"We should report this to the front desk," said Téa.
"What are we going to tell them?" asked Caerii, in disbelief. "That we were robbed by a gnome…?"
"Well, I suppose we could…" Téa began, but trailed off. It did sound too crazy.
"Exactly," said Caerii. "But I think we should take inventory to make sure that nothing's missing."
"I don't know what that thing would want…" said Téa. "I'm not carrying any food with me. All I have in my suitcases are clothes, books, and photos."
"Maybe it likes shiny things, and it was after that pocket organizer of yours?"
"No; I always carry that with me," Téa replied, gathering her things. "It doesn't look like I'm missing anything. How about you?"
"Nope," she replied, sifting through the mess. "But I wonder what it was looking for…"
"Forget that," said Téa. "I want to know how it got in here; what's to stop it from coming back?" She paused as an idea came to her. "Hey, Caerii? Can you keep an eye on my stuff? I think I need to take another walk."
Seto Kaiba may as well have been a marble statue again as he waited for his quarry. A few hours after his arrival in Vancouver, he had found Keith and proceeded to tail him. Seto moved with the stealth and silence of a tiger; Keith had no idea that the CEO was so close. And when Keith ended up in a large park, obviously waiting to meet some sort of contact, Seto hid himself behind a large fountain. Dusk began to descend upon the city, and Keith (along with Seto) was getting visibly impatient as his contact refused to show up.
Seto's thoughts turned to his younger brother. Hopefully, Mokuba wasn't too worried about Seto's prolonged absence; Seto had sent him several emails detailing what had been going on (but he had been careful to leave out the detail of Téa's hug; Mokuba wouldn't have allowed him to forget it anytime soon).
Tired though he was, Seto refused to give in to so much as a yawn. A slight breeze caught his trenchcoat and attempted to tousle his hair, but he didn't move. The moving trenchcoat went unnoticed; concealed within the shadow of the fountain, he may as well have been invisible.
After several more minutes of waiting, Seto glanced behind him to check the time on a tall clock tower. But, to his utter shock, he found his view blocked by a man standing only a couple yards away, staring in his direction.
The young man's heart faltered ever so slightly as he recognized the other man. The bald head and haunting eyes were unmistakable; it was the same Rare Hunter that Yugi had defeated in Battle City and won Slifer the Sky Dragon from.
Seto froze. Was the Rare Hunter able to see him? He thought that he had been well-hidden, but if the Rare Hunter came any closer, Seto ran the risk of being discovered.
"You're late, Strings!" Keith snarled.
The bald Rare Hunter cast one more glance into the shadows of the fountain and then walked over to Keith, maintaining his eerie silence. Seto, who had been holding his breath, released a quiet sigh of relief. It wasn't as though he had feared the Rare Hunter; being discovered would have seriously ruined his plans.
"I called you here to tell you that the rendezvous will be going according to plan," said Keith. "We weren't sure if the operation was going to be a success, but things worked out better than we ever could have imagined. It's only a matter of time until Domino will be ours."
Strings still did not say a word. Seto leaned in closer, trying to hear every word.
"I'd like to see the look on Yugi Muto's face when he realizes what's been happening," mused Keith. "He and his crew don't suspect a thing; I got inside information from our Domino contact. She's been a bit late with her messages, though; I guess they've been keeping more tabs on her for some of the recent incidents at Kaiba Corporation."
The CEO's eyes blazed. Was one of his workers a traitor? It certainly wouldn't have been the first time such a thing had happened. But then he realized the implications of the situation.
"Mokuba!" his mind exclaimed. With Seto absent from Domino, it would be only too easy for whoever the traitor was to do something to the raven-haired boy. He knew that Mokuba was fine for the moment; he had been exchanging emails with his brother a mere hour ago. All the same, Seto realized that he would have to alert Roland about this as soon as possible.
"Are you just going to stand there in eternal silence, Strings!?" the card shark snapped at the other man. "You're driving me crazy; I don't know how Ishtar managed to put up with you! Look, you'd better show up at the rendezvous next week! Did that, at least, get through your head!?"
He still received no reply, and Bandit Keith turned away, muttering furiously under his breath. Despite himself, Seto smirked at the thief's frustrations; it was times like these that he relished tackling his problems alone. Here, Seto was free to carry out whatever counter maneuver he came up with, and Téa Gardner, thousands and thousands of miles away right now, wouldn't be able to insist on helping.
"And yet she cared enough about you to offer," the normally silent part of his mind reminded him.
And now Seto flinched. Why was he thinking about Téa now, of all possible times!?
"You can't escape that fact," the voice went on. "But this isn't the first time, though is it? What about when you had been bitten by the funnel web spider? She was the only one who was there. She was the only one who never left your side. She was the one who tried to keep you awake."
What Seto had dismissed then as typical Téa Gardner care was perhaps deeper. She had placed her cards on the table; she had all but told him that she was in love with his caring side. He realized that he would have to deal with this situation. He would have to tell her that this caring side she loved was almost nonexistent, and that this foolishness would have to stop before it drove both of them to insanity.
But that hug… that hug that he had vowed to never speak of to anyone… The more he tried to forget it, the deeper the memory seemed to etch into his mind. His head didn't want the memory, but for some reason, his heart did.
Bandit Keith's voice jolted him from his thoughts.
"What are you looking at, Strings!?" the card shark quipped, as Strings began to look into the fountain shadows. "Is someone there?"
When Strings did not reply, Keith began to walk towards the fountain. But he never knew what hit him; Seto caught the thief in a judo throw. Hurtling through the air, Keith knocked Strings off of his feet, and Seto chose that moment to retreat into the night.
"You had to keep you mouth shut!?" Keith roared at his underling. "Why couldn't you have told me that there was someone there!?"
Once again, there was no answer, which prompted Seto to smirk as he fled. The CEO's trenchcoat whipped among the night breeze. He wasn't upset at having his cover blown; when the card shark had been sent hurtling through the air, a receipt for a plane ticket had fallen from his pocket. And it hadn't escaped Seto's sharp eyes; he had managed to catch a glimpse of it in the moonlight.
He knew exactly where he was heading next.
"Hey, Téa; I thought you were going to take a rest…" said Aurus, as he saw her walk through the lobby. He had been in the middle of a game of chess with Hesper, but had paused to greet her.
"Later; right now, I have a gnome to catch," she replied.
"OK; good luck with that," the young man replied, turning back to his game. He suddenly did a double take as her words sank in, and he gave her a most bewildered look indeed.
Téa didn't even notice; she was following the creature's path through a small maze of hedges.
"I almost wish that Kaiba was here; he should have seen this…" she mused, in spite of herself. "I wonder if he'd think that it was just another mind trick…"
Of course, there were other reasons why she wished that Seto Kaiba was with her.
"How did I ever get this far…?" she asked herself. And then, as though to answer her, her memory recalled that horrible scene a few months ago… Seto, bitten by a funnel web spider, slipping away before her very eyes…
She suppressed the shudder, but it made her realize that it had taken nearly losing Seto to make her see how much he meant to her. But now, he was still slipping away from her, but in a different sense; his own pride was getting in their way, refusing to allow him to feel the emotions that she knew he had.
"Would he have stayed by my side if I had been the one to be bitten by the spider that day?" she asked herself, forgetting all about the gnome as she stood still in the hedge maze.
She wasn't sure. Oh, she was certain that Seto would not have left her if there had been even the slightest chance that she would have pulled through. After all, he had saved her from drowning only a few hours before the spider incident. But even after Seto had fallen into a venom-induced coma, she had not left him, and that was what she was doubtful of; Seto didn't seem like the type to stand by someone who had no hope of pulling through. Perhaps he would've simply taken her back to her friends, regretting that the event had occurred.
Of course, there was no real way of knowing. And Téa had to admit that those were not circumstances that she wanted to be in.
A rustling of the hedges reminded her of her quest. She made her way through more of the maze. She eventually found what she was looking for. In one of the corridors of the maze, the gnome, no bigger than a foot high, was standing, motionless by one of the hedges. Téa slowly crept up behind, it but the creature still didn't move a muscle.
"It's fake!" she realized. "It was some sort of mechanical gnome! But why in earth would someone send a robotic gnome to dig through our stuff? Either these are some insanely overzealous thieves we're dealing with, or there's more to this than meets the eye…"
She inspected the gnome without touching it; the last thing she wanted to do was to get her fingerprints on it and remove the guilty party's prints at the same time. There was no visible logo of any company on the gnome, and she had to admit that the prospect of a fake gnome was something rather reminiscent of Pegasus and his hoard of Toon monsters. However, this made no sense at all; why would Pegasus, a wealthy and busy CEO, have a gnome break into her room and root through her luggage (not to mention Caerii's suitcase, as well)?
Taking out her handheld computer, which had a built in camera, she took a few pictures of the gnome. Perhaps Seto could figure out something about it, assuming he didn't take it as another joke on her part.
Could it have been some sort of bizarre coincidence? Had she simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time?
A rustling of hedges prompted her to seek a hiding place in one of the adjacent corridors of the maze. Maybe now she could get a few answers to this increasingly puzzling scenario.
"Here it is…" said a man's voice. A man, completely unrecognizable to Téa, came and picked up the mecha-gnome. He glanced back at his companion, who had just appeared, and Téa's mouth fell open in horror.
She didn't know the second man by name, but she knew him all too well—the green hair was unmistakable. It was the sullen-face Rare Hunter who had, under Marik's orders, kidnapped her, brought her to Domino Pier, and had her sit trapped, with a crate looming ominously over her head while she had been forced to watch Yugi duel a possessed Joey back in Battle City.
And then, unbidden, her mind spoke to her.
"It was Kaiba who saved you that day," the voice inside her said. "He called for the helicopter to remove the trap, and he was the one who prevented that creep from releasing that crate…"
She had felt fear that day, and the very presence of this Rare Hunter was beginning to instill fear within her as she watched. And now, as she stared at the enfolding scene, she began to wish more than ever that Seto Kaiba was once again with her.