Prophecy
Disclaimer: POOPY!
"When legend becomes reality,
Three warriors of ancient monsters will rampage the earth,
Of light, dark, and element.
Look to the Heavens,
They will come from there…"
Chapter 22 – Illusion
After defeating their fears while trapped in the Vines of Seth, Jennie and Erica were running away with Jackie only to end up in the same room as the Shadow Realm…and trapped inside, were their friends.
"Guys!" Erica shouted, rushing forward.
Before the other could grab her back, some of the tentacles that were around the pulsing glob of the Shadow Realm turned into knives and struck at the girl. Luckily, she jumped back, crashing into Jennie.
"Smooth move, ballerina!" Jennie snapped, pushing her friend off her.
Gasping, Erica bellowed, "WHAT THE FREAK WAS THAT?"
Jackie shrugged as he stared slightly at the purple mass.
"Okay." Jennie started, claming down. "What do we do now? The Shadow Realm has our friends inside its body and we can't destroy it without destroying the YGO cast."
"Maybe we could take the YGO cast out first before we destroy it," Erica suggested.
Jackie stopped staring at the blob and said sarcastically, "Oh, yeah! Just come up to it and say, 'Hi! Do you mind if you could spit out our friends and let us destroy you to smithereens?' I think NOT!"
"Well, we have to do something!" Jennie hissed.
Then, abruptly, the grotesque mass seemed to belch out another smaller mass right at the three. Quickly, they split, the glob bouncing on the floor and then crashing into the door. Walking toward it carefully, Erica saw that there were bodies in it.
"Oh my God!" Erica said with an intake of breath. "There's Malik and Bakura in there!"
Quickly, she tried to rip the glob off, yelling to her friends to help. The two hesitated until Jackie ripped off some of the blob, too. Only Jennie remained standing there.
"Help us!" Jackie shouted.
"I don't know…that thing seems iffy to me…" commented Jennie. Her two friends threw dirty looks at her. "Okay! Okay! I'm comin'!"
When the girl took one more step, though, Jackie's and Erica's hair were raised up as if by static. Erica didn't notice anything, but Jackie did.
He wrenched his hands off the gobbet and pushed the tomboy away from it, too. "Get away! This thing's electri—"
All of a sudden, lightning shot from the gooey-ness, striking Erica and Jackie like blades, cutting them in several places. Jennie was lucky enough to duck so she was unscathed. After the electric tornado was gone, the braided-hair girl looked up from the shelter of her arms. Jackie was boldly still standing, but Erica was sitting on the floor, head between her knees, and clutching her arms. Their bodies and clothes were cut, red blood dripping down from light to deep scratches.
"Oh my God…" Jennie gasped and ran forward. Gripping Erica's shoulders securely, she looked up at the panting boy for an explanation.
Jackie groaned as he collapsed on his knees and said furiously, "That damn thing was an illusion! It wanted to trick us so we'd be like this! Damn it!"
Jennie looked at the small blob and saw the bodies of Malik and Bakura disappear like how a hologram would fade away. Horrified, she felt Erica tense and grip her arms even more tightly. Blood rushed out once more from her wounds.
"That is IT!" the girl whispered softly. Her two friends glanced at her with alarm. Her anger signs were showing through. "I had enough of this bull. I don't care if I die."
Slowly, the tomboy stood up weakly. She was clutching a card in her hand and her amber brown eyes flares like flames. Jennie and Jackie got up also and took out their favorite card. They all faced the Shadow Realm's center and watched it ripple and pulse. The bodies of the Yu-Gi-Oh case seemed to float inside its body. Standing in a semi-circle, the three raised their cards high above them. In loud tones, they summoned their monsters.
"Flower Mage!"
"Black Wizard!"
"Elemental Dragon!"
The cards glowed like the sun and shot beams in all directions. A sudden wind picked up. Unable to stand the gales and light, the trio fell into the ground, clutching each other and closing their eyes, their hair whipping their faces. As the lights formed into figures, the bluish-purple mass seemed to recoil its huge body. Slowly, the light faded and three forms came forward.
One was a cheerful sprite with blond hair and green clothes around her body, ribbons floating around her. She held a staff decorated with various flowers. Another was a man clad in black armor, a sable cape, and another silver staff topped with a huge crescent moon and a star levitating in the middle. Finally, there was a multicolored, enormous Chinese dragon with long fangs and glistening wings. It looked over the smaller humanoid figures like a guardian. Gently, they all went down onto the floor and helped their masters up onto their feet.
"Whoa," the trio chorused, staring at their monsters.
The Black Wizard and the Flower Mage were at least a head taller then Jackie and Jennie while the Elemental Dragon took caution to duck its head from the high ceiling. The Mage giggled at their expressions.
Jennie smiled at her friends. "Hey! Mine has a sense of humor!"
The other two nodded absent-mindedly.
The Wizard bowed slightly before Jackie.
"This guy has manners! Finally someone shows me some respect!"
The Dragon leaned its delicate head to Erica's level. Cautiously, she pet its head. A loud rumbling sound in its throat and its tail trashed around the room happily.
Erica squealed as she hugged the Elemental Dragon's snout, "Awwww! It's purring! Isn't it cuuuuuuute!"
Everyone stared at the dragon and Erica with a slight scared expression. Then, without warning, a sharp tentacle shot toward them. Swiftly, the Black Wizard stopped it in mid-air and split to pieces like glass. Quickly at attention, everyone faced the physical form of the Shadow Realm. With alarm, the six saw black monsters appear in front of the glob, ready to kill.
With fear, Jennie, Erica, and Jackie clutched onto their monster for safety. Instead, they fell into their bodies with burst of light and became one.
Once again, they all said, "Whoa."
"Holy Jesus! I'm a magician!" Jackie yelled, swinging his staff around, narrowly missing Jennie's head as she dodged his attacks.
"What about me, thick-head!" Jennie snapped, bonking the boy with her stick. "I have to be a flower mage with a dress! How damn stupid is that! A FLOWER mage! Come on!"
The dragon snapped its jaws at the two. Shockingly, when its mouth moved, Erica's voice came out from it. "What about ME! I'm a freakin' dragon with green vision and smelling every fart from the Shadow Realm and its monsters! That's not nice I'll tell you that!"
Again Jennie and Jackie stared at Erica.
The big blob shook in indignantly from being ignored and shot more electrocuting gooey things. With awesome speed, the trio dodged in their new, strange forms. When the attacks finally stopped, Jennie and Jackie stood sided by side in the air while Erica remained on the ground. The monsters of the Realm and the trio traded murderous looks. After a few tense minutes, one of the opposing monsters blew a beam of red energy by Jennie's head, creating a huge crater in the wall. With war cries, everyone attacked.
The war had begun.
The last monster of the Shadow Realm roared and dissipated into the stank air as Erica lashed her tail at it. Jennie and Jackie were nearby, pointing their staffs at the Shadow Realm blob thing. Soon, the Elemental Dragon rose up to be with them. Then the mass gave futile efforts to attack with its tentacles, but it was too slow. With a mighty heave, Jennie and Jackie grabbed one tentacle each and tossed the Shadow Realm off its floor and into the wall with boom.
Immediately, as if on queue, Erica shot forward and lashed her tail at the thing, scraping off parts of its body. It screamed in fury, but could do nothing when the dragon girl shot a beam of white from her mouth and into the middle of the Realm's body. The Yu-Gi-Oh cast shot out then, landing on the floor far away from the blob. Rearing back from the mass's flailing arms, Erica joined her two magical friends once more.
"Ready?" Jackie said in a soft voice. The other two nodded.
Jennie hissed, "I've been waiting for this day!"
The girl and boy combined their staffs and a bright light from Jennie's stick combined with Jackie's dark one. The translucent orb grew bigger and was about to get even bigger when Erica leaned her head back to let out a maelstrom of rainbow beams. As the three powered up for a final attack, the mass (much smaller now since it was so deprived of energy) frantically tried to find a place to hide. Just when the attack was about to shoot forward, the Shadow Realm yelled out a straggled shriek. It was squeaky and begging.
"Please! Spare me! You don't have to destroy me! In a blink I can get you back home! Please, you don't have to do this!" the Shadow Realm screamed.
The orb faded as Jackie and Erica glanced at each other with uncertainty. Jennie, however, was still pointing her staff at the Realm.
Gritting her teeth, the girl shouted, "Ohhhh, no! I've come waaaay too far to give up and go home! I'm going to kill you, rip you apart, and watch you get eaten by your own monsters!"
Everyone stared at Jennie as she whipped her wand around like a maniac. Only when Erica had bonked Jennie on the head with her tail did she stop fuming.
"Listen," Jackie reasoned, whispering to his friends, "we could just go home! Just like that! Even if we do win this, we might not be able to fix a portal that'll go into our world. For all we know, we just might stay here for all our lives! Though I hate to admit it, the Shadow Realm has a point!"
Erica contradicted, "But we can't just leave the Yu-Gi-Oh cast there! With that stupid thing hanging around, it could destroy the Yu-Gi-Oh world! Also, did you forget that Tien-Xiang said that it could affect our world, too?"
"Yeah! Are you going to leave Tien here, also?" Jennie snapped.
Jackie looked shocked and scratched his head from wonder. Drifting, he muttered, "I forgot about that…"
"YOU FORGOT?" the dragon and the sprite yelled. Then they moaned in exasperation.
"I have short memory, okay? But even I don't forget that!" Jennie shouted at the boy's ear. Erica agreed by nodding.
As the Flower Mage was giving a lecture to the poor Black Wizard, the now smaller Shadow Realm snarled, flung itself between the two arguing people, and attached itself to Erica's dragon head. Roaring, the Elemental Dragon tried to shake off the thing. Jennie tried to help by ripping off the blob, but got brutally electrocuted instead. Jackie caught the fairy and dragged her back into the air since she was falling, but dropped, too, when the Shadow Realm stunned him with its tentacles. Fortunately, the Elemental Dragon wrapped the two in her tail. Then the mass exerted a gas right into Erica's nostrils. Feeling faint, the dragon fell with her friends.
The ground shook as the serpent slammed onto the ground, everything growing dark. Slowly, the Shadow Realm thingy inched over the heroes, soaking them up into its body…
Jackie moaned as he got up from the sidewalk and sleepily looked around. In his hand held a school textbook and next to him was Erica's broken cell phone. It was right at the time when he had been sucked into the other world. It seemed like time hadn't continued from the moment he had left.
What was he thinking about? He was always here…wasn't he?
Confused, the boy felt vague memories drifting away until there was none. Only the memory of having to review for the comprehension test remained.
Waving away the feel of apprehension, he stood up and called, "Hey, Raccooooon! You home?"
After a few minutes passed by, he felt some déjà vu. Scratching his head, he was about to walk away until a window opened and a cat alarm clock hit him hard on the head.
"Damn it, I'm watching T.V.!" Erica screamed. "Go through the front door! It's opened!"
After the girl closed the window with a boom, Jackie threw profanity around for a minute before going to the front door. When he entered, Erica attacked him by swinging her huge literature book, missing Jackie's head by centimeters. The two ran around the house, dodged the girl's mom as she threatened them to stop running with the kitchen knife, and finally settled into the living room, reading together.
"…and, so, ends our tale of the one who did not forget," the tomboy concluded. Taking out flashbacks for the vocabulary, she was about to test her best friend. Apparently, there was a vacant look about him.
"Hey, Sherlock! Testin' time!" the girl muttered, chucking cards.
Jackie shook his head to clear it and asked with hesitation, "Did you feel…weird an hour ago or anything unusual?"
Erica looked up at the ceiling. "Well…yeah. I went down to the basement so I could turn the power on because we had a blackout, but for some reason I was on the floor as if I fell. I felt like I was missing something. You know that feeling, right?"
The boy nodded.
"Well, that feeling was going haywire. Everything said that I should stay down there, but I just went back up here. All I remembered was watching Yu-Gi-Oh and stuff."
"Perhaps it was more than a coincidence that this happened since I found myself on the sidewalk. It was like I was losing something important, but I didn't know what," Jackie said, frowning.
"Eh, I'll just call Jennie about this. For some reason, I think she feels this way, too. Now where is that blasted cell phone…?"
While the girl rummaged around, Jackie nervously tapped his pen on the coffee table. He had broken it when he found it outside. He wondered if Erica would be mad…
"Uh…Erica?"
"What?"
"I think I…uh…"
"Damn it! Where is that thing?"
"Um…"
"Did you find it anywhere, Jackie?"
"Erm…"
"I think I dropped it outside."
The girl rushed out the door and into the lawn, continuing her search. Jackie looked around for something to defend himself with and just when he got pillows, Erica's angry bellow was heard.
"JACKIE! I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!"
Through the week, the two students (and Jennie) had to go to school and it was very tense week indeed. Though the trio spent a lot of time together at school, they spent most of their time in silence, trading looks of seemingly pointless worries. In Language Arts class, the three became a group for a one day project.
"UGH! Screw this! I can't concentrate at all!" the tomboy yelled, throwing her sheet of paper away. Jennie agreed with same aggravated tone.
Jackie stated, still working, "We have to finish this, guys. It's half our marking period grade."
Jennie grabbed his paper out of his hands. "Don't you feel even a bit muddled? I've been feeling nervous all week for no reason at all and all you can think about is work?"
"Well," Jackie snatched his sheet back, "you don't care either."
"So what! I wasn't on Monday, not on Tuesday, not even Wednesday! However, ever since I saw a commercial on the new YGO episodes, I've had dreams. Dreams of the strangest things that's even weird to me. Now that it's Friday and the Yu-Gi-Oh is coming up tomorrow, I feel really, really nervous. I didn't care before, but now I do."
Jackie had a grave face and whispered, "I had dreams, too. I never have them, but now I do. I feel scared. Yes, I admit it. I'm almost scared for Saturday to come. I don't know why."
"Come to my house tomorrow then," Erica volunteered, eyes serious. "You guys in or out?"
The braided-hair girl and the hacker boy exchanged looks. "…I'm in."
When Erica's two friends came on Saturday, Jennie and Jackie greeted each other like best friends normally did: slap each other hard on the back. While Erica waited out the slapping matches, the two finally settled and faced each other across the coffee table.
"Okay." Jennie said, taking a deep breath. "We came and meet here today to find out the reason for our hysteria. Before Yu-Gi-Oh comes up, any suggestions in why we might be so scared?"
Erica raised her hand and started rapidly, "Maybewegotabductedintoalargeportalforasplit-secondandwentintotheYGOworldwherewehavetobeattheShadowRealmfromrulingitsandour-worldandwhenwewerefightingit,wegottransportedbackhomewherethisisallanillusiontomakeusforget-thattherewaseverarealYu-Gi-Ohworld."
There was silence until Jackie keeled over and laughed his head off.
Jennie pat the dark-haired girl's head sympathetically, "You poor thing, having no life other than daydreaming about alternate realities."
Erica tried to bite her friend's hand, but she moved it just in time. Jackie was still laughing until Jennie threw a pillow at him to shut up. Then the clock above the T.V. rang the start of Yu-Gi-Oh. Holding their breaths, Erica turned on the T.V. and for the next thirty minutes they watched Yami duel.
Through the show, not even one of the three had made a sound. Usually, they made smart aleck comments about how stupid the cast was, but even when the commercials came up, there was still no sound. Occasionally, Erica's dad would look in to see how they were doing, but when he saw their intense and grave faces, he knew that it wasn't the time to bother the teenagers.
Finally, Erica turned off the television. The three were silent and Jackie had taken off his glasses so he could rub his face without destroying it. Jennie had her head in her hands and the other girl was staring at the coffee table.
"I guess your idea of us being abducted into the Yu-Gi-Oh world wasn't so crazy after all," Jackie laughed weakly. Erica said nothing.
Jennie's voice came softly, a bit muffled from her hands, "I can't believe we forgot what happened. Then this is all an illusion. The Shadow Realm…that thing wanted us to forget…and we almost did…."
There was a depressed silence once again. Suddenly, Erica stood up and held up a card that materialized out of thin air. The other two got up, too, holding the same cards as the amber-eyed female.
"I think it's time to get out of this dump, right, guys?" Erica winked at her two best friends. They smirked with self-confidence.
"RELEASE!" they all hollered simultaneously in one voice, raising their cards like a glowing beacon.
The images around the three wavered like a ripple in water. Then it suddenly cracked apart into a million pieces like a mirror. Yelling in panic, the trio fell into darkness and was engulfed by light. Blinded, they all closed their eyes and felt themselves drifting away. With a roar in their ears, they came back to try once more to defeat the Shadow Realm. This time, they were going to destroy it, no matter what.
A/N: I'm done! Yes! Well, yeah…OH, LOOK! ANOTHER ILLUSION TRICK BY THE REALM! Silly, Shadow Realm! Illusions are for kids!
By the by, I'm sorry for not updating on Monday. Fanfiction. Net decided to be a jerk again and not let me update. I spent three effin' hours trying to get in before trying again today…
Anyway, I GOT OVER A HUNDRED REVIEWS! MYLIFE IS NOW COMPLETE! (punches the air in victory) I want to thank all those reviewers who have stayed with me since chapter one and for putting up with my uber-slow updating skills. THANK YOU ALL FOR REVIEWING! YOU GUYS MAKE ME SO HAPPY! (sparkles shine around her) I feel so looooooved! HERE'S TO MY WONDERFUL REVIEWERS!
Isis the Spinx, Sirenofthenight, Akari Ishtaru (who's…Kura?), candy-animelover600, fairys'maiden (I know about the dream thing. It's weird, isn't it?), and ElementalDemoness23.
Since this story has reached past the hundredth point, I'm updating again on Friday! Did you read that? I AM UPDATING ON FRIDAY! Yup! IT'S A PRESENT FOR ALL YOU! Then I'm going to update at the Monday after that and the schedule will be the same.
SO REVIEW!