Updates ... And the Sugoroku following just keeps on growing! You have no idea how exciting it is to click on those review alert e-mails! I love seeing regular reviewers, but its just awesome seeing new ones too! You all really make the story!

PyroDragon2006 ... Welcome aboard the Sugoroku train! Better late than never I always say! I'm just happy you reviewed: ) I am very big into research, historically accurate data and my research on WWII, plus basic Japanese life during that time, is a good week and a half and 10 megabits of saved info on my computer. My file on 'games of the world' is fast approaching that size as well! And you're right. Sugoroku's life may not have evolved completely around the supernatural, but his is an amazing and unique adventure as well. After all, his life helped shape Yugi's to some degree. Many of the very concepts that Yugi fights with and for were taught to him by his 'Grandpa'. And thank you for the review on 'Amazin'' as well. I do actually have a bunch of things that I started writing before I found the Manga which of course means that yes, Jonouchi (or Jounouchi as a real purist might spell it) is indeed Joey. And I never thought of doing something like that with the Yamis...intriguing idea I must admit. BUT I MUST FINISH SUGOROKU'S STORY FIRST! Lol. And no worries about bad spelling. Even I miss a few before I post too!

Scarab Dynasty ... I'm so tickled you're enjoying my story! I agree that it can be hard to find stories based on strictly 'minor' characters of the show. But as you said, they can be just as important as the main. Being in America myself, I first heard Grandpa's name as Solomon too. But I have this tendency to go back to Manga once I find it. Its just me. I wouldn't call myself a purist or anything (where would the fun be in that?) but I like to give credit back to the original authors by sticking with their originals. I think it helps me write a little more in character. You're quite right in that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would historically be fast approaching and I'm quite pleased that you picked that up with my break on chapter 7. However, these events are made such a big deal of, I decided to go elsewhere. I'm not skirting the issue or events. I just think that everyone knows quite a bit about those terrible events. I have Sugoroku elsewhere. Which you will shortly see.

Snow Weaver ... Ah yes, fate can fickle. As can luck. And when your life seems to be a combination of the two...look out! Keep those tissues handy. Especially if your imagination is as good as mine. Honestly, when I wrote chapters 8 and 9, it took over a week for both because it was so easy for me to picture. I had to take breaks because I was getting upset over it! I haven't been that upset since my English term paper on the German death camps at Auswitch.

And now that that's all done... read on!

Trixie21

Okay, you all know the drill. I have to take up valuable space and time to say that I do not own any part that is the coolness of the Yu-Gi-Oh universe. That honor goes completely to Kazuki Takahashi. Authoress as she bows subserviently before her shrine of great creators... "We're not worthy! We're not worthy! We're not worthy!"

This Old Man: Sugoroku's Story

Part 1: Japan

8. The Rain of Fire…

March. 9, 1945

Sugoroku was just over a month shy of his 16th birthday that day and from the very start of it, the boy knew it would be no ordinary day. Just how he knew he could not say, but the tingling along his spine was something hardly ignorable.

The day had begun with an air heavy with pregnant expectation. The early morning skies above were at first beautifully painted in colors of red gold hues, but in swift minutes the clouds pushed in, and the canopy shifted to a dull gray. While the clouds above were nothing unusual for that time of year, the way they seemed to press down on the city was. It appeared to Sugoroku that they were almost smothering the area under a weighty hand that brought the sense of an oppressive dread to the entire region.

In the last year, the Americans had been slowly and surely working their way through all the islands that Japan had conquered. At the same time, the British and Indian forces now occupied Akyab in Burma and were slowly working their way through India with smaller units laboring in China.

The American Naval forces were getting closer and closer, and it would not be long before they were in striking distance of the Japanese homeland, leaving the island nation at risk for direct attack from the sea. Nothing held the Americans back. Not even the most desperate attempts made by the Japanese pilots who, with nothing left, gave their lives by crashing their planes into the war ships they fought against.

Japan's defeat would come.

It was only a matter of time.

Sugoroku sat in school that day only half-paying attention to the lessons as he instead surveyed the faces of his teachers and his fellow students. There was a grim set to them and their eyes were filled with worry. They finally knew as well as he did that something was not right. Something was coming. But what? And when?

By the end of the day, his nerves were a tangled jumble of constant edginess and he found, as he walked in the hard, fast wind that had built throughout the dry day, a definite urge to get home as quickly as possible. It was an urge that he happily obliged; an instinctive feeling that drove him to pick up his pace, and when he nearly crashed through his front door, his parents looking at him in quite some surprise, he could not help but feel like he had just barely escaped the fangs of some great beast that had tailed him.

Unfortunately, if he had been in any way hoping that making it home would bring peace to him, he was wrong. The nameless fear continued to grow throughout the rest of the evening and when he went to bed a little later, he knew that it would be another sleepless night.

It was just shortly after midnight that he heard them. The unmistakable droning of the planes had returned and with them, the bombs that would once again fall. What he did not know was that along with the bombs, there would come a horror that no one in the city had ever dreamed possible.

As soon as the bombs began to fall, Sugoroku knew immediately that these were not all the ordinary firebombs designed to just destroy with explosive power as had been used in all the other raids. These were different.

The boy looked out his window, peered at the skyline, and watched as the night sky began to glow with a steadily growing brilliance. The planes continued to fly overhead and for what would later seem like hours, these strange new incendiary bombs rained down on the center of Tokyo. As he wondered at the number of planes that crossed the night and the continuous sounds of bombs hitting, the winds began to pick up and suddenly a gust blew into Sugoroku's face, causing him to stumble back with a cry as he covered his eyes with his hands and rubbed.

The hot wind had carried with it the first loose flecks of ash from a burning city.

Sugoroku was immensely surprised. He had never seen this before with the other attacks. The most he had ever been exposed to was the glow of distant fires. This ash and biting, heated wind were very new and very wrong.

Sugoroku's father burst in just then as the boy was getting back up to his feet.

"Come! There are fires on the houses! We must put them out!"

Sugoroku followed his father out of the room as he exclaimed in confusion, "But that is in the heart of the city!"

"No! It is here! Our neighbors homes are burning!"

Sugoroku stepped out of his home and looked about in awe.

Several of his neighbors homes were indeed on fire, having caught on by the still-hot ash that had been blown from the city center. A bucket was pushed into his hands and after filling it from a rain barrel, he joined the efforts of his neighbors trying to keep a home made mostly of wood from catching to full flame.

In short time however, it was clear it would be a losing battle and Sugoroku took a moment to pause. Looking back towards the city center, he froze as he watched in horrified fascination.

In the distance, a huge borealis had grown over the quarters closer to the center of the city, an area that had been inexorably reached by the gradual, raid-by-raid unrolling of the carpet-bombing. The bright light of the fires pushed back the veil of night and the B-29 super fortresses were visible here and there in the sky. For the first time since the very first attack almost three years ago, they flew in low staggered levels. Their long glinting wings, sharp as blades, could be seen through the oblique columns of smoke rising from the city. Their black silhouettes, gliding through the fiery sky, would often suddenly reflect the fire from the furnace below, shining red-gold against the dark roof of heaven or glittering blue, like meteors, in the searchlight beams.

The people around him soon joined Sugoroku's side while others watched out of doors or peered up out of their holes, uttering cries of admiration at this grandiose, almost theatrical spectacle.

The planes had started to move off to further areas, but the wind, still violent, began to sweep up the burning debris beaten down from above. The air was soon filled with live sparks, then with burning bits of wood and paper, until it looked as if the sky was truly raining not with water, but with fire.

Sometimes, flammable liquids were set alight, and the following bomb blasts looked like flaming hair reaching up with red-white tendrils. Dotted red lines from the antiaircraft guns streaked across the sky, but the defenses were nothing and the big B-29s continued to work as if unhampered.

There were intervals while Sugoroku watched that the sky would empty, the planes having disappeared. But fresh waves soon came and the destruction continued.

Flames rose higher into the night, twisting like cyclones of fire in the wild wind across roofs silhouetted in black in a seemingly otherworldly dance. If not for the obvious destruction they were causing, it might almost have been beautiful.

The people watched the ghastly spectacle for some time and would have stayed longer, perhaps even until their deaths, if a struggling group of people had not come running from down the road; some screaming, many hurt, almost all crying. Their faces were covered in soot. Many ran naked, their clothes having been ripped off them by others who were fleeing as well as by the vortices of heat they had only just escaped from. There were even a few whose remaining clothing was still only slightly damp from the water that had been sprayed upon them by firefighters who hoped that it would help some survive the heat and flames that had attacked them on nearly ever side. Older men, women, children that had not left... Even babies carried on backs passed by Sugoroku in a terrified charge and, with a rush that would have made any disease envious, the panicked fever gripped him and those around, and they too joined the flight out of the city, away from the terror.

The struggle to leave the large town was a far from unhampered thing. Throngs of people would join his group unexpectedly and each time there was a moment of tangled confusion as the people tried to push past in their chosen direction. Families become separated while some people were shoved down under the human wave and trampled. Others just seemed to disappear as if in thin air.

Sugoroku and his parents were among a lucky few that by morning, had gained the higher hills, an intact family unit.

For many around him, this was their idea of the end of a war.

For Sugoroku there was more to come.

Next Chapter: The Quick and the Dead…

R and R's gratefully appreciated: )