Author's Notes: Writer's block is no fun, my friends. All of a sudden, you get an urge to write something, but tying the story together and making sense of the direction can take time. Anyways, time to move the story away from New York City and to another dueling event that is located in a surprising part of the United States. Disclaimer: I do not own Yugioh GX, and all rights belong to the creators, and I am not seeking any money for this.
Chapter 7: Great Alaskan Invitationals: The Prelude
Far and away, one of the most astute moves that Syrus had made was to authorize the creation of the Anchorage Lights. Alaska had no professional sports teams for a couple of years before this, and dueling had been growing in popularity throughout the state. By far the biggest reason was that in Alaska, a person had to do something to pass the time during the winter. Dueling was something that anyone could become good at, and cards could be bought over the internet and shipped in. It was no surprise that the Lights had taken off in Alaska, where the whole state rallied around the team. They sold out Sullivan Arena in Anchorage, and the team had always been heavily homegrown. Their best duelist was named Matt Bowen, who was an Alaskan Native that ran a Pyro deck. He was considered the second-best duelist in the league behind Harrington, and was arguably the most popular athlete to come out of Alaska in some time if you excluded dog mushers.
One of the biggest dueling events in Alaska happened every year in January, and was one of the more unique tournaments anywhere in the world. The Great Alaskan Invitationals were a pair of 32 duelist events held in Anchorage and Fairbanks. At each site, half of the field was duelists born in Alaska, and the other half were duelists that were invited from all over the world. Each event had a group stage before the top 2 duelists in each group of 4 advanced after a round robin in your group. From there, there would be a straight tournament style event, with the two winners earning $50,000 and a year's supply of caribou meat.
It was for that reason that Alexis was up in Anchorage. The organizers of event wanted to have her compete because of the way that she won against Harrington, and that she would be a big enough draw to increase the audience on cable television. For the 5th year in a row, the Great Alaskan Invitationals were featured on FX, as a way to fill late night programming and to make sure that something live was airing for those people who were into sports, or just couldn't sleep and needed to watch something other than late night fare or old movies. The broadcast was similar to the exhibition match between Alexis and Harrington, as the feed relied on having microphones on the duelists in addition to stats boxes showing card information. That was the style of broadcasting that Syrus had chosen, in order to keep the attention on the product itself. He would be watching the event from his office in Chicago, making sure that he could incorporate some changes to the upcoming league season that would increase the profile of his sport.
Alexis was not thinking about the future of the sport, nor was it her prerogative to worry about organizing an event. She was competing in the Anchorage section of the Invitational, having been invited because of her stature in America and to capitalize on her victory a few weeks ago in New York City. The New York School had given her dispensation to spend the week in Alaska, as this would be another advertisement for the school, as well as a chance for Alexis to take a look at some potential students that would be competing and attending the tournament.
What surprised her was that she seemed to have some of the old talent back, and it was fun to show her students that they had a professor that could bring it on against the type of competition that those students dreamed about. In Duel Academy, she had always been one of the toughest students, only losing a few times because of seemingly preternatural runs of luck to further her opponents. It was almost like there was some unseen hand that had given those opponents that beat her some sort of plot armor. Here, she did not have to worry about that, and those runs of luck were probably left on the island, where supernatural things happened on an almost yearly basis all those years ago. It was almost liberating to just worry about what happened in a duel instead of what would happen as a result of the duel.
How she would do in the tournament, she did not know. Matt Bowen would be in her group, and that would be an interesting matchup. Bowen would be dueling in his home arena, and thousands of fans would be cheering for him. The second Alaskan native in her group was a former Pro Leaguer named Isabelle Stewart. She was a former phenom that flamed out a few years ago after refusing to take a dive in a Pro League card, and that cost her a lot of sponsors. Her deck was Warrior types, a common archetype. Her fellow invited duelist in the group was Aster Phoenix. The ironic thing was that they had almost dueled each other for the fate of Slifer Red, before Jaden returned to dueling. Her group was considered a glamorous group, and would be given prime time billing by the organizers on the three days of group play.
What made the Great Alaskan Invitationals interesting besides the format was that each group was scheduled to have the matches happen over three nights, and each duel would be contested at the same time with the matches taking place on half of the arena. This was done to avoid having any duelist trying to manipulate the results of the group in order to corrupt the integrity of the event. Monitors would be placed on all sides of the half of the arena, showing the duel on the other half to the audience. The cheers were known to be an extra challenge for the competitors, something that they would have to overcome. The organizers of the event claimed that the feature made it a challenge that was unrivaled anywhere else in the sport.
Alexis had trained for that by having her students duel her while volunteers would scream and yell, making it a simulation. It was an attack on the normal senses, and she wanted to see what would happen. Her completive instincts had been underrated through her life up to this point. She had been through a lot, and she had seen things that plenty of her peers could not believe. Duel Academy in her time period had been a great test of endurance and mental strength, and she had been one of the students who had been with Jaden all of his years. She had seen her brother vanish and return, see Zane get corrupted and taken to the brink. Through it all, she had been hanging tough and never backed down for anything. Surely, that would make her able to win some tournament in the Last Frontier.