The Magicians' Realm Chapter 102: Taking a Few Shots, a yu-gi-oh fanfic

Chapter 102, everybody! Yes, we're back! Been working on all my active fics this month so hopefully we'll be getting back on track soon…still trying to convince the kids to come up with a better plan than just rushing Skellington to see what happens….Also Yami makes some bad puns and probably deserved that.

"Linner" is kinda a family thing, and operates under the same reason Idgy gives. And The Who sings "Boris the Spider" I don't know why that weirded me out when I first learned this...and Teana's referencing Unsolved Mysteries, for the record...and Max could probably tell Skellington what parts of speech those were.

Movie this week is Casper—dang I want to live in Whipstaff….

Angiembabe, thanks for the review! Yes that's kind of weird…and huh—I went back and looked, but didn't see anything. I'm thinking maybe FFN was trying to insert an ad into the body of the text (they do that sometimes) and it just didn't load. :\

References:

Original characters, + setting © Kineil D. Wicks (myself, not the girl in the story)

Okay, if someone found him now Yami Skellington was going to be very impressed.

Skellington took a deep breath before he unfurled the scroll. He was deep in the forest, down Xohan's old road, and was confident he wouldn't be discovered by anything less than very dedicated squirrels.

He examined the scroll carefully, watching for tricks, but with a feeling of glee beginning to build in his chest. This was it. This was it. This was the thing that would tip the balance.

He struggled to keep thoughts of revenge out of his head. That had to wait. He had to wait. He had to get back to his friends, get them back here. And then….

Why had Maxwell given him this?

It was a thought that niggled in the back of his mind—what sort of game was Maxwell playing, exactly? Helping—after he had done that—

It was entirely possible that Maxwell was trying to play for forgiveness. Fat chance on that.

Or….

What was that he had said? The short answer would be to go to my old office and sit in the new chair. It didn't make much sense—a mystery that wished to be solved. Except for the little fact that it stank like a trap. And besides, he didn't have time to do that—he had to get back.

Let's see….Fastest way would be to allow himself to be caught by some low-ranking idiot, who'd just send him back and be done with it. That idiot detective they replaced Skulduggery with would do nicely, he thought—now just to wait and be captured.

But he could wait. He had a thousand years of practice, after all—

"Hey you!"

He froze in the act of tucking the scroll away in a chest pocket, slowly turned….

The twice-great nephew.

"Oh…kay," he muttered finally, glancing away before looking back at him. "Not what I was expecting, but…okay, look, I'm sure you're a nice kid and you've got things you have to say to me, but I'm really not in the mood right now and I'd rather not fall down any more stairs."

The kid was obviously gunning for a dramatic moment—had to pause. "Do what?"

"I understand we're in the middle of a forest; I just wanted to put that out there."

The kid waved him off, took a deep breath—obviously trying to get himself back on track—

"Fine," the kid said, putting his hands out. "Fine just—let's stop, you win, all right?"

Okay…."What'd I win?"

Now he was getting one of those you stupid idiot looks he was used to from Kineil or his sister Helen. "You win. I…I want to know what happened, back then.

"I want to hear your side of the story."

*\*/*

Idgy seemed kind of bemused at the state they were in when they came back, trending towards concerned as Teana headed for the couch Skulduggery pointed out, offered to make a headache cure for her and a drink for the rest of them. A stiff one, Skulduggery insisted.

Jack was just thrilled that he didn't have algebra today.

"Honey, don't show her any spiders," Idgy said, for which Teana was grateful for—being laid out on the couch in someone else's house was enough without opening her eyes to some multilegged thing in front of her. Did open her eyes at a sort of wheezing noise to see Kineil collapsing into a nearby armchair.

"Okay," she said, propping up a foot on the coffee table before apparently remembering that this wasn't Yami's house. "So I've decided that investigating my own murder scene is more draining than I thought it would be."

"Now you see why I didn't want to be bothered?" Teana asked.

"I do, actually. But at least now I know where to avoid for the rest of my natural days. I'll go there when I'm a little old lady, shuffle along, and then death will come with a shiny badge and shoot me. Which is very rude, by the way, he oughta just ask nice like a normal person."

"You expect me to believe that death will ask you to come along nicely and you wouldn't punch him in the nose?"

"It depends on how cute he is," Kineil said, sinking further into the chair. "If he looks like Andrew off of Touched By An Angel, totally saying okay. Anyone else, yes, pow, right to the kisser."

"What if death has a sense of humor?" Skulduggery asked, coming in with his hands full of drinks and a teacup and saucer balanced on one. Handed Kineil the free drink before heading for his own recliner, not breaking stride. "Personally, I think death would have a dry sense of humor—tell me a good one then haul me off while I'm distracted with laughing."

"We need less depressing topics," Teana said, sitting up a little to accept the tea Skulduggery handed her—watched as he sat down and put his iced drink to his temple, slouching in his chair with a scowl on his face. "Preferably not relating to today."

"Hmm," he noised, glaring at nothing. "And yet it needs discussing—we know the where and how, but we don't know the when or why. Or the who, even."

"They're the dudes that sang 'Boris the Spider,'" Kineil offered.

"Cute. And then the topic of the mystery children in the woods—I don't suppose you noticed who some of them looked like, did you?"

"I was busy getting a close look at the back of the front seat. A little warning next time?"

"Well let me inform you: the one I nearly ran over looked very much like you, but younger and without your Hawks' Eyes."

Kineil tipped her head at that. "I don't have any relatives up here—not that I know of, at least. Think the farthest up and east they are is the other side of the Giant Mountains down near Nawleans." Made a face as she thought about this. "I might have relatives on the other side of the Capitol from here, but I wouldn't bet money on it."

"Maybe you just have one of those faces," Teana offered, sipping at her tea.

"I feel like I should be insulted at that."

"Ah, but here's the rub," Skulduggery said, pointing. "She might have one of those faces, but not everyone has the hair I saw on a couple of those kids. Miss Teana, you saw it too, right?"

She had—two of the kids, one of the ones helping the Kineil lookalike back up, had a very distinctive head of hair. Yami's hair.

It was enough to make her tentatively hope and feel along the threads again, despite the pounding headache they were inducing. Maybe…maybe if there was a future generation, that meant that disaster could be averted, that there was hope, that she could find that perfect thread a little easier now.

Well, no…but it did make a few questionable threads fall by the wayside…or that could have been because they were a day closer to way too many of those bad threads. She was going to have to work hard to narrow them down to that one thread, to make sure they didn't stray so far she couldn't yank everyone back to that one….

But not today. Today she had that migraine keeping her from thinking straight, and she needed to think straight to get to that one thread. She had to take the rest of the day off and recover, despite not wanting to, despite knowing that every passing second got them closer to the point of no return.

And a couple of those bad ones might come from meddling where they shouldn't.

"Maybe you should just accept that some mysteries might never be solved," she said to Skulduggery finally. "I mean they made a whole show of it, after all."

Skulduggery made a disgruntled noise at that, mouth working as he glared a hole in his coffee table (not literally, but it wouldn't surprise her).

"I think I'd rather call it temporarily postponing the truth," he decided. "Because I very much don't like leaving something unsolved. It ruins my record."

"He spent the first five years here going through the town's cold cases," Idgy said, coming in. "He gets on a tear and you can't do a thing with him."

"Now see, that makes me sound obsessive—I prefer dedicated."

"It's obsessive," Kineil said.

"It is," Idgy agreed. "Come on, I've got either supper, a snack, or linner being a thing in here—you three might feel better after you eat."

"You get a little morose when you're hungry," Kineil muttered, getting up.

"Perhaps," Skulduggery said, getting up as well, pausing to help Teana up. "What do you think? Feel up to getting something in your stomach?"

"Maybe," she said, accepting the help up. "'Linner'?"

"You know how a meal between breakfast and lunch is brunch?" Idgy asked, leading them to the kitchen, where Jack was already spooning potatoes on his plate. "We figure a meal between lunch and dinner is linner."

"It'll catch on eventually," Skulduggery insisted.

"Maybe," Teana said, resisting the urge to check—whether or not someone used a name for a meal was critical to their continued survival. Nor did she pay much attention to the conversation after Grace, about how maybe Hobbits had the right idea of multiples of each meal. No, she had other concerns.

Primarily: that no one at this table would be alive by the year's end.

She had to make this work.

*/*\*

Yami Skellington actually looked floored by that comment.

"You wha—" he started—spun around looking like he expected someone to jump out and yell ha fooled you—spun back to face him. "Finally! You know the running and screaming gets old after a while."

Recall that this is the most dangerous Magician in Delvaire's history. The dork attitude was a sham. Or, possibly, the end result of a thousand years of…whatever happened to a person whose bones were banished.

"Now the problem is," Skellington said, pacing towards him and gesturing a bit—Yami resisted the urge to back up. "That while I'd love to stay and chat—tea, cake, the whole shebang—there's kind of a series of unfortunate events I'd like to get rolling and that I expect to happen sometime soon, and I'm not entirely certain you want to be around when that happens. Catch my drift?"

Unfortunately.

"So," Skellington said, stopping a few feet from him, one arm folded back, the other hand splayed on the lower part of his ribcage. "What say we schedule this for another time, hmm? I promise it'll be riveting and dramatic and all those other good adjectives. Or whatever parts of speech those were."

Yami nodded. "Sure. And by the way, thank you for being so accommodating." When Skellington looked bemused—"And for standing on the X like I hoped you would."

Skellington looked down—moved a foot to see that yes, he was standing on a little X drawn in the dirt.

"I'm an idiot," Skellington said, arms flopping down as he shot an aggrieved look skywards.

"That you are," Honda called from a side road. Skellington looked—

Got a bullet between the eyes for his trouble.