Chapter 17

Emma was travelling home from a long day's work. She wasn't having much luck as the public transport was appalling. She had missed her train as she had turned up just in time to see it pull out of the station, and had to wait for the next one which was delayed. It was at times like these that she wished she did take up Kaiba's offer of the use of the limos, but she already had enough to deal with from Joey without making it any worse.

Her mind wondered back to the events of two weeks ago, after they had escaped from the game they had become trapped in. She still smiled at the thought of the hug that she had received from Kaiba in front of the gang, even though that was what Joey kept using to tease her.

She was surprised at how well everybody had been handling the horrible experience that they had all been through together. Mokuba was still the same cheerful and happy person as always and Kaiba had insisted that he wasn't affected by the whole thing, but Emma had noticed small changes in his behaviour like how he now didn't turn cold towards her and blank her out whenever any of the gang was around.

The gang too were unaffected since they had been though so many strange things since Yugi had put together the millennium puzzle together that it seemed almost like an everyday occurrence to be trapped inside a virtual world. Sarah on the other hand had just had her first experience of the type of weird things that Bakura had told her about, but was now aware of things that she might have to put up with in the future. Of course she was still unaware of all of the incidents involving the spirit of the millennium ring, but there was no need to drag up the past since that problem had been sorted.

The three guests, although they were a bit shaken from the whole thing, handled it extremely well. As a way of apologising and compensating, Kaiba had agreed to give the three guests whatever they desired. Only Marcus had turned down Kaiba's offer as he was set on suing Kaiba Corp for all that he could, but strangely enough he hadn't been heard from again. Andrew's request for a duel against Kaiba was granted. He had played a good duel which saw him beat two of Kaiba's Blue Eyes White Dragons as well as reducing his life points down to just 50, but he hadn't been able to stand up to Kaiba's third Blue Eyes White Dragon. Zene was now the proud owner of the only official Seto Kaiba website, which featured everything that there was to know about him and his company all in one place. Well as much as Kaiba was willing to share with the public anyway, and he had even agreed to do exclusive interviews and web chats from time to time, thanks to a little persuasion from Mokuba who was secretly working on the case for Emma.

Further investigation in to Checkmate had been made, which found that three of their representatives had memory loss due to brain washing but no other connections to Gozaburo's interference had been found. Kaiba still planned to go along with the deal despite all that had happened as the technology involved was something that he couldn't let slip pass him. Unfortunately there was no record of the data on Checkmate's system and the data stored on the Kaiba Corp system had been deleted by Emma and Noah, so the whole deal fell apart. Emma had wanted to tell Kaiba about the copy of the disk that she had done, but didn't want to get his hopes up before she had checked the whole thing for herself first.

Placing her key into her apartment door Emma snapped back to the here and now, surprised at just how fast time flies when your thoughts are someplace else. She kicked off her shoes as she closed the front door and made her way into the kitchen where she began to make herself a cup of tea. She went to set up her laptop on the breakfast bar and typed away until her screen went blank.

'Sorry I'm late. I got stuck on public transport, again.' She typed before picking up the disk that she had copied two weeks back which lay on the bar top. She had searched it for anything that may have been of use for Kaiba to use but had found very little on the disk itself.

'Its okay, it's not like I'm going anywhere. How was your day?' Was the message displayed on her laptop screen when she returned.

'Same as usual. And you?' She typed back before moving away to finish off making her tea.

'Success!' Was displayed when she arrived back and seated herself down. 'I finally tracked down the last remaining source that the pop-ups where being sent from and deleted it. I'm a little disappointed that father's codes were so easy to crack, but at least Seto doesn't have to put up with them anymore.'

Emma smiled as she began to type her response. One of the few things that she did find on the disk was Noah, who must have saved his data on the disk when they tried to copy the programme data. 'Thank you.' She now knew that Kaiba wouldn't be tormented by his past any longer.

'I also updated Zene's site and your firewall with the spare time that I had.' Noah told her while she sipped her tea. He didn't wait for her to reply before he posted again. 'So what now?'

Emma placed her cup on the bar as she thought about Noah's question. They hadn't thought that far ahead. What was she supposed to do with him now that he had helped her to help his step-brother? She couldn't tell Mokuba about him as she had promise Kaiba that she wouldn't mention anything about Noah's role in their horrid game experience. She also knew that Kaiba didn't think too fondly of Noah, and wouldn't know where to start explaining about the copied disk, so decided against telling him about her discovery. She typed on the keyboard. 'Any good at Sudoku?'

'Why?' Was Noah's reply.

'You're going to need something to do until I get home from work each day.' Emma typed as she smiled to herself.

'Well I guess I could redecorate.' Emma laughed at Noah's reply as the screen began to change through all different kinds of colour schemes and designs. Having Noah around was just what she needed to keep her company for when the other two Kaiba brothers set out for America. But of course Noah would remain around for a lot longer than that.

The End