currently being fed soul energy. But the word didn't fit the one it was searching for to describe one of the most prominent emotions it was experiencing. Then it came to the spirit. Could the feeling have been… "happiness?" Could this be what genuine happiness felt like? The voice had mentioned the word before, but the spirit had never been able to completely grasp the concept. Now, though, it thought that maybe it was starting to understand. It couldn't remember any other time when the gnawing loneliness inside it had receded so much.

The Shadow that had touched the light first now curled a tendril gently around it to take in more of the new but pleasant sensation that the human's soul was giving off. The master of the Shadows soon followed the example of its subordinates, for once allowing them to lead, and several thin, barely-there appendages parted to make way for a larger, slightly more solid one. The spirit rested a dark, wispy hand against the light and nearly shivered in delight. The feeling was so much more potent now than when the spirit had simply been experiencing the sensations second hand through its link with the Shadows. The light gave an especially bright pulse before settling back into its normal level of luminescence.

Something strange happened then. The spirit's lips stretched upward seemingly of their own volition. Then a raspy noise rose from within its chest and was released in short, forceful bursts, almost like a "cough." The sound that it was suddenly making was out of its control. But oddly enough, neither of the involuntary actions alarmed the spirit. Rather, they produced an even stronger feeling of "happiness" inside of it.

The spirit felt the upturn of its lips and identified it.

This is a smile. I am smiling.

It turned its focus to the more noticeable of the two actions and identified it as well.

This is a laugh. I am laughing.

I am laughing and smiling. Doing this feels… good. I feel warmth, and safety, and "happiness." These feelings are also pleasant. I feel this when I am around the old man.

The spirit came to a decision. It decided that it liked being around the old man and his warm, bright soul.


Sugoroku Mutou stared at the golden case, wide eyes drinking in every detail. On the side facing him, a depiction of the Eye of Horus stared back, and the man almost flinched.

As soon as his mind had connected the bits of memory that held the answer to what was so significant about an Egyptian style gold puzzle in a gold box, he had quickly placed the lid back on and backed away. The single-eyed gaze hadn't seemed accusatory, however, and that was the only reason he hadn't been running since the moment he'd realized what exactly had been left sitting at his doorstep.

Of all the places the apparently not-so-mythical Millennium Puzzle could have ended up…

During his time spent in Egypt when he was a younger man, he'd heard plenty of stories about the Millennium Puzzle; definitely enough to learn about its reputation and develop a healthy dose of caution. It was those same stories, however, than now fed his curiosity about the mysterious item, and despite the risks, he couldn't bring himself to look away from it.

Bold yet laboriously precise lines were etched into the gold and intermingled with slim, delicate ones, working together with them to frame the intricate hieroglyphs that wrapped around the outside edges of the case, all of it centered around that one graven eye. The warm light that filled the shop glittered off the gold surface, giving the item an almost dulcifying allure.

The man knew that unlike many other metals, gold doesn't fall prey to rust or the like, but the original splendor still should have diminished somewhat after so much time. At the very least, the artifact should have been littered with the small dents and scratches that came to all delicate items that were smuggled illegally. The golden box, and each piece of the puzzle within it, deliberately ignored their age and whatever rough treatment they may have endured after being unearthed.

Under any other circumstances, Sugoroku would have called the items modern knockoffs (albeit very finely crafted and aesthetically pleasing ones). And yet… there was something that stopped him from dismissing them. An indefinable, underlying sense that told him he was missing something.

He tried to focus that sense and pinpoint what was causing the feeling, but the ethereal glow of warm light that shimmered across the case's glossy finish suddenly seemed so much more interesting than it had a moment ago. One minute passed, then two, seemingly in the blink of an eye as his mind slipped into a patchwork of quickly fading snippets of thought, and he felt the beginnings of a cool tingling sensation, a bit odd but not unpleasant, start to spread through his chest.

The feeling suddenly crescendoed, startling him slightly. He gave his head a small shake as he slowly pulled his thoughts together.

Looking at the case again and replaying what had just happened, he knew he should've felt frightened, but the closest he could manage was slight uneasiness. He also should've dropped the Millennium Puzzle off somewhere far away from his home and never thought about it again. But then someone else would just find it, someone who hadn't heard the stories and didn't know the danger. Sugoroku could not, in good conscience, leave the artifact behind, knowing it would more than likely ruin another person's life. He'd have to keep it.

He couldn't leave it out in the open where it might do… whatever it was that it had just done to him. But he wasn't sure he'd be able to resist the urge to take it from wherever he decided to hide it. Somehow he knew that the longer he went without seeing the Puzzle, the more he would start to crave the sight of it.

It will have to be someplace where I can see it often, but I can't easily reach it, he mused, then thought on it for a while.

Finally, with the utmost care, Sugoroku lifted the box from the counter and brought it into the storage room. He climbed the little stepladder until he could reach the top shelf, and set the puzzle box down. Another reflection of light off of the shiny surface caught his eye. He stole another long glance.

Then he took a deep breath, drew out a larger-than-average scoop of stubbornness from his inner well of perseverance, and made himself leave the closet. He folded up the stepladder for good measure before closing and locking the door behind him, trying to convince himself that there were much better things he could be doing than staring at a hunk of gold.

No matter how fascinating that hunk of gold may be? A traitorous part of his mind questioned him. He resolutely ignored it.


Once the old man had it in his possession, the spirit's box was rarely moved. It was mostly kept in one place and almost never touched. The spirit didn't particularly like the accommodations, as the space its box resided in was quite dark.

However, it was tolerable, since the man generally stayed close enough for the spirit to reach out to his light soul, and on most days, he opened the door to the "closet" it was in to retrieve a box – not the spirit's box, unfortunately, but one that was usually made of "cardboard." He always took the box out of the closet and to his "shop," where he "sold" the contents to the "customers" (random other humans that came and went from his shop).

(The spirit had come to know quite a few words during its stay with the man, often picking up on his surface thoughts when its shadowy heart touched his light one. Such as the word "name," and the name belonging to the old man: Sugoroku.)


On one of the days when the customers weren't there – a "weekend" – the spirit was surprised when three people showed up at Sugoroku's shop anyway, and even more surprised when the man happily let them in. Any other time someone had wanted to enter the shop on a weekend, Sugoroku had politely sent them on their way, assuring them that he was always open on weekdays.

This was not a weekday, yet the man was letting the three apparent strangers in, and not just past the front door, but up the stairs to what the spirit knew was his private living space. Confused and more than a little suspicious, the spirit reached out with its mind and ran mental fingers over the heart and mind of each of the possibly harmless and probably welcome newcomers.

The first one was a man, like Sugoroku, though he felt younger. There were several minor worries on his mind, but they had been mostly tucked away for the moment. He seemed genuinely happy to see the older man, and the spirit could sense that he had no ill intentions towards Sugoroku. In fact, even though it was a bit dimmer and definitely not as prominent, the spirit could sense a light in this new man's soul that reminded it of the light in Sugoroku's own soul. Satisfied, it moved on to the next human.

This one was a woman, and felt about the same age as the man. She and the man felt similar in many other ways, as well. Like the man, she had several worries on her mind, which she had temporarily pushed down. She was also pleased to see Sugoroku, wished him no harm, and harbored her own little light in her soul. Sugoroku was obviously not in any danger from her. The spirit turned its attention to the last member of the still largely unfamiliar group.

As soon as it brushed against the mind of the third human, it was hit by a wave of hyperactive enthusiasm and affection. For a moment it floundered in its own mind, trying to process the information being thrown at it, and the only thing that prevented it from attacking the foreign mind out of shock was the impression that immediately followed the enthusiasm. And that was light. Pure, magnificent, and utterly addicting light.

The soul of the young boy (the information on age and gender had somehow managed to reach the spirit even past the nearly overwhelming torrent of other information) was so pure, so white, so light, that the spirit could scarcely believe he was human at all. Surely a being of such innocence and purity could not have been a member of the same species as those wealth-seeking individuals who had once surrounded the spirit with their filthy presence.

When it had first felt Sugoroku's light, it had been difficult enough to believe that he and those individuals were all the same species. Believing that the boy was the same species as the greedy scum was a task that fell just short of impossible for the spirit.

And even when it finally did accept that the boy was human, it still couldn't help but think of him as being something more as well. To the spirit, the child didn't just have a light heart; he seemed to be the human embodiment of light. It was as if he wasn't just a light soul, but was one with light itself. As if he was The Light. The only human Light in the world.

It took a while for its shock and wonder to settle down enough that the spirit could focus on anything other than how brilliantly the boy's presence shone. It was at that point it noticed something was wrong. The brilliance and warmth of his heart and soul were so distracting that they had been shrouding the abnormality from the spirit until this time. The child was ill. In his excitement at seeing Sugoroku, it seemed that the boy himself had forgotten for the moment that he was sick.

Suddenly, the spirit felt something else touch the boy's light, and a tiny section of his light flickered and dimmed for a few moments before very slowly regaining its former brightness. The spirit barely noticed the feelings of surprise and deep worry that came from the other three humans, too focused on trying to identify what horrid thing had so negatively affected the boy's light. It realized almost immediately that the intruder in his soul was not sentient, and soon discovered that the culprit was the child's own illness.

Inside the spirit's metaphysical chest there rose a feeling that, until now, had only ever surfaced when there was a nearby danger to itself or, in more recent years, a threat to Sugoroku. Only this time, the strength with which the feeling surged forward resulted in a sensation that came so close to overwhelming the spirit that it bordered on pain.

It needed to protect this boy! But how would it go about doing so? No one was attacking him, so it had no one to fight off. The spirit paced around a high-ceilinged room in its prison, agitated. Its Shadows picked up on the feeling and mirrored it, and the spirit made itself stop. The Shadows soon followed suit.

This did nothing to soothe its agitation.

The three adults had taken the boy and set him on a "couch," and the woman pulled an unfamiliar object from her bag while the younger of the two men swiftly headed down the stairs to the shop where the "phone" was located. Sugoroku bent down and held the boy's hand reassuringly. The spirit wasn't sure exactly what the woman did with the object she had taken from her bag, other than that she gave something from it to the boy.

After several seconds, the spirit felt the boy's light brightening, and the child seemed to be doing better. The woman called down to the man, telling him of the boy's improved condition. The man uttered a brief apology to whoever he had called before hanging up the phone and dashing back up the stairs.

Eventually, after lunch and conversation (while the adults kept an inconspicuous eye on the child), the man, the woman, and the boy of Light left, Sugoroku having promised to teach the boy how to build a "beginner's domino spiral" the next time they visited. In the silence that followed their departure, Sugoroku went about cleaning his shop with a content and relieved expression on his face, though there was an undertone of niggling worry that seeped into his aura. The spirit found that it felt the same way, and waited both eagerly and anxiously for the next visit from the group of three.


Almost four weeks later, a phone call came in. This in itself wasn't all that uncommon, but Sugoroku's reaction to it definitely was. He slowly hung up when the call finished, then quietly helped the one customer in the store pay for his things. Once the customer had left, Sugoroku walked to the front of the shop, flipped the sign from "OPEN" to "CLOSED" and headed up the stairs to the building's living quarters. There he waited in silence on the couch until a knock came at the door.

At first, the spirit almost didn't recognize the one who knocked as the woman from the family group. She was so filled with unpleasant emotions that her light was mostly obscured by them.

It did, however, recognize the boy of Light. Its excitement at his arrival was unfortunately dampened by the somber mood of the adults though, and the spirit realized for the first time that there was something off about the group waiting at the door: instead of three people, there were only two. For some reason, the man wasn't there.


Sugoroku opened the door and Akako led her son by the hand into the shop. As soon as the door was closed behind them, she crouched down so she could look the little boy in the eye.

"Yuugi? Jii-chan is going to be looking after you for awhile. You be a good boy while I'm gone, okay?" The child nodded, and Akako cupped his cheek tenderly. "I'll come pick you up in a few hours, sweety. I'm sure you'll have lots of fun."

She then turned to Sugoroku. The man spread his arms a little in invitation before wrapping her in a hug. She leaned into it, gripping fistfuls of his shirt and taking a deep, shaking breath.

"Mama?"

Both adults turned to look at Yuugi, who stared back with a worried expression. "What's wrong, Mama?"

Akako froze. She was about to give him an excuse, something to reassure him that everything was fine, but one look in his eyes stopped the words from coming out. No matter what cover-up she offered, he'd be able to see right through it. Her son had always been very perceptive when it came to others' feelings, and while it was an admirable and uncommon trait even for someone twice his age, it was working against her in this case. She took a deep breath to center herself.

"Your father… he's… been in an accident, Yuugi…" she began, hoping all the while that what she was saying didn't make her a terrible mother.


Not many days after the first time the woman dropped the little boy off at Sugoroku's house-shop, she and the boy – who was named Yuugi, as the spirit had discovered – returned with armfuls of boxes and bags. The spirit learned that "moving in" was the term for what they were doing.

As the woman and the boy continued bringing in their belongings, Sugoroku's home started getting cramped, and the old man had to move some of his own possessions into storage. It was because of this that the boy finally came across the spirit's artifacts.