It was one of those days, a bright sunny day that hovered over the possibility of becoming a dark, stormy day. The wind blew indicisively around annoyed pedestrians who didn't know whether to hurry before it rained or take their time enjoying the scenery of Domino City, which consisted mainly of buildings, many impressive, and other people, some not so impressive.
Several teenage girls were suddenly opting for activity number two, and weren't very interested in buildings.
Seto Kaiba strode confidently down the street radiating a cool, casual kind of unfriendliness and enjoying the menacing click of his boots on the sidewalk. He didn't set much stock in life's ever-celebrated "small pleasures," those were for the romantics (aka people easily crushed), but he definately enjoyed his own importance once and a while. Everyone with any to enjoy did so, and this didn't make him a bad person, though if it did he probably wouldn't have cared. Companies weren't run by good people.
The wind made a brave attempt at becoming a tornado, and Kaiba's trenchcoat slapped him sharply in the face before whipping off his shoulder. There was a sigh and two gasps as one of the girls fell over. The CEO quickly straightened the offending collar, paying no attention to the rapt females. He had no time or intrest for a love life. A setment in the back of his mind was aware that he was saught after by most of the female teenage population, but the practical part of his brain which ran things (so tightly in fact that there was little chance of a coup) had decided that it didn't serve much purpose as of yet and was therefore irrelevant.
He didn't go out to the shopping sections of Domino City often, but today he had a mission. Well, two missions.
Mission number one: birthday present for Mokuba. For some reasion the little squirt was insulted when his gifts were ordered from Ebay.
Mission two: seek and destroy. Or rather, just seek; the ever-strenuous search for competitor's products. The destroy part would come later in a blaze of anonymous glory.
Finally, he stopped in front of a boyish-looking shop. Beside the demonically-smiling clowns, an extravengant display of complex-looking, moving structures built from tiny parts sat with a sticker proclaiming "I'm educational!" Despite the sticker, it looked perfect. Kaiba could nearly hear the angelic choir serenading his find.
Over the door a neon sign proclaimed that the place was called "Larry's Wacky Toy World." With a self-conscious sigh, Kaiba tried to innocuously slip into what in his mind was already dubbed "Hades's Toy Closet." The bells jingled an annoyingly loud welcome, and Kaiba glared at nothing in particular while he walked quickly to the construction set, well aware of the fact that glaring at bells would not be considered a normal activity.
There was a little merry-go-round spinning rather... well, merrily. Gingerly, Kaiba reached out a finger and stopped it. With an irritated little click, the base snapped off and slowly spun in a circle. Upon closer inspection, it was revealed that many of the joints had been super-glued together. So much for that.
As he was leaving, he heard the steps of the shopkeeper stop as he inpsected the display, and the steps speed up and he started toward the CEO, calling out a feeble "Hey! What do you think you're-" As he rounded the corner he dropped the sentance, and Kaiba never bothered to speculate as to why.
Down the street a little farther was a coffee shop, odors wafting from the open door. It wasn't a large affair, and there weren't many customers at the moment, and he was thirsty. Why not?
Ordering a cafe au lait from a squirrly bartender who seemed about to pop from his attempt to make a good impression. Kaiba took a stool at the u-shaped counter. Around the bend a couple seats away, sat a young woman.
Kaiba had seen gothics, and he had always admired their dress sense. Sometimes, to amuse himself, he would rate them on a scale of gothicness from 1-10, the score depending on how much they acted goth, dressed goth, radiated a goth aura, darkened the air around them, and how those factors meshed. This girl was an 11; her clothes seemed to have grown from her soul spawned in misty depths of park places.
She was strikingly beautiful. Her long, straight, jet-black hair was the kind seen on pegs in halloween costume shops. She had the trademark pale face, dark colors lining her eyes, and dark red lips. The dark fabric and leather she wore was low-shouldered and tight-fitting, rather stretching the limits of decency, and draped down in places to flap eerily. Buckles adorned odd places, which was a plus in Kaiba's eyes. The whole effect was topped off (or rather, bottomed out, haha) by high-heeled leather boots and shocking, enthralling green eyes that held unfathomable depths.
Currently she was bent over reading a paper. Slowly, as if sensing Kaiba's eyes on her, she raised her own eyes to meet his gaze, then just as slowly raised her head, her dark lips curved in a sensuous, predatory smile and an eyelid came down in a teasing wink. It was the kind of wink only recieved by males, the kind that Kaiba had lectured Mokuba on; if he ever saw it he was to run away. Fast. Throwing sharp, pointy things, if necessary.
Suddenly, as if come out of a trance, he left Planet Goth and came back to the coffeeshop, realizing with embarassment that he was staring. If that wasn't bad enough, his heart was pounding wildly.
He took a shaky sip of coffee, unsure of what to do. Feelings had never been a problem; he kept himself carefully under control at all times. What was wrong with him?
A message from his eyes arrived at his brain via panik: she was coming, the smile still on her lips like the smirk of a teacher as a student gets an answer wrong.
Kaiba treated her with his secret weapon: he glared.
Kaiba had been told that he had remarkable, beautiful, dangerous, bitingly cold, seductive eyes (though it escaped his brilliance how they could be all these at once). If he remembered correctly, he believed the term was "icy blue" with maybe an "iced lightning" here or there. That didn't matter much to him. However, there was a very useful practical application. When he glared, anything up to and including large predatory animals (that includes humans) tended to slink away wimpering to various degrees.
This woman didn't bat a painted eye, but rather sat down next to him, still smiling her demon-smile.
"What do you want?" Kaiba said in what he could only hope was a steady, cold tone. In response the girl put her hand on his shoulder and leaned close to whisper in his ear, "you place, eleven?"
Later, Kaiba would think back objectively and swear by his Blue Eyes White Dragons he heard the click of a camera from somewhere. No doubt the stray picture would be all over the internet. Ah well, more publicity. At the moment he was putting far to much concentration in keeping his vision steady.
"I'll need a key," she whispered, not waiting for an answer to the previous question.
"No." Yeah right, he wasn't that far gone. Turn up your charm a little more if you want to get this buisnessman.
She did. Keeping her right hand on his shoulder, she slipped the other into his pocket and drew out a key. The rush of blood in his ears was overpowering. Dazedly, he moved to stop her, but she pecked his cheek and it was all he could do to keep from passing out.
"I'll see you tonight," she whispered, and was gone.
In the wake of the strange event, Kaiba stared into his coffe which, compared to his insides, was colder than, as they say, a brass toilet seat in the Arctic. Now, what had just happened here?
He became aware of an older woman smiling knowingly at him. He glared, but it wasn't at his best and only caused the woman to chuckle and look away.
Leaving his coffee, Kaiba slapped down some money and headed home.
Approximately three steps away from the door, there was a tug on his jacket. Upon glancing in the direction of the tug, he saw nothing, but looking down he found an old, wrinkled man who would be beaten only by Yugi in a limbo contest on a world lacking knees or hips.
Kaiba resisted the urge to look for men in white suits, and decided to simply stare at the little man until he either made his point or went away. After the coffeeship, he wasn't in the mood to be bothered.
The little man squinted wild-eyes up at the CEO. "Be wary, master, vampires have many strange powers!" Only then did he run off into the ever-convenient dark alley.
Vampires? What was that about? Did the little man mean that the woman was a vampire, or vampiress, or whatever?
By the time he arrived home, he was convinced that the woman not only was a vampiress, but had powerful powers of seduction. It was the only explination. Powerful powers? By Bill, he was a mess.
He pushed open the doors of the Kaiba mansion, heading to his room to work. So shook up was he, it was only then that he remembered Mokuba's present. He cursed silently, slamming down his briefcase trying hard to remember every single one of what must have been wonderful reasons for not bringing alchohol into the house while Mokaba was there.
Kaiba concentrated on the comforting, familiar sounds of his laptop's start-up and amost imperceptable hum, like the purr of a kitten. The sound of a smoothly-running computer was to Kaia like John Williams to the Star Wars enthusiast, or perhaps more like the absence of splashing to someone with a fear of sharks.
Unfortunately, like the man with a fear of sharks before whom his fear could be silently lurking, so a virus is often lurking just beneath the surface, waiting for the click to start its feeding frenzy.
No sooner had Kaiba logged onto the internet (automatically bringing up Kaiba Corp's home page), and brought up Ebay, then a very familiar deranged rabbit began hopping all over the screen along with the enigmatic message "APOCOLIPS."
Click, escape, and control-alt-delete as he may, he could not get rid of it. He swore and hooked up his specialized tracing program. Apparently the vandal was as bad at covering up his tracks as he was at spelling. For future reference, Kaiba took a notebook out of a pocket, flipped through to a blank page, and wrote the name "Bakura" with a little black skull next to it.
Now for the fun job of attempting to reboot. The laptop flatly refused to be any help. Kaiba pressed keys irritatedly. Ha, "apocolips." There's someone going nowhere in life. "Apocolips." Lips. Dark ones, on a pale face...
"Whatcha doing, big brother?"
Kaiba swore again and tried to slam down the laptop before Mokuba, at the edge of his desk, could see the screen with "Ebay!" still across the top.
"Seto! You told me not to use those words!"
"So don't. What do you want?" Kaiba noticed with pride the muscles forming o his little brother's arms. That briefcase carrying was doing him some good.
"I'm going to a friend's house."
"Yeah, fine. Have fun."
Mokuba sprited energetically to the door, but turned at the last moment. "And no ordering off of Ebay!"
Kaiba watche dhim leave, suddenly feeling very... alone. Vulnerable. And that vampire was coming tonight.
He was halfway to dialing his chauffur when it hit him that there was a downright dirty-minded, if not occult or possibly evil-incarnate woman who knew where he lived. And whose hand held his house key. Having given up on mental post-it notes to himself when he found they tended ot flutter away at the smallest gust of abnormality, he etched a mental .txt file on the orderly desktop of his brain to install voice-recognition locks.
Now he had nearly seven hours before she arrived. He settled back into his cushioned chair and tried to think of ways to avoid the confrontation, but now he was feeling much more himself and began to wonder if there weren't advantages to allying with a vampire...
Several teenage girls were suddenly opting for activity number two, and weren't very interested in buildings.
Seto Kaiba strode confidently down the street radiating a cool, casual kind of unfriendliness and enjoying the menacing click of his boots on the sidewalk. He didn't set much stock in life's ever-celebrated "small pleasures," those were for the romantics (aka people easily crushed), but he definately enjoyed his own importance once and a while. Everyone with any to enjoy did so, and this didn't make him a bad person, though if it did he probably wouldn't have cared. Companies weren't run by good people.
The wind made a brave attempt at becoming a tornado, and Kaiba's trenchcoat slapped him sharply in the face before whipping off his shoulder. There was a sigh and two gasps as one of the girls fell over. The CEO quickly straightened the offending collar, paying no attention to the rapt females. He had no time or intrest for a love life. A setment in the back of his mind was aware that he was saught after by most of the female teenage population, but the practical part of his brain which ran things (so tightly in fact that there was little chance of a coup) had decided that it didn't serve much purpose as of yet and was therefore irrelevant.
He didn't go out to the shopping sections of Domino City often, but today he had a mission. Well, two missions.
Mission number one: birthday present for Mokuba. For some reasion the little squirt was insulted when his gifts were ordered from Ebay.
Mission two: seek and destroy. Or rather, just seek; the ever-strenuous search for competitor's products. The destroy part would come later in a blaze of anonymous glory.
Finally, he stopped in front of a boyish-looking shop. Beside the demonically-smiling clowns, an extravengant display of complex-looking, moving structures built from tiny parts sat with a sticker proclaiming "I'm educational!" Despite the sticker, it looked perfect. Kaiba could nearly hear the angelic choir serenading his find.
Over the door a neon sign proclaimed that the place was called "Larry's Wacky Toy World." With a self-conscious sigh, Kaiba tried to innocuously slip into what in his mind was already dubbed "Hades's Toy Closet." The bells jingled an annoyingly loud welcome, and Kaiba glared at nothing in particular while he walked quickly to the construction set, well aware of the fact that glaring at bells would not be considered a normal activity.
There was a little merry-go-round spinning rather... well, merrily. Gingerly, Kaiba reached out a finger and stopped it. With an irritated little click, the base snapped off and slowly spun in a circle. Upon closer inspection, it was revealed that many of the joints had been super-glued together. So much for that.
As he was leaving, he heard the steps of the shopkeeper stop as he inpsected the display, and the steps speed up and he started toward the CEO, calling out a feeble "Hey! What do you think you're-" As he rounded the corner he dropped the sentance, and Kaiba never bothered to speculate as to why.
Down the street a little farther was a coffee shop, odors wafting from the open door. It wasn't a large affair, and there weren't many customers at the moment, and he was thirsty. Why not?
Ordering a cafe au lait from a squirrly bartender who seemed about to pop from his attempt to make a good impression. Kaiba took a stool at the u-shaped counter. Around the bend a couple seats away, sat a young woman.
Kaiba had seen gothics, and he had always admired their dress sense. Sometimes, to amuse himself, he would rate them on a scale of gothicness from 1-10, the score depending on how much they acted goth, dressed goth, radiated a goth aura, darkened the air around them, and how those factors meshed. This girl was an 11; her clothes seemed to have grown from her soul spawned in misty depths of park places.
She was strikingly beautiful. Her long, straight, jet-black hair was the kind seen on pegs in halloween costume shops. She had the trademark pale face, dark colors lining her eyes, and dark red lips. The dark fabric and leather she wore was low-shouldered and tight-fitting, rather stretching the limits of decency, and draped down in places to flap eerily. Buckles adorned odd places, which was a plus in Kaiba's eyes. The whole effect was topped off (or rather, bottomed out, haha) by high-heeled leather boots and shocking, enthralling green eyes that held unfathomable depths.
Currently she was bent over reading a paper. Slowly, as if sensing Kaiba's eyes on her, she raised her own eyes to meet his gaze, then just as slowly raised her head, her dark lips curved in a sensuous, predatory smile and an eyelid came down in a teasing wink. It was the kind of wink only recieved by males, the kind that Kaiba had lectured Mokuba on; if he ever saw it he was to run away. Fast. Throwing sharp, pointy things, if necessary.
Suddenly, as if come out of a trance, he left Planet Goth and came back to the coffeeshop, realizing with embarassment that he was staring. If that wasn't bad enough, his heart was pounding wildly.
He took a shaky sip of coffee, unsure of what to do. Feelings had never been a problem; he kept himself carefully under control at all times. What was wrong with him?
A message from his eyes arrived at his brain via panik: she was coming, the smile still on her lips like the smirk of a teacher as a student gets an answer wrong.
Kaiba treated her with his secret weapon: he glared.
Kaiba had been told that he had remarkable, beautiful, dangerous, bitingly cold, seductive eyes (though it escaped his brilliance how they could be all these at once). If he remembered correctly, he believed the term was "icy blue" with maybe an "iced lightning" here or there. That didn't matter much to him. However, there was a very useful practical application. When he glared, anything up to and including large predatory animals (that includes humans) tended to slink away wimpering to various degrees.
This woman didn't bat a painted eye, but rather sat down next to him, still smiling her demon-smile.
"What do you want?" Kaiba said in what he could only hope was a steady, cold tone. In response the girl put her hand on his shoulder and leaned close to whisper in his ear, "you place, eleven?"
Later, Kaiba would think back objectively and swear by his Blue Eyes White Dragons he heard the click of a camera from somewhere. No doubt the stray picture would be all over the internet. Ah well, more publicity. At the moment he was putting far to much concentration in keeping his vision steady.
"I'll need a key," she whispered, not waiting for an answer to the previous question.
"No." Yeah right, he wasn't that far gone. Turn up your charm a little more if you want to get this buisnessman.
She did. Keeping her right hand on his shoulder, she slipped the other into his pocket and drew out a key. The rush of blood in his ears was overpowering. Dazedly, he moved to stop her, but she pecked his cheek and it was all he could do to keep from passing out.
"I'll see you tonight," she whispered, and was gone.
In the wake of the strange event, Kaiba stared into his coffe which, compared to his insides, was colder than, as they say, a brass toilet seat in the Arctic. Now, what had just happened here?
He became aware of an older woman smiling knowingly at him. He glared, but it wasn't at his best and only caused the woman to chuckle and look away.
Leaving his coffee, Kaiba slapped down some money and headed home.
Approximately three steps away from the door, there was a tug on his jacket. Upon glancing in the direction of the tug, he saw nothing, but looking down he found an old, wrinkled man who would be beaten only by Yugi in a limbo contest on a world lacking knees or hips.
Kaiba resisted the urge to look for men in white suits, and decided to simply stare at the little man until he either made his point or went away. After the coffeeship, he wasn't in the mood to be bothered.
The little man squinted wild-eyes up at the CEO. "Be wary, master, vampires have many strange powers!" Only then did he run off into the ever-convenient dark alley.
Vampires? What was that about? Did the little man mean that the woman was a vampire, or vampiress, or whatever?
By the time he arrived home, he was convinced that the woman not only was a vampiress, but had powerful powers of seduction. It was the only explination. Powerful powers? By Bill, he was a mess.
He pushed open the doors of the Kaiba mansion, heading to his room to work. So shook up was he, it was only then that he remembered Mokuba's present. He cursed silently, slamming down his briefcase trying hard to remember every single one of what must have been wonderful reasons for not bringing alchohol into the house while Mokaba was there.
Kaiba concentrated on the comforting, familiar sounds of his laptop's start-up and amost imperceptable hum, like the purr of a kitten. The sound of a smoothly-running computer was to Kaia like John Williams to the Star Wars enthusiast, or perhaps more like the absence of splashing to someone with a fear of sharks.
Unfortunately, like the man with a fear of sharks before whom his fear could be silently lurking, so a virus is often lurking just beneath the surface, waiting for the click to start its feeding frenzy.
No sooner had Kaiba logged onto the internet (automatically bringing up Kaiba Corp's home page), and brought up Ebay, then a very familiar deranged rabbit began hopping all over the screen along with the enigmatic message "APOCOLIPS."
Click, escape, and control-alt-delete as he may, he could not get rid of it. He swore and hooked up his specialized tracing program. Apparently the vandal was as bad at covering up his tracks as he was at spelling. For future reference, Kaiba took a notebook out of a pocket, flipped through to a blank page, and wrote the name "Bakura" with a little black skull next to it.
Now for the fun job of attempting to reboot. The laptop flatly refused to be any help. Kaiba pressed keys irritatedly. Ha, "apocolips." There's someone going nowhere in life. "Apocolips." Lips. Dark ones, on a pale face...
"Whatcha doing, big brother?"
Kaiba swore again and tried to slam down the laptop before Mokuba, at the edge of his desk, could see the screen with "Ebay!" still across the top.
"Seto! You told me not to use those words!"
"So don't. What do you want?" Kaiba noticed with pride the muscles forming o his little brother's arms. That briefcase carrying was doing him some good.
"I'm going to a friend's house."
"Yeah, fine. Have fun."
Mokuba sprited energetically to the door, but turned at the last moment. "And no ordering off of Ebay!"
Kaiba watche dhim leave, suddenly feeling very... alone. Vulnerable. And that vampire was coming tonight.
He was halfway to dialing his chauffur when it hit him that there was a downright dirty-minded, if not occult or possibly evil-incarnate woman who knew where he lived. And whose hand held his house key. Having given up on mental post-it notes to himself when he found they tended ot flutter away at the smallest gust of abnormality, he etched a mental .txt file on the orderly desktop of his brain to install voice-recognition locks.
Now he had nearly seven hours before she arrived. He settled back into his cushioned chair and tried to think of ways to avoid the confrontation, but now he was feeling much more himself and began to wonder if there weren't advantages to allying with a vampire...