Rating: K

#17 kHz

Jounouchi hated physics. If ever there was a class he felt would be completely useless to him beyond the four walls of Domino High School, it was physics. After all, ever since meeting Yugi he'd seen pretty much every law of physics known to man bent beyond all recognition every time he took out a deck of Duel Monster cards, so what was the point of learning this stuff anyway?

The school officials disagreed, however, so he was stuck taking physics. Right now they were studying wavelengths. "A wavelength is the distance between repeating units of a wave pattern," his teacher droned on while Jounouchi doodled Duel Monsters in his notebook. First he sketched a really awful Red-Eyes Black Dragon. Man he was happy to have that baby back in his deck. Then he moved on to other monsters—Flame Swordsman, Little Winguard, Rocket Warrior—and finally a few things he didn't have in his deck, like Yugi's Dark Magician. He doodled a Harpie Lady that looked even worse than the Red-Eyes and thought of Mai. If only he'd had the guts to tell her how much he liked her before she'd left. If only he'd had the guts to kiss her….

He shook his head, trying to shut down that train of thought. He was still a dumb high school kid and she was older and so out of his league in every way possible. If he would've tried to kiss her she probably would've slapped him into next week. Besides, they hadn't heard from her at all in the last couple of months since Battle city, not so much as an e-mail, and there was no way he was gonna e-mail or call her first. He was sure she would just laugh at him for being nothing more than a kid with a crush on someone he could never have. Best not to think about Mai.

He scribbled out the Harpie Lady with a little too much vehemence, then wrenched his eyes up from his notebook, trying to focus on the teacher once more. "Frequency is the number of wave peaks to pass a point in a given time. The hertz is the standard unit of measurement of frequency. One hertz is one cycle per second. Can anyone give an everyday example of frequency?"

Several hands shot up. Jounouchi noted with a roll of his eyes that Anzu's was one of them. Nerd. The teacher called on a different nerd, however, a girl named Nami.

"Radio and television stations are determined by frequency," Nami replied primly.

"Very good," the teacher replied. "FM radio and television both use Very High Frequencies, ranging from seventy to ninety megahertz for radio and even higher than that, into Ultra High Frequencies for television. AM radio, on the other hand, uses Medium Frequencies, from about 520 to 1620 kilohertz. Now the advantages of higher frequencies are that they produce a much better quality sound, but can't cover as much distance. Low frequencies, thirty to three hundred kilohertz, which are used for navigation and even very low frequencies in the three-to-thirty-kilohertz range for things like submarine communications, can be received from thousands of miles away."

Very low frequency, Jounouchi thought, his mind drifting again. That pretty much described his relationship with Shizuka ever since his parents' divorce—a videotape here, an audiotape there, and that was it, with no quality whatsoever. He hardly knew her, and she hardly knew him. It got the job done, though, covering the vast distance between them—not just in space but in the walls his mother put up between them—and kept them communicating. A thirty-kilohertz relationship was better than no relationship at all.

Ever since Shizuka's operation, however, things had been different. As he'd guessed, his mother felt she owed it to him to allow him regular contact with his sister since he had more or less been the one to finance her surgery. In the months between him sending the money and the actual operation, they'd gone from very low frequency to something more approaching medium frequency, like AM radio. Not the best quality in the world, but certainly good enough to enjoy some of the old standards.

Then came her surgery and they'd finally been actually together. And after that, during the whole Battle City fiasco, they'd spent a lot of time together. Of course, he would never allow that again. He loved helping Yugi and being at his side when the weirdness happened, but no way he was gonna let his sister get involved again. He'd learned his lesson.

But still, they had grown close again during that tournament and in its aftermath their communication now was much more regular. They e-mailed. They talked on the phone at least once or twice a week. He'd even gotten his own calling card so that he could call her without it showing up on the regular phone bill so his dad wouldn't find out. He visited Shizuka in Tokyo a couple of times and Anzu even offered to let her stay at her place if she wanted to visit Domino. Now their relationship was like FM radio or television, Very High Frequency. She knew everything about his life now, and he knew everything about hers. High quality, shorter distance, metaphorically if not literally. A three-hundred-megahertz relationship.

He liked that. Maybe there was something to be said about physics after all.