Flash Duel

Chapter 1

Jack Harper was in the living room of his penthouse condo in Central City. He liked the penthouse because the rest of the floor was empty, giving him the solitude he both craved and often resented. Jack wasn't a very typical young man. At six-foot-three, one-hundred and ninety pounds, brown hair and blue eyes, he was what most people considered to be good looking, yet most people never seemed to give him a second look. He considered himself to usually be at least a decent conversationalist, yet he never seemed to be able to hold anyone's attention, in particular when it came to girls he was interested in. He was fairly strong, thin, and certainly not scrawny, yet no one would ever call him muscular. All in all, Jack thought himself relatively normal, he'd just somehow never really clicked with anyone in his life.

Even with what he did best, what he did for a living, he still couldn't make any friends. What Jack did for a living was he played the game of Yu-Gi-Oh. He'd been playing the game for his entire life, it was his favorite thing in the whole world. Jack had a collection of thousands of cards and a large amount of memorabilia. For thirteen years, ever since he was only seven, Jack had been competing in and winning tournaments. He made a good living by either winning the prize money from the tournaments or selling the rare cards he won from them.

Jack had come to Central City a year before for the then national Yu-Gi-Oh tournament and it was then he had happened to come across his condo and had bought it using the majority of his savings. He'd grown up in Central City but had moved away for a few years when he was seventeen. Even though he lived alone, he liked the relative luxury he lived in. It was usually a very small compensation for his general loneliness, but a compensation nonetheless.

Jack was at that very moment rewatching the anime of Yu-Gi-Oh. He'd long lost count of how many times he'd watched the various series all the way through, but it never got old for him, especially the original series. Watching Yugi, Joey, Téa, Tristan, Kaiba and all the rest of the characters fight their way through whatever dark magic could be thrown at them always made him feel better. Whether they be relying on the strength of their cards or the power of their friendship, it never failed to lift his spirits. Sad and pathetic as he knew it was, he'd always felt the characters of the show were the best and closest thing to friends he'd ever had.

As Jack watched, he was also working with his cards with hundreds of them spread out all around him, coming up with new strategies and combos. He'd heard some people in the street and seen a few articles that said some scientist named Wells was doing something with a particle accelerator that very night, but Jack didn't have much interest in science, so he hadn't paid much attention to it.

He was thinking out loud as he plotted game plays.

"So, then I use Yubel to take out their monster, activate Monster Reborn, special summon Phoenix Gearfried back out, attack with him and that's game." Jack smiled to himself. "I love this game."

He looked at the TV and saw the Pharaoh Atem facing off against Pegasus at Duelist Kingdom in the first season and continued to smile.

Meanwhile, twenty city blocks to the west, Barry Allen and his longtime friend and secret love, Iris West, were standing in the crowd to see the particle accelerator turn on. Barry had just finished unsuccessfully attempting to convey his feelings to Iris. She had thought he'd been referring to feeling awkward about talking about girls with her, making it clear she sees him as nothing but a friend and brother.

"Aren't you glad I know you so well?" Iris asked him, finishing her unintentional stomp on his feelings.

Before Barry could say anything in response to that, a mixture of cheering and boos erupted from the crowd. The man most responsible for the design and creation of the particle accelerator, Harrison Wells, was stepping up to the podium on the stage with several younger scientists whom Barry was not aware of standing on either side of him.

"For those of you who don't know me..." Wells paused to allow the crowd to laugh. "My name is Harrison Wells. Tonight... the future begins. The work my team and I do here will change our understanding of physics. It will help us bring about advancements in power and medicine. I want to live in that future and I want you all to join me."

Suddenly in the crowd, Barry was shoved aside by a kid in his late teens who grabbed Iris' laptop bag and ran off with it.

"My laptop! It's got my dissertation!" She cried out.

Without hesitation, Barry took off running after the thief. Huffing and puffing, Barry ran as fast as he could, trying his best to keep up with the thief as he rounded a corner. Barry raced after him, but was stopped by Iris' laptop being bashed into his face. Before the thief could take off again, Barry tried to talk him down.

"Hey man, you don't want to do this. Just give me back my friend's bag and we'll call it even."

The eyes of the young man softened and Barry thought he had gotten through to him. Barry reached out to take the bag, but before he could grasp it, the thief punched him in the face. He then punched Barry several more times in quick succession. Barry fell down to the pavement just as Iris entered the alley.

"Barry!" Iris shouted.

The teenage thief jumped onto a chain link fence, only a short climb away from safety and freedom. The unmistakable click of a gun hammer being cocked back made the kid stop dead. A handsome, square jawed man in his late twenties was pointing a .45 at him.

"Freeze! Police!" The cop yelled. "Or do you want to find out the hard way you're not faster than a bullet?"

Thirty minutes later, after getting back to the police station and after Iris and the cop who had helped them, Detective Eddie Thawne, had argued about Iris refusing to press charges against the thief, Barry was back in his CSI lab.

He had the TV on in the lab to the news coverage of the particle accelerator. He was just settling down to really watch it when he noticed it was starting to rain outside. He got up to close the skylight when he saw it. A huge, exploding flash of light coming from the direction of S.T.A.R Labs where the accelerator was. A split second later, a bolt of lightning shot down through the skylight into Barry's chest, sending him hurtling into a shelf full of forensic tools and chemicals.

At the same time, twenty-eight city blocks to the northeast, Jack Harper noticed the light from the explosion and stood up with curiosity. He saw the wave of dark-matter approaching his building. The very same moment as the dark-matter enveloped his entire condo, the Pharaoh Atem was on the TV, the eye of the Millennium Puzzle glowing, the ancient magic within being used. The light from the puzzle somehow intensified and shined upon Jack. The pictures from all of Jack's cards, both those spread on the floor and within their cases glowed brightly. Currents of energy jutted out of all of the cards and flowed into him. Jack felt a strange feeling of power coursing through him. It was warm and rich and spread through his entire body giving him the high that usually accompanied alcohol without any inherent intoxicating effects.

Just as his mind processed everything going on enough to think it couldn't get any stranger, the light from the TV became almost blindingly radiant. The light then narrowed and became a small circle, yet somehow lost none of it's brilliance and then the weirdest thing yet happened. Jack saw a small, golden ring emerge out of the screen and hang in mid-air. The ring floated itself the ten feet over to him and attached itself directly onto the middle finger of his right hand. The ring felt cold. It was solid metal and somehow happened to fit his finger snugly and perfectly. It was then Jack saw that the ring had an Egyptian eye symbol on the top, exactly like that of the Millennium Items. The light from the TV then returned to normal, the glow of his cards died away and just as quickly as it had all started, it was as if it never happened. Jack looked down at the ring on his finger and the room suddenly started to spin. All of Jack's equilibrium left him. His heart beat faster. Adrenaline spiked throughout his body. His vision started to blur. He knew he was about to collapse. Jack just managed to take the needed step to fall onto his couch before he completely blacked out.

When Jack awoke it was bright daylight out. He found himself face down on his couch, half of his body hanging off the edge. Groggily pushing himself up into a sitting position, Jack checked his watch. It was 12:23PM, more than thirteen hours past the last time he could remember. As Jack stood up, he was surprised. For some reason he thought he should feel weak or sick or some kind of negative sensation, but actually, he had an odd feeling of strength throughout his entire body. The energy and stamina needed to run a marathon or bench-press a car seemed to be infused within him. Jack looked down at himself and saw the gold ring with the Egyptian eye symbol on his right hand, middle finger. Images of bright light and glowing cards flashed through Jack's mind. He quickly shook his head to dislodge them.

"What a weird dream." He thought, smacking his lips together.

His mouth was bone dry. His tongue felt as sandy as a cat's inside his mouth. He walked through his condo to the bathroom for a glass of water. Turning on the bathroom light on his way to the sink, he received an unexpected shock at what he saw. In the medicine cabinet mirror, Jack's reflection was staring back at him, but it wasn't quite right. His normally chestnut brown hair had several streaks of amber blonde running through it. The contrasting hair also seemed to have grown, extending past his other hairs in conspicuous spikes.

"How the hell did that happen?" Jack thought. "When the hell did that happen? I've never dyed my hair. I hardly ever think about my hair except when it needs to be cut."

Jack leaned closer to the mirror and sharply scrutinized the yellowed hair. The changed color ran all the way down to his scalp, as if it were natural and only those few sticking up spikes seemed to have been altered. The images of bright light and glowing cards passed through his head again, causing him to have to grip the sink to retain his balance. After it had passed, Jack looked down at the gold ring on his finger, the millennium symbol staring back up at him.

"No! That couldn't have happened. Stuff like that can't happen in real life. This ring has to just be one of the Yu-Gi-Oh toys I've bought. That's the only rational explanation." He thought.

Taking a moment to think about what he'd just said to himself, Jack couldn't help but chuckle.

"You sound like Kaiba." He said out loud to himself.

He then looked into the mirror again.

"And you look like Yugi."

The following weeks carried on for Jack the way they usually did, plotting strategies, playing Yu-Gi-Oh online, watching the show and trying every now and then to interact with people, getting nothing but awkward glances and staunch silences for his efforts.

Jack was stopping in at the popular coffee house called "CC Jitters" for a soda when he saw someone he thought he knew. She was a young, black woman, very pretty and a few years older than Jack himself was. She was in line to order a coffee. She looked kind of lonely and sad. He knew that look, having worn it so many times himself. Despite knowing he'd almost certainly fail to do anything but bore or possibly frighten her, he was feeling another craving to try to obtain human companionship which couldn't be ignored and decided to go over to her.

"Excuse me?" He asked her.

She looked up at him.

"Yes?"

"You're Iris West, right?" Jack asked.

"Yes."

"We went to school together, sort of. It was the same building. You were a high school freshman when I started middle school. I'm Jack Harper."

"Oh!" Iris exclaimed. "I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you. I think I remember you."

"It's okay if you don't. Most people don't. I remember you and your friend Barry cause you guys were nicer to me than most. I was the kid who was always playing with Yu-Gi-Oh cards all by himself." Jack said.

"Oh, yeah! Now I remember you. How are you?" Iris asked, her tone slightly improved and happier.

"Hanging in there." He said succinctly.

Iris waited several beats for him to add something, but he didn't.

"So, what are you up to these days? Are you in school?" She asked.

"Not really, I..."

Jack suddenly stopped talking. He'd heard something odd. It had been a sort of high pitched hooting sound. He looked back behind himself but could find nothing which was making the sound he'd heard. Dismissing the sound, he turned back to Iris.

"Uh, no, no, I'm not in school. I play Yu-Gi-Oh professionally now."

"You can make money at that?" Iris asked as she stepped up to the order counter. She paused a long moment, the air around her awkward. "I'm so sorry, I really didn't mean for that to be so condescending."

"It's okay." Jack said with a small smile. "Most people react like that. I'm not really rich from it, but I'm pretty well off."

Iris smiled at him then turned to the girl behind the counter.

"Can I have a tall, caramel cappuccino, please?"

Iris paid for her drink and then she and Jack stepped off to the side to talk some more. Jack was actually feeling good about himself at the moment. This was usually about the time when one of his relatives would try to get him to talk about something they considered normal, or, if he happened to try to make a friend, they'd either nicely brush him off or just walk away. The fact that Iris was still there and wanting to talk to him made him think that maybe he was making some kind of progress with his personal type of social malady. It gave him a little bit of hope.

"So, how exactly do you make money playing Yu-Gi-Oh?" Iris asked him with a tone of genuine sounding interest.

"Well, it's pretty simple, really. The national and world championships have large money prizes and along the way, you inevitably win some really rare cards you can sell for good money. The real trick is constructing a deck that can take you all the way. There are millions of different kinds of cards and literally endless strategies and combinations." Jack said, his voice filled with joy and enthusiasm for what he did best.

"Wow!" Iris exclaimed. "Well, I'm definitely never gonna think about that as a kid's game again."

Jack smiled widely. Iris returned his smile. Jack thought quickly and deliberately for what to say next to try to keep the conversation a successful one.

"So, how is Barry? Do you still see him?" Jack asked.

Iris' expression then reverted back to a mask of sadness and melancholy. Two solitary tears streaked down her face and she looked away from him. Jack's own face shifted to a mixture of apprehension and fear. He was terrified he'd said something horribly wrong.

"I'm sorry, it's just, Barry's in a coma." Iris said weakly.

"Oh, I'm sor-"

Jack suddenly whipped his head around. He'd heard the high pitched hooting again, louder and clearer than before, as if it had come from right behind him. Again there was nothing he could spot which could be making that sound. Slowly, he turned his gaze back around to Iris. The look on her face was confused with a slight twinge of annoyance to it.

"Uh... sorry about that. Uh, what, what happened to Barry? Why is he in a coma?"

"Well, it all happened the night Harrison Wells' particle accelerator exploded." Iris said.

She launched into the story pf everything that had led up to Barry being struck by lightning, but Jack was only partly listening to her. His mind was focusing on that strange hooting sound. What was so odd to Jack was that he knew exactly what it sounded like to him. To him, it sounded exactly the same as the noise the Kuriboh monster made on the show. He would have known it anywhere.

As Jack was thinking, another strange sound perforated his ears. A huge, falcon like screech sounded from somewhere far overhead.

"Red-Eyes Black Dragon?" Jack thought.

He was beginning to become unnerved by these sounds. They sounded so real to him, so alive. He tried once again to force his thoughts away from the sounds and focus on Iris.

"...and they're not sure if he'll ever wake up." Iris finished her story.

"I'm... I'm so sorry." Jack faked that he'd been paying attention.

"Thank you. This isn't a very easy time for me and my dad."

Jack had no idea what he should say next and not least because he'd missed all of the relevant information she'd conveyed. He said nothing. After several long moments, the silence was broken by a newcomer to the conversation.

"Iris?" A male voice asked.

Jack turned and saw the handsome face and square jaw of Eddie Thawne.

"I thought that was you. Just thought I'd come say 'hi.' You know, everyone at the station's real sorry for you, Joe and especially Barry."

Iris responded, "Thanks. Oh, uh, Detective Eddie Thawne, this is Jack Harper, an old classmate of mine and Barry's. We just ran into each other."

Eddie held out his hand to shake Jack's.

"Hey, Jack, how you doin'?"

Jack was about to reach out to shake when the sounds began again, but this time it wasn't one sound, but a torrential flood of noises. There were sounds of growling, sounds of screaming, of fiendish grunting, of rushing water, of raging fires, of whirring machinery, of grinding stones, of bullets, of laser blasts, of clanging blades; sounds of battle and bellows of victory and anguished defeat. Jack's pulse quickened so rapidly that he could feel the pace in his throat and head. His breath was coming in shallow, hyperventilating gasps, sweat was breaking on his forehead. His eyes and head were darting around everywhere for anything that could explain what he was hearing.

"Jack?" Iris asked.

"Are you okay, man?" Eddie asked.

The deafening, earsplitting roar Jack recognized as only belonging to a Blue-Eyes White Dragon made him painfully and desperately cover his ears.

"DOESN'T ANYONE ELSE HEAR THAT?!" Jack screamed at the top of his lungs, just barely able to hear himself.

Eddie and Iris both took steps closer to Jack with their hands up and slightly outstretched in a sign of wanting to help him. Jack saw their lips move, but heard nothing over the deluge in his ears.

Out of nowhere, directly in front him was a Swamp Battleguard swinging its massive club at him. Jack yelled in sudden fear, ducked away and fell backwards over a table. From the floor he saw what looked to him like the Elemental Hero Flame Wingman fire a stream of flames at him. Jack instinctively rolled out of the way. He could feel the heat from the flames nearly searing his face. When he stood up, still futilely trying to block out the sounds, a Junk Warrior synchro monster sped past him. An Insect Queen was on the ceiling, snarling down at him. There was a Jinzo in the corner shooting its trap destroying lasers in his direction.

Jack absolutely couldn't take it anymore and ran out of Jitters as swiftly as his legs would carry him, screaming the whole way. Every pair of eyes in the coffee house watched him as he left. Eddie Thawne tried to chase after Jack to help, but in his panic and delirium, Jack moved much faster and Eddie lost him before long.

Jack didn't stop running for a full forty city blocks, ducking into a dark and narrow alley and toppling onto his butt against the wall. As he huffed and puffed, trying to catch his breath, the cacophony of noises ceased as abruptly as they had started and Jack heard nothing but his own breathing and the normal sounds of the city.

"What's happening to me?" He asked out loud through ragged breaths.

After a long time spent collecting himself, Jack eventually managed to drag himself out into the street and hail a cab to take him home. Jack watched the buildings pass by from inside the cab, trying to use the motion to calm his mind.

"Okay, just relax, man." Jack thought. "You were not hearing duel monsters. You were NOT hearing duel monsters. It was some kind of stress reaction to something or some kind of auditory hallucination. You are not going crazy."

Another thought then passed through his mind and Jack smirked.

"Still, how cool would it be if duel monsters were real?" Jack asked himself.

Thirty minutes later, Jack was back on the top floor of his condo building. He was exceptionally pleased to be back in the isolation of the almost entirely vacant floor, where he could privately and thoroughly sort out his thoughts. He was looking forward to the peace and quiet. He did not receive it.

It was only an hour after Jack had gotten home that the noises began anew. He'd been making a small but satisfying dinner for himself when the tidal wave of sounds clobbered him like a speeding semi-truck. They were thunderous and louder, more intense than before, causing Jack to instantly fall to the floor in a writhing, tortured mass as he hopelessly tried to block it all out.

All the sounds were the same as they had been before; roaring, growling, snarling, rushing air, shifting earth, epic battles, small skirmishes and all other levels of fighting.

"Make it stop! Please, make it stop!" Jack wailed, barely able to hear his own thoughts.

Just then, amongst all the din and chatter of the commotion, Jack just barely heard a single, human voice. It was faint amd almost impossible to distinguish, but it was there. Jack focused all of his mental energy on that voice, bringing it to the forefront of everything. With an act of will so supreme he thought it might break his mind, Jack managed to make the human voice louder and everything else quieter and less harsh.

He heard that it was a girl's voice. He thought she seemed to be reading aloud from a book. He couldn't understand her words for some reason, but her voice was soothing. It was soft, feminine and girlish, but somehow not in a way which made her sound childlike. By continuing to focus on her one voice, all the rest of the sounds eventually hushed and died away completely.

Jack ceased to squirm in pain on the floor and pulled himself up into a sitting position against the cabinets. He panted and continued to listen to the girl's recital in his mind. Her voice was not only soothing to him, it was pleasing to him. Her voice triggered a peaceful state of bliss he'd never known. He truly loved the sound of it.

"Whatever's happening to me, at least I got to experience that. I wish a girl like that was real." Jack thought as the girl's voice fell away to silence.

Several days passed without further incident for Jack. In a way, he was almost sad the strange bombardments of sound had not continued. He thought if it would happen again, he could possibly find that girl's voice amongst all the chaos. Her voice had been the most pleasurable and sensual experience to ever happen to him.

He knew he was tormenting himself somewhat by trying to remember her voice, but thought it was an indulgence he could afford to make. Jack perceived that if the sounds never came back again, he would eventually forget about them and even the angelic voice of the girl within them, but for the time being, he wanted to remember her melodic tones for as long as possible.

The lobby door buzzer brought Jack out of his thoughts. He got up from his computer and crossed the condo to the intercom by his front door. He pressed the button to call down to the exterior door.

"Yeah?" Jack asked.

"UPS." The delivery guy said from fifteen stories below.

"I'll be right down." Jack said back.

Jack rode down in the elevator, signed for his package and then went back up to his apartment. The box was moderately large and long and felt heavy from foam padding on the inside. There was Japanese kanji on the side of it, among the other postage and writing.

"Oh! This has to be it!" Jack exclaimed.

Jack was one of a very few top ranked players in the entire world asked by Konami to beta test their brand new duel-disk. Unlike the original toy duel-disk released in the early 2000's, he'd been told that this one was designed to be as closely identical as possible to the ones from the original show. The email he'd been sent said that it was fully constructed from metal and had the full range of automatic motion from the standby to the active modes. He'd read that this duel-disk had a very small kind of vice press in the deck slot to hold the cards securely in place, a functional graveyard mechanism and an automatic lifepoint counter. They claimed the device would even produce very low level holographic projections of the monsters and other images on the cards.

Jack very carefully opened the box and awed at what he found inside. It was a shining and exact duplicate of the second generation Kaiba Corp duel-disk. It was packaged in its standby mode with the monster and spell/trap card zones divided into two sections of two and three on either side of the primary computer module. Jack took it out of the box, examining it closer still. The duel-disk even had the metal armband that adjusted itself to a perfect fit.

Taking the duel-disk out of the package, he placed his left arm through it, pressing the activation button as he did so. The armband fitted itself securely to his forearm, the two sections of monster and spell/trap zones whirred and moved to join together and then lit up to show they were ready to receive cards.

"Okay, that is the coolest effing thing ever!" Jack thought.

Giddily excited to test out the holographic imaging system, Jack moved into the living room to one of the glass cases filled with memorabilia. He opened the case and took out the most favorite deck he'd ever created. It was the deck that held all of his most treasured cards and strategies. He could think of no other which would be suitable for such a momentus occasion. Jack shuffled his deck thoroughly, delighting in fantasizing he was about to use that deck and disk to duel with Yugi or Kaiba or maybe even go up against the evil Marik or the villainous Dartz.

Jack inserted his deck into the deck zone slot and drew out six cards. The cards he drew were Red-Eyes Black Dragon, The Claw of Hermos, Inferno Fire Blast, Red-Eyes Burn, Lady of Dragons and Decoy Dragon.

"Oh! Decent opening hand." He thought. "Think I'll see how the monsters look first."

Unnoticed by Jack, the millennium symbol on the gold ring on his finger began to glow softly. He used his right hand to pull the Decoy Dragon card out of his left and pretended he was having a real duel.

"I summon Decoy Dragon in attack mode!" He said aloud.

He placed the card vertically down onto one of the monster zones. With a flash of light, a fully three-dimensional image of Decoy Dragon appeared in front of Jack. He was completely blown away by it. The monster in front of him looked as if it were real. It was a small dragon, no more than five feet in length, mostly a light teal color with a flesh colored stomach. It had a wingspan of about four feet and was flapping them gently to hover a few feet above the floor.

"They call this low quality?" Jack thought.

As he continued to marvel at the creature in front of him, Jack started to notice a few oddities. The Decoy Dragon was making gentle sounds that were something between a growl and gurgle; Jack could also hear it breathing. The small dragon was moving it's head all around, looking at the condo. It turned around in the air and stared right into Jack's eyes. Jack thought he saw something like an emotional expression on the monster's face, a look almost like confusion. Decoy Dragon had just begun to move closer to Jack when Jack pulled the card off of the duel-disk, making the dragon vanish.

"Wow. Those guys have really put a lot into this. If I didn't know better, I would have thought that Decoy Dragon was alive. Anyway, let's move on to something with a little more kick now." Jack thought.

He eyed the Red-Eyes Black Dragon card in his hand and pulled it out.

"I summon the Red-Eyes Black Dragon!" Jack shouted.

Jack laid the card down in attack mode, the summoning light flashed, and it happened. As soon as Red-Eyes appeared, he straightened to his full height of twenty-six feet, crashing upwards through the ceiling and roof into the midday air. It's bellowing, falcon like cry seemed to resonate right into Jack's very bones like a declaration of dominance. Red-Eyes' tail accidentally whipped to the side, striking Jack in the chest and sending him falling onto his back in front of the massive dragon.

"He's... he's real!" Jack stated with absolute astonishment.

The sound of his voice carried up to Red-Eyes' ears and the dragon glared down at him, growling with a ferocious fury.