CHECKING IN

Jefferson Hewitt sat on the sidelines. He had no idea when he was set to duel, or who he would be competing against; all he knew was that this kid, Curtis Miller, showed some promise. It was rare to see someone so fresh to this game beat a former regional champion, and yet here this kid was, beat Weevil Underwood while not losing a single Life Point. It was amazing.

Of course, this boy was still competition. He was still someone who could get in the way of his true goals. Maximillian Pegasus was still in the building, and no doubt watching from the view box after his duel with Seto Kaiba. He still had yet to find out if the duelist who got to the very end of the tournament got to play Pegasus, but he was sure he would learn the truth soon.

And if Kaiba could beat the creator of the game, then Jefferson – then "Pandora" – was sure he could as well.

He turned his attention back to Curtis Miller, and thought back to when he first discovered the game. He was close to this boy's age when Pegasus debuted the game on ESPN, just after a showing of The World Series of Poker. For as much as he blamed Pegasus for his father's death in Egypt, even Jefferson had to admit that the game looked like fun to play. So when the time and money were right, he bought his first deck. Throughout the years, he learned all the new techniques, from the continuously updating summoning techniques to the subtle changes in the rules to some Spell and Trap Cards. He quickly picked up on the inner workings of Synchro, XYZ, and Pendulum Summons, and had just recently learned how Link Summoning worked.

Going by the commentary provided during that last duel, this boy had just started playing the game six months ago. If he put his mind to it, a duelist could learn the entire game in that amount of time. And if his flawless performance against Weevil Underwood was any indication, this kid had learned everything up to when XYZ Summons were introduced; he had no way of knowing yet if Curtis was running any Pendulum or Link monsters. But he showed a lot of promise as a duelist. Then again, so did anyone who played well.

Of course, this kid was nowhere near the level of the next two duelists, Yugi Moto and Mai Valentine. Yugi was the first person to beat Pegasus at this game back during the Duelist Kingdom tournament on Pegasus's private island, and like Weevil Underwood, Mai had once gone to regionals and took third place in Duelist Kingdom. Her Harpie monsters were a force to be reckoned with. Especially if she were to combine her Harpie Lady with Cybershield, Elegant Egotist, and then summon Harpie's Pet Dragon. Jefferson had seen her play on TV a few times, so he knew how she worked.

And then there was Yugi Moto and his Dark Magician. When it came to Normal Monsters in the most recent meta game, Dark Magician, like Kaiba's Blue Eyes White Dragon, was still a powerful card, though by itself it was just a 2500 Attack Point beatstick. Of course, he knew that Yugi had plenty of Spell and Trap Cards to support both it and its female variant Dark Magician Girl, and Dark Magician – at least for Yugi – was sometimes used as a tribute to Ritual Summon Magician of Black Chaos.

Maybe there was a chance they would see that monster in the next duel? Who knew, really. When it came to Duel Monsters, everything fell to the luck of the draw. While there was most certainly skill involved, that only accounted for about ninety percent of the game; the remaining ten percent was made up of pure dumb luck. After all, not even Seto Kaiba knew what his next card could be – he could top deck something like Chaos Emperor Dragon, Envoy of the End, or it could be the Flute of Summoning Dragon Spell Card.

Jefferson reached into the deck slot of his duel disk and pulled out his cards. He was using a Burning Abyss deck. Unlike most of the cards in the game, which were based on the hieroglyphics Pegasus saw during his trips to Egypt, the Burning Abyss deck was based on the classic tale of Dante's Inferno. Many of the monsters in the Main Deck were Level Three monsters with emphasis on bringing out the more powerful monsters, such as the Ritual Monster Malacoda, Netherlord of the Burning Abyss, and XYZ Summoning monsters such as Dante, Traveller of the Burning Abyss.

This particular deck was only a couple of years old, but that was more than enough time to Jefferson to learn the ins and outs of the deck and how it stacked up against other, much faster decks, like those godforsaken Zoodiacs that had only just recently started to become limited after causing him and so many other duelists many a headache. It didn't help that one turn of a Zoodiac deck could take upwards of twenty minutes, which was half the length of an official match.

He flipped through his deck. He wasn't sure who he was facing, but he was sure that each of these cards would come in handy.

He checked his watch. Five minutes till eleven. The next match was set to begin soon.