Chapter 2
Jack gaped up at the Red-Eyes Black Dragon directly in front of him, awed and horror struck. Jack was completely unable to believe his eyes. He'd placed the card on the duel-disk and instead of a holographic image, a real, flesh and blood duel monster had appeared in front of him. It had stretched up and broken though the roof. Jack was only partially upright, propped on his elbows after Red-Eyes' tail had knocked him down. Jack could see every single scale on its body. He could see the razor edge of its claws and feel the heat from its breath.
"This can't be real. This can't be real! I'm losing my mind! I have to be going crazy!" Jack told himself.
Red-Eyes was staring down at Jack as well. His gaze was frighteningly harsh. He seemed to be studying Jack, trying to understand him. It was similar to when Jack had summoned Decoy Dragon. But unlike Decoy Dragon, Red-Eyes was a much more fierce creature. After only a few moments, he growled a menacing growl yet again. Red-Eyes bared his fangs at Jack. His teeth were just as black as his scaly armor. He opened his mouth wide. The reddish light of his Inferno Fire Blast attack appeared in his mouth. It grew brighter and brighter as it charged.
"This can't be happening! This isn't happening!" Jack screamed in his mind.
The blast from Red-Eyes attack formed into a huge fireball on the cusp of his mouth. The light from the coming attack reached nearly blinding proportions. Red-Eyes was about to shoot it.
"Aaaaahhhhh!" Jack screamed.
An idea suddenly flashed through Jack's mind. He looked down at the duel-disk on his arm and saw the Red-Eyes card upon it. At the same time as Red-Eyes fired his attack, Jack pulled the card off of the disk. Both Red-Eyes and his attack instantly vanished as if they'd never been there.
Jack fell back, sprawling on the floor. What felt like gallons of adrenaline started to slowly work its way out of his system. Jack just laid there for the longest time, trying to catch his breath. He could see the blue sky through the massive hole in the roof.
"I've lost my mind. I've gone crazy. I have to have gone insane." Jack thought.
A knock at the front door brought Jack out of himself. Pulling himself up to his feet, Jack felt like his body was made of led. He slowly shuffled over to the door and opened it as far as the chain permitted. Eddie Thawne was on the other side.
"Hey, Jack, I'm Eddie Thawne, we met the other day at Jitters. I just wanted to check up on you, make sure you're okay after that whole thing that happened."
Jack thought about it for a second, then closed the door, undid the chain and let Eddie inside.
"Uh, how exactly did you find out where I live?" Jack asked.
"Well, I don't know if you picked up on this at Jitters, but I'm a Detective with the CCPD, so I just ran your name through the database to get your current address."
Eddie started to look around Jack's condo, the way people do in someone else's home for the first time.
"So, this is a nice place you have h-"
Eddie stopped dead as his eyes found the hole in the ceiling and roof.
"What happened here?" There was a tone of concern in Eddie's voice.
"With what?" Jack asked back.
"The ceiling."
Jack also looked up at the hole.
"Wait, you mean, you see it too?" Jack asked with surprise and relief.
"Of course I see it. It's a massive hole in your roof. How'd that happen?" Eddie said.
Jack paused a beat before answering.
"Well, I think they must have made some kind of mistake when they built this building. I've been hearing a weird crackling from the ceiling for weeks and a few minutes ago it just collapsed like that."
Eddie looked back at the hole and the living room in general as he considered Jack's explanation. Jack had lied through his teeth, but he thought there was enough mortar and concrete rubble on the floor to legitimize his story.
Eddie looked back at Jack. "You ought to get in touch with the building owner immediately. There's no way you should have to pay to get that fixed or put it on your insurance."
"Yeah, I'll be sure to do that. Alright, thanks for coming by Eddie." Jack said and began to usher the policeman out of his condo.
"Wait, I wanted to ask you about what happened at Jitters." Eddie said, halfway out the door.
"All in the past. Low blood sugar, you know how that can be. Appreciate the concern. I'll see you around, man."
Jack closed the door in Eddie's face and locked it for good measure. He then moved over to the middle of his living room and looked up through the hole again.
He thought to himself, "Okay, Jack, good side, turns out you're not going crazy, cause he could see the hole too. Really weird side: if you're not going crazy, that means you somehow summoned an actual, living Red-Eyes Black Dragon."
A string of images then passed through his mind. Images of golden light, glowing cards, and a ring emerging out of his TV. Jack glanced down at the ring on his finger. He stared at it as if he were seeing it for the very first time.
"That particle accelerator." Jack thought. "The energy stuff that passed through me and everything else. It somehow must have created this ring and the ring must somehow be an real millennium item. A Millennium Ring. It made it so the cards I played brought out a real Decoy Dragon and Red-Eyes."
An idea passed through Jack's mind and he looked up at the hole in the ceiling again, pondering it. Acting on the idea, he went through his binders of cards until he found the one he wanted, removing it and looking at it closely. Jack then held the card over his head towards the ceiling.
"I use Blue Medicine to fix the ceiling." He proclaimed.
Nothing happened.
"I use Blue Medicine to fix the ceiling." He repeated.
Again, nothing happened. Jack held the card closely to his face, looking at it and pondering. "Blue Medicine" was a spell card which in any normal match was used to increase its holder's lifepoints by four-hundred. If there was any spell card which could fix the hole, he thought it would be one like this.
"I don't get it. When I put my monster cards on the duel-disk, they came to life."
The connection formed in his mind and Jack looked down at his duel-disk. He lifted to playing position and inserted the spell card into one of the spell/trap zones.
"I use the effect of Blue Medicine on the ceiling." Jack said out loud.
In one of the most amazing sights he'd seen yet, Jack watched as all of the rubble floated, moved up and combined to reform the ceiling and roof without a single seam or crack present afterwards.
"Gorram it, it worked!" Jack thought. He looked at his duel-disk again. "That's how it works. I have to play the card on the disk as if I'm in a duel. I can make the monsters, spells and presumably the traps all real."
The widest and most joy filled smile he'd ever worn spread across Jack's face.
"This is gonna be awesome!"
An hour later, twenty city blocks to the west, a somewhat unimportant alarm went off in the computer system. Cisco Ramon was manning the computers at that moment and picked up on it immediately. Typing a string of commands on the keyboard, Cisco brought up a map of Central City on his screen via satellite imagery and zoomed in on a specific point. A window in a corner of the screen popped open reading "Unknown energy type detected."
"What the?" Cisco muttered to himself.
He entered another command, trying to bring up an analysis report on the detected energy. The box saying "Unknown energy type detected" simply shrank and then re-expanded, in effect bouncing to reinforce that it was the extent of the computer's available information.
Cisco frowned at that. He transferred the data onto a tablet and got up from the computer desk with it.
Walking from the primary computer lab, Cisco took the tablet a moderately long way until he reached his destination. He knocked on the door to an office and waited for the response.
"Come in." A voice said from the other side.
Cisco opened the door and found Dr. Harrison Wells behind his desk.
"Dr. Wells, our satellites have picked up something odd." Cisco said.
"Really?"
Wells pushed himself and his wheelchair around the desk closer to Cisco. Cisco held the tablet out so that they could both look at it.
"Our satellite's detected some kind of unique energy signature coming from within the city. I tried to get an analysis report on it, but the computer can't identify what kind of energy it is." Cisco said.
Wells took the tablet in his hands and began to use the command functions on it.
"Do you think it could be another person like our patient, Barry?" Cisco asked.
"I don' think so." Wells said.
He tilted the screen so Cisco could see it again.
"I think what we've found is a glitch in our satellite system. Looks like fragmented data created a false sensor reading that the computer identified as an energy pattern and that's why it couldn't say what kind of energy it is."
Cisco took the tablet back, staring at the screen.
"Huh. You're right. I'll get started on finding and eliminating that data."
Cisco then left the office. Wells watched him as he left, tracking his movement.
"I think I'll look into this." He thought.
He then stood up, out of the wheelchair, shifting everything from his thought process to his body language from the guise of Harrison Wells back to his true self of Eobard Thawne. Thawne then used his super-speed to faze through the walls and race out of the building towards the location of the energy surge.
Meanwhile, several miles outside of the city, Jack was standing in the shadow of a building in an abandoned industrial park. He'd come there with his duel-disk to test out his new found powers. For the purpose of experimentation, Jack had put together a deck with many varying types of spells, traps and monsters. The deck would never be any good in an actual duel, but would do to see how the cards worked with his abilities. Jack activated the duel-disk and drew his first card. It was the spell card 'Illusion Magic.'
"If the Blue Medicine card could work to repair my roof then that must mean that my Millennium Ring doesn't make the card do what it says exactly to the letter, but more of a type of real world equivalent." Jack thought.
Abundantly curious to what it would do, Jack played Illusion Magic.
"I activate the spell card Illusion Magic."
A high dome wall of shimmering and translucent light formed a wide circumference around Jack and a portion of the building. Even though he couldn't tell from his position, Jack had the sense that the wall of light was hiding him, keeping him and any of the monsters he may summon invisible and undetectable. He decided to leave that card in play.
"This is so cool!"
He drew his second card.
"I summon Monster Egg!" Jack half shouted.
The light of summoning flashed and a huge, dark brown egg with a jaggedly circular hole and two eyes peeking out appeared in front of Jack. Jack was about to approach it when a shard of eggshell suddenly flung towards him. He dodged the fragment easily, but then another one flew at him as well. It slashed across Jack's face, cutting semi deeply through his cheek. A bombardment of sharpened eggshells were volleyed at him. Jack turned away and doubled over to protect his head and pulled the card off of the disk. Monster Egg disappeared.
Jack stood up straight. Lifting his hand to his face, he touched the cut and winced slightly from the stinging pain. His hand came away with a bit of blood covering three fingers. He decided it wasn't bad enough that he should stop and tend to it.
"Well, I won't be summoning that one again." He thought.
He then drew another card from the deck, the monster 'Strike Ninja.' Jack played the card and the Strike Ninja appeared. Strike Ninja's back was to Jack and he immediately started glancing around at the unfamiliar surroundings.
"Koko wa doko?" The ninja asked himself. He was speaking Japanese.
Strike Ninja then turned around and saw Jack.
"Anatahadare?"
Jack had no idea in the least what the man was saying to him.
Strike Ninja went on. "Koko ni tsurete kite kuremashita ka?"
"I'm sorry, I don't understand what you're saying. I'm Jack." Jack stepped forwards with his right arm extended to shake hands.
The Strike Ninja jerked into a defensive, on-guard stance and pulled a kunai out of an unseen weapon holster from behind his back. Jack stopped immediately.
"Sugu ni yamete! Watashi wa anata o kizutsuketaku wa arimasenga, nani ga okotte iru no ka o shiritai to omotte imasu!" Strike Ninja yelled.
Jack quickly removed his card, terminating the interaction.
"Okay, note to self, don't summon him again unless you learn Japanese."
He then drew his first trap card of the session.
"I activate Wall of Thorns."
Instantly, a protective wall of thorn covered vines shot of the ground in front of him, fifteen feet tall and thirty feet wide. Jack stepped closer and felt one of the vines. It was wholly tangible and real, the thorns sharp and the vine soft like any plant and yet also somehow as hard as steel. Jack already knew full well it was all genuine by that point, but he was still in awe of it all.
The rest of the day proceeded like that. Jack tested over thirty cards in the deck over the following two hours. The spells and traps had almost no difficulty to them, they were nothing but mindless manifestations of magic. The monster cards were an entirely different story. As Jack had observed in the case of Decoy Dragon, Red-Eyes and the others, he had no arbitrary control over the actions of the monsters he summoned like he would in a duel. Instead, it seemed that the magic of the Millennium Ring was summoning the duel monster spirit which corresponded to the card played and brought them to life with their own minds, personalities and control intact.
When he summoned the V-Tiger Jet machine monster, it had soared high, dive bombed at Jack and attempted to blow him up with a barrage of missiles before Jack pulled the card.
When he summoned the Shining Friendship, a favorite of Tèa Gardner, the small, green fairy monster had floated over to Jack and cuddled itself against his face. It's fuzzy body felt soft and delicate and it exuded a feeling of caring and affection.
He summoned Elemental Hero Neos and after Jack had explained who he was and what was happening, the two of them ended up talking for over thirty minutes, discussing the merits and detractors of fusion monsters, what it felt like for Neos to fuse with another monster, battle tactics, deceptive strategies and a few other topics. At the end of it, Jack removed Neos' card with consent from the hero and a feeling of comradery which Jack enjoyed thoroughly.
Things changed again when he played his next card, the beast monster known as 'Fenrir.' A giant gray wolf, easily twice the size of any normal one appeared. As soon as it saw Jack, it growled a frightening, aggressive snarl, fur spiking upward along its back. Fenrir arched its back, sunk down, spring loading its back legs and launched itself into a fast traveling lunge at Jack, its fangs bared and ready to bite and kill him. It hit him, knocking Jack down onto the ground and making his head collide into the concrete. Jack just managed to reflexively put his right hand behind his head to cushion the impact. Fenrir rose up, readying itself to strike, shot its head downward and locked its teeth around Jack's throat. Jack pulled Fenrir's card a split second before the animal succeeded in ripping his throat out.
Jack sat up, gagging and gasping for breath. He felt his neck. There were indentations in his skin from the monster's teeth, seeming to just be on the verge of becoming puncture wounds. Jack knew he had discarded Fenrir at the last possible moment.
"Okay, I've got to choose my monsters a lot more carefully. If I think about it, there are a lot who'll probably act just like that one." He thought.
Dragging himself to his feet, Jack drew his next card to press on. It was the Summoned Skull. He was about to play the card simply out of a nearly automatic sequence of testing his powers when his mind flashed an image through his mind of the giant, skeletal monster attacking him with its lightning-strike. Jack gulped and shuddered from the thought.
"Yeah, I'm just gonna stay away from the fiend type monsters entirely."
Jack deposited Summoned Skull directly into the graveyard and drew his next one. The card he'd picked was the Dark Magician Girl.
"Dark Magician Girl. Well, between how she was on the shows and the fact that she's basically human, she'll probably be friendly enough." He played the card. "I summon Dark Magician Girl."
The customary flash of light occurred and the girl from the image was brought to life before him.
"Huh? What?" She asked no one in particular before seeing Jack. "Could you tell me what's going on here?"
Jack was taken aback by her voice. He had recognized it. Her voice was the same female voice he had heard amongst all the deluge of the sounds of the duel monsters. Hers was the voice which had allowed him to tune the rest of it out and push it away, the voice which had saved him. He stepped closer to her, holding out his hand to shake.
"Hi, uh... hi. I said that already." He chuckled weakly. "It's nice to meet you. My name's Jack."
Dark Magician Girl gripped his hand with hers and shook. Her skin was fair colored, soft, supple and felt utterly flawless. The contact sent shivers running through Jack's body.
"It's nice to meet you too, Jack. Could you please explain where I am?"
Jack held onto her hand for a moment longer than he should have before releasing it and beginning to tell the story.
"Well, obviously this isn't the duel monster spirit world. I can't really explain how it happened, but some kind of scientific accident made it so that I received this ring."
He held up his right hand so she could see the golden ring.
"A millennium item? But, it can't be. The Millennium Ring is a completely different type of item and it belongs to someone else." Dark Magician Girl said.
"Like I said, I don't really know how it happened, but it did. This Millennium Ring seems to give me the power to make duel monster cards real. How else could you be here now?"
"I don't know."
Before going on, without knowing what he was doing, Jack took a good look at the girl in front of him. She was of average female height, around five-foot-five. Golden blonde hair flowed from her head in bangs around and between her eyes and cascaded in long waves down past her shoulders. Her eyes were the most beautiful emerald green color he had ever seen and conveyed a playful, fun loving spirit. She had long legs and medium sized breasts beneath her light blue and pink accented outfit. Jack knew in that moment that she was the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen.
As beautiful as she was, even though he couldn't put his finger on what it was, Jack thought there was something a little off about how she looked.
"Is there something wrong? You're staring." She said to Jack.
Her words shook Jack back to himself.
"Um, I'm sorry, I really didn't mean to stare. It's just, you don't quite look like how you do on the card somehow."
She smiled demurely at him.
"Oh! I understand now. That picture on the card makes me look just like a child, doesn't it? I've always hated that."
Jack knew then that that was it. In the flesh, she looked older then she did in the card's picture. She looked to be physically somewhere around twenty-one, same as he himself was.
"So, what's this all about?" She asked him.
"Oh, right! I'm, uh, I'm sorry for getting off topic." Jack answered, looking slightly down and away from her.
"It's not a problem, I'd just like to know." She said in eminently sweet and understanding voice.
Jack made eye contact with her again and smiled.
"Okay, see it's just that I'm testing out exactly what I can do with these new powers. Seems I'm able to summon monsters from your world and bring you here in flesh and blood. Since you have your own mind and will power, I obviously can't control you and I wouldn't try to."
"So, what exactly are you planning to do with this ability?"
Jack responded, "I'm not really sure what I'm gonna do with them. I do know you don't have to worry about me, I've got no interest in doing anything evil. For right now, I just want to meet and maybe make friends with some of my favorite monsters... like you."
Dark Magician Girl beamed a wide and beautiful smile at him. "Well, you've definitely made a friend in me. I'm very glad to know you, Jack!"
"I'm happy to know you too, Dark Magician Girl." He smiled a genuine, exceedingly happy smile.
"Before I go or you un-summon me or however it works, let me take care of that for you." She said just as he was about to take her card off the disc.
"Take care of what?" Jack asked.
Instead of answering verbally, Dark Magician Girl reached out, put her left hand over the cut on his cheek and closed her eyes. A pink aura glowed out from her hand and Jack's entire body trembled as a blissful, elating warmth which made him feel like he'd ascended to some kind of heavenly plain of existence saturated his being. He gratefully wallowed in the feeling until it ceased when she removed her hand from his face. She had used her magic to heal the cut on his face and the slight damage to his throat. Rather then a feeling of withdrawal or a desire to have the sublime sensation her magic had given him back, Jack felt a profound thankfulness to have experienced it.
"Wow!" He gasped quietly.
It was a long several moments before his eyes regained focus and found hers. He reached up with his own hand and touched his face, confirming that his small injury was indeed no longer existent.
"Wow." He said again, smiling at Dark Magician Girl. "Thank you."
"Don't think anything of it. I'm glad to be able to help a friend."
"Well, I'm, uh, I'm gonna pull your card now, so you know. I'll, uh, I'll be seeing you around."
"Okay. Feel free to summon me if you ever need help." She said.
Jack nodded and took her card off of the monster zone, lifting it close to his face and looking at it.
"The Dark Magician Girl." He thought affectionately.
Eobard Thawne had been waiting for over three hours at the exact coordinates of the energy surge, but hadn't seen a thing. After so much time, Thawne had no choice but to conclude some sort of mistake either in the computer or the information itself had actually been a mistake.
Although the S.T.A.R Labs computers were quite advanced and the young Cisco Ramon was truly a genius with the machines, Thawne knew simple mistakes were still possible. Thawne super-sped away from the abandoned industrial park. If he had waited just five minutes more, he would have seen the Illusion Magic card being deactivated and Jack starting on his way back home.
Back in the condo, Jack was eating a dinner of a homemade chicken burrito while watching more Yu-Gi-Oh. He was well into the second season of the show, watching as Yugi and Atem dueled the Rare Hunter, Arcana, in the Battle City tournament. As the Pharaoh summoned the Dark Magician Girl to finish Arcana off during the climax of the conflict, it naturally made Jack think of how he'd met her only a couple of hours before.
Jack couldn't help himself as he pulled the duel-disk closer to himself on the couch, extracted the deck and went through it until he found the Dark Magician Girl card. For a long time he just sat there, looking at the card. He couldn't help but think about the girl from the image he had met. She had been like no other girl Jack had ever met before. She had been nice, kind, sweet, had seemingly failed to notice his social awkwardness, but most of all, she had seemed to be interested in Jack. In his entire life, no one had ever really been interested in Jack before. It was that more than anything else which kept his thoughts revolving around her. Without really knowing what he was doing, Jack activated the duel-disk and placed the card on one of the monster zone slots.
"I summon the Dark Magician Girl."
In a flash of light, she was standing in front of him. She saw him and smiled warmly.
"Hello Jack! Do you need help with something?" She asked brightly.
Jack suddenly realized he hadn't thought for a second about what to say to her after he summoned her.
"Think of something!" He yelled at himself in his mind. "Think of something to say. A reason why you summoned her. Say anything other than 'I just wanted to see you.'"
"Uh..." Jack stammered.
He then suddenly had a blast of inspiration. It was the perfect way to not only not weird her out, but to create an excuse to spend time with her.
"I told you how I'm trying to master my powers. I thought that since you know, you're a duel monster and know so much about that world and since we can easily communicate, I was thinking maybe you could help me make allies with some of the monsters in my deck."
On the inside, he breathed a deep sigh of relief for coming up with such a good explanation. With a slight tension, he then waited for Dark Magician Girl's response.
"Well, depending on the types of monsters you plan to call upon, it could be tricky, but it also sounds like it could be fun. I'll be glad to help you!"
The rapturous charge that passed through Jack upon hearing her words, knowing that she had agreed to spend time with him filled him with such excitement he had to fight to not black out from it.
He responded, "That's great! So, we'll start tomorrow? Same place as today?"
"That's fine with me. I'm looking forward to it."
"Okay, so, I'll see you then." Jack said.
Dark Magician Girl beamed a bright smile and gave a nod of her head before Jack removed her card.
That night, he went to sleep with more of a sense of optimism for the future then he'd ever felt before.