Author's Note: Oh, I'm so, so sorry. I actually had most of the new chapter written, and then my computer looked me right in the eyes, smiled at me with its horrible electronic grin, and said 'Y'know what would be really cool? If I was DEAD!'. Then, displaying the degree to which it loathed me, it melted its own goddamn hardrive and ruined all my files. I hate that computer, and I'm glad it's dead. My new computer is sleek, black, and polite. It has a fine new monitor which was expensive, but more than makes up for it with a wonderful flat screen that takes up very little desk-space. I'm considering showing pictures of it to my old computer's corpse in the junkyard, just to show it how quickly and efficiently it has been replaced.
Author's Note 2: In earlier chapters, I mentioned that I'd fallen in love with the anime Crono Crusade, a series about an exorcist nun named Rosette and her demonic sidekick Crono who go around fighting evil. Well, recently that show lost some of the love as it began to wind down. They faced the final villain of the series, the upper-level demon lord Aion the Sinner. Aion is a serious bad-ass, who has stomped Crono like a bug every time they've fought, defeated giant monsters made of diamond just by lookin' at them, and survived being shot through the head with a magical bullet without even flinching.
In his last duel with Crono, the final battle of the series, Aion got killed in thirty freakin' seconds.
I'm sorry, but the ultimate battle with the greatest evil in the series should NOT be less than a minute in length! It should be at LEAST a full episode if not two! Hell, Zorc in YGO lasted like five! Dante from Full-Metal Alchemist made it around four, Zechs Merquise from Gundam Wing dueled Heero for a full episode that I can remember off the top of my head. And don't even get me started on Majin Buu from DBZ. Can a final battle last for an entire season?
Crono Crusade has now joined Kill Bill: Volume 2 in the 'most anticlimactic final battle EVER' club. For shame, Sister Rosette. For SHAME.
Chapter 22: We seriously need some new villains
"This is so unfair." Evil Bakura sighed sadly. "Although frankly, I don't know exactly why this didn't occur to me earlier…"
-Oh, I can't fight this feeeeeeling, deep inside of meeeeee…- Yami crooned, continuing the sing-along with a rousing, horrendously off-key rendition of 'Hooked on a Feeling'. To Evil Bakura's relief, Yami and Bakura had not stuck to Gilbert and Sullivan, and were now singing songs that were pretty much chosen at random. Unfortunately, they still weren't very good at singing.
Evil Bakura winced. "Oh, Gods, what if the other ones all have a worthless vagrant ex-king living in them? I never actually got the eye to work, I don't know for sure it doesn't. Pegasus is certainly… unusual enough to have magical voices in his brain…"
"Hmmm? What was that, Bakura-girl? I was too busy reading this comic book about a horrifying pink version of Bugs Bunny that I'm totally obsessed with." Pegasus said.
"… Case in point. This raises the disturbing question of whether or not I even really want the other five items…"
"Along with the disturbing question of whether or not that guy in the eyepatch is, y'know, dead?" Misty asked. "Why do none of you seem to care that another human being just jumped off this blimp?"
"… … … HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" The entire Yu-Gi-Oh! cast began to laugh uproariously.
"Oh, that is so adorable," Kaiba said, wiping a tear of mirth from his eye. "S-she actually thinks we care about each other!"
"Kid, it goes like this," Joey said sagely. "Our lives suck. Therefore, when other people have WORSE lives, it makes us feel better about our own sad, sad existence."
"Are… are you people always so evil?"
"If you knew what we do with our spare time, you wouldn't ask that," Pegasus said.
"What do you do?" Ash asked cheerfully.
"Steal souls."
"… eek."
"Ah, the good old days," Evil Bakura said wistfully. "I haven't stolen a soul in a long time… I really miss it." Then he slapped himself in the face. "OW! WHAT THE HELL?"
-Wow, cool, I figured out how to control the motor functions!- Yami thought cheerfully, making Evil Bakura hit himself in the face again. –This is better than videogames! Maybe I should start a scoring system… twenty points a slap?-
"Oh, is that how we're gonna play it? Well, two can play at that game! Don't forget, I know where you live!" Evil Bakura said cruelly, and punched the Millennium Puzzle as hard as he could.
Silence.
((Looking back, punching a pointy metal thing may not have been the most intelligent way to strike back at you.)) Evil Bakura thought.
-Yeah especially since I didn't even feel it at all.- Yami agreed.
((The thought had occurred to me, although not until after I punched the thing, unfortunately.))
And the puzzle is magic, too, so it must be really, really hard, right? Bakura asked his other half.
((Oh, it is.))
-You broke your hand, huh?- Yami asked.
((Yeah, it seems to be pretty well broken. I'm… uh… I'm just going to collapse in pain and start screaming now.)) The spirit of the ring thought. "OH, SWEET RA, I BROKE MY #(#&( HAND!" he screamed out loud, collapsing to the floor.
"… Okay, soul removal notwithstanding, the villains DO seem more familiar the longer I stay here." Misty admitted.
"Well, while Bakura joins our rapidly overcrowding medical wing, we should move on in the tournament before we all die of old age," Kaiba interjected. "Now, let's see, the next tournament match-up will be Mai Valentine vs. Mal… um, Namu,"
"Um… well, Seto, we can't exactly run that match right at the moment…" Mokuba said.
"Hmmm? Why not?"
"… Seto, we were just talking about it. Please, please tell me that there's enough Humanity left in you that you haven't already completely forgotten the suicide that occurred on this very blimp not so very long ago."
"Sui-what now?"
"… Seto, you are so, so evil," Mokuba said sadly. Then, seeing the delighted smile on his brother's face, he added "THAT WAS NOT A COMPLIMENT! A human being did just die here, and even if you didn't like or care about him, you could at least REMEMBER it!"
"Oh, wait! Egyptian guy, blondeish hair, eyepatch?" Kaiba asked. "So he jumped off the blimp? Well, I guess we can delay his match until he gets back."
Joey raised his hand. "Um… people generally don't come back from that."
"Oh, silly, stupid Wheeler. Clearly, you don't understand how this tournament is going to work. Allow me to show you what is truly occurring here at this path to my ultimate destiny!" Kaiba then reached into his trenchcoat.
Instinctively, everyone ducked. But rather than his usual gun, Kaiba produced a piece of paper which he then unfolded and put on display for the crowd to see. It was a crude chart of some sort, apparently drawn in crayon with stick-figure illustrations. "Gaze ye, upon my blueprint of my future!"
Step 1: Hold tournament! (Illustration: stick-figure Kaiba, identified by his trenchcoat, holding a card and laughing at stick-figure Yugi, identified by spiky purple hair).
Extra-special step 2 (Hastily scribbled in between step 1 and the former step 2. Former Step 2 and all steps afterward have been re-numbered appropriately): Get second mind! (Illustration: Stick-figure Kaiba shaking hands with another stick-figure Kaiba and smiling)
Step 3: Beat Isis, but not too hard because she is very scary. (Illustration: Stick-figure Kaiba bowing down to stick-figure Isis, identified by long feminine hair, and giving her money after chivalrously defeating her.)
Step 4: CRUSH YUGI! KILL HIM AND CRUSH HIM AND TAKE HIS GOD FOR MEEEEEEEEEEE! (Illustration: stick-Kaiba holding stick-Yugi's severed head and laughing uproariously)
Step 5: Beat Malik, get all god cards, be cool. (Illustration: Stick-Kaiba smiling at a crying Stick-Malik, who is indistinguishable from stick-Isis because both are identified by long feminine hair).
The crowd read this chart. And then they contemplated it. "Is that written in crayon?" Joey asked slowly.
"It's so beautiful!" Tea said cheerfully.
"To be fair, it's still better than Malik's blueprint of his evil plans," Odion said sadly.
"… why, exactly, do I look exactly like my brother on this… thing?" Isis asked coldly.
Kaiba, eyes wide, made a move to jump off the blimp, before Mokuba tackled him around the knees. "NO! We will have no more of that!"
"Mokuba, she's gonna kill me! The only way to stop her is to beat her to the punch! If my life ends, it will be on my own terms!" Kaiba protested, struggling towards the edge of the blimp.
"Seto, stop it! As pointless as this tournament may be, you still have to run it!" Mokuba said, still dragging Seto away from the edge of the blimp.
"Oh, you don't have to worry, I'm not angry," Isis said cheerfully.
"… … … you're not? OH GOD I'M SORRY I QUESTIONED YOU!" Kaiba said.
"Such a silly boy," Isis said, smiling indulgently.
"Well… um… if I'm still alive… then I guess we go on?" Kaiba said, as though he seemed confused by his own life. "The next match is… Joey vs. Odio… Malik."
"Nah." Odion said.
"… what?"
"Nah. I don't feel like doing this. I don't even like this card game. The only reason I'm here is that I promised mother, on her deathbed, that I would look after Malik. Well, it's hard to look after a corpse that's buried ten feet in the ground from jumping off an airborne blimp. So no, I won't be playing,"
The silence was deep and terrible.
"You… you don't…. LIKE duel monsters?" Yugi asked, as though the very concept was beyond his comprehension.
"Nope." Odion said.
"But… everyone likes Duel Monsters. It's the meaning of life wrapped up in card game form!" Kaiba protested.
"Well, if everyone liked it, I would like it. And I don't. So not everyone does."
"I like pancakes!" Tea claimed.
"Yay, pancakes!" Tristan and Ash agreed.
"I… I… I… I don't know how to handle this, really." Kaiba said, seemingly at a loss for words.
"Disqualify me? Consider it a forfeit? I don't really care, but… whatever." Odion said dismissively.
"This… I… the whole world is falling apart! Oh, second evil mind, I need your help here!" Kaiba said. "Well? Come on! Oh, so what, now you're too GOOD to help out your own self? Well screw you!"
"Um… does Kaiba have another mind bound to him?" Yugi asked Isis.
"Possibly, but this particular one most likely has more to do with a chemical imbalance than a magical force…" Isis replied. "I really should have seen this coming when he was willing to crush himself to death under a stone tablet to get a playing card. I mean, there's geekdom, but this was going right past geekdom and firmly into the realm of psychosis."
"Oh, god, what if my evil mind is SO evil that it's even betraying ME? Maybe it won't talk to me because it wants me to die, because its intense hatred of all life is SO intense that it doesn't even care if it lives itself? Or… oh, no… what if I AM the evil mind? It was supposed to be just like me, how do I know which me is me anymore? I could be asking myself for guidance! HELP, LIEUTENANT MOKUBA, I DON'T KNOW WHO I AM ANYMORE!" Kaiba shrieked, curling up in a fetal position.
((Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand we're back!)) Inner Yugi crowed triumphantly. ((I gotta say, you were disturbingly self-confident there for a while, but I think we've gotten this crazy train back on track! Have I mentioned that the only reason anyone even pretends to like you is for your money?))
"ALL IS DESPAIR!" Kaiba wailed, sobbing.
"… this is starting to become a running gag." Mokuba grumbled.
"This is all your fault!" The Queen said, panting heavily.
"MY fault? You're the one who couldn't even pilot a helicopter!" Malik said, panting heavily.
"Like anyone could pilot properly when a person just falls out of the sky onto your helicopter! I'm just lucky I got us to the ground alive!" The Queen retorted, panting heavily.
The reason for all the heavy panting was that both villains really wanted to catch back up to the blimp. Unfortunately, after the crash landing, the helicopter engine was shot. However, with a few last-minute modifications and a lot of duct tape stolen from a hardware store near the crash site, they had managed to take the wreckage of the helicopter and construct a sort of makeshift flying machine. Again unfortunately, this contraption was, in addition to being slow, powered entirely by pedals (Again stolen, this time from some bicycles that some child had been silly enough to leave in their unlocked garage). And yet again unfortunately, they were both currently out of flunkies to pedal for them.
Consequently, both of them were getting rather more of a workout than they'd gotten… well, ever.
"Pedal faster, twerpo! I think I can kinda see a dot in the distance that may or may not be the blimp!" The Queen gasped.
"When I get the Egyptian God Cards, I am TOTALLY going to take all your favorite TV shows off the air for this!" Malik gasped in return.
"If you lay one FINGER on Care Bears, I swear I will rip out your freakin' liver."
"So, what do we do now? We're running low on people to do this thing." Mokuba said.
"I could go again, I guess. I mean, I did get a little gipped out of my game," Yugi offered.
"That's true, but generally speaking you need more than one person for a tournament. Maybe… if we count Odion as a forfeit, and disqualify Mai for public drunkenness and Malik for dying, that means Joey goes on to the next round too. And we're going to assume that some obscure rule makes Seto automatically the winner of the first round, so that really leaves us with just Miss Isis and Jerkass."
"Who's Jerk… oh, that's right. Me." Pegasus said.
"Damn straight, Jerkass. So, the next duel will be those two, if nobody has a problem?"
"Not at all," Isis said cheerfully.
"No problems here!" Pegasus said.
"I forfeit!" They said in unison.
"… … … huh?" Mokuba said.
"I saw the future that he would counter all my moves by reading my mind and it would be a draw." Isis said.
"I read her mind and saw that she would counter all my moves by seeing the future and it would be a draw." Pegasus said.
"So we forfeit because there's no point in really doing it, y'know?" They said in unison.
Mokuba rubbed his temples to fight off the approaching migraine. "I hate those freakin' Millennium Items so goddamn much…"
"So, what do we do now? We don't have any Malik, Bakura's out, Kaiba's nuts, and these two have managed to disqualify themselves through inaction. The only one really left to duel is Joey, and he has nobody to compete with! What exactly are we going to do?" Yugi inquired.
Joey looked at Odion. "Are ya SURE ya can't just do this ONE match? I'll beat ya really quick!"
Odion nodded gravely. "NO. The only reason I even joined this stupid tournament is because of my oath to Malik, and now that he's gone, so am I! Malik is dead, and I didn't kill him myself. Therefore, my oath is completely fulfilled and I can move on with my new, free life completely guilt-free. And that little idiot is NEVER going to ruin my life again!"
It was not immediately obvious what had happened, exactly. All that anyone knew for sure, right at the beginning, was that there was a horrible shrieking noise, followed by a massive explosion, followed by a sickening crunch.
The shrieking noise was the sound of a vaguely helicopter-ish metal and plastic thing being sucked into the jet intake on the blimp. The explosion was the sound of said jet intake exploding violently. And the crunch was… well, you can probably figure it out.
"Thank Ra we landed on Odion! Otherwise, that might have really hurt!" Malik said thankfully.
"How… how did we survive being sucked into that jet intake? And how did we get INTO it? To be sucked in a jet intake we'd have to have been in FRONT of the blimp, and we were clearly behind! And why does a BLIMP even have JET ENGINES?" The Queen asked.
"If I had to guess, I'd say somebody, most likely Odion here…" Malik began, poking his limp brother/henchman, "Said something that made our showing up right at that second really ironic."
"Oh. Well, I guess we owe him one, then."
((Oh, we owe him more than one.)) Yami Malik said.
And what might you mean by that?
((Well, it's just that, as I recall the rules, ODION is the primary factor sealing me in the Millennium Rod. And when he is rendered… spiritually unavailable… that means I get to leave it. And do things like… oh… THIS!)) Yami Malik said triumphantly, spiritually picking up his nicer counterpart by the pants and spiritually chucking him into the spiritual abyss like a bouncer tossing someone out of a bar.
"Um… Malik? You feelin' okay?" Yugi asked.
Looking up from his spiritual conversation, Yami Malik smirked. "Never better."
In Kaiba's private blimp movie theatre, The Dark, Foul, Evil, Sorceress of Chaos and Destruction™ sat watching Lady in the Water and eating popcorn. She took a sip from her Pepsi and tilted her head. "Ohhhhhhhhh! I get it now! The secret twist ending is that the movie isn't any good! That M. Night Shymalan is a GENIUS!" she said, smiling happily at her cleverness in discerning the twist.
Then she scratched her chin thoughtfully. "I wonder when all those people are going to remember that I'm down here?" then she shrugged. "Ah, who cares. Saaaay, I wonder if this theatre has that new Pirates movie? I just loved the first one."
((How exactly did it come to this?)) Evil Bakura mentally inquired. ((This puzzle was supposed to solve all my problems. Instead… my problems have gotten infinitely more obnoxious. And damn, my hand is in quite a lot of pain.))
MY hand. Bakura reminded him. All evidence to the contrary aside, this is still my body.
((Ah, that's right. Anything bad that happens to me also harms you by necessity,)) Evil Bakura thought, smiling. ((Thanks, Bakura, you always know just what to say to cheer me up.))
No problem.
((And in reality, I'm still mostly in control of this body, right? It's not like the Pharaoh has any REAL power. Yes, he's nothing more than a temporary annoyance that shall be swept aside in due time.)) Evil Bakura thought. Then his unbroken left hand swung across his body to punch his broken right hand.
"GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Evil Bakura roared in agony.
-I am getting better at controlling those motor functions all the time!- Yami marveled. –I think it even gets easier as I do it, too! Maybe I'm becoming more adapted to this body.-
((I swear to every dark, sinister god that ever befouled the heavens, I will FIND A WAY TO RE-KILL YOU!)) Evil Bakura psychically shrieked.
You most definitely shall not! We must be kind to our guests. Bakura sniffed.
((HE IS NOT A GUEST!))
But you invited him over! He wouldn't be here if you hadn't brought him here!
((I… I… I… I hate you both so much…)) Evil Bakura sighed.
-Oh, look on the bright side, skippy.- Yami said. –At least your life can't…-
((NO! DON'T SAY IT!))
-Don't say what?-
((What you were about to say! You know that when you say… THAT… it invariably happens!))
-What invariably happens?- Yami asked, smirking wickedly.
((IT GETS WORSE!))
-Now, what would make that occur?-
((Saying 'it can't possibly get worse!'))
/AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH/ Malik shrieked as he crash-landed in Bakura's psyche, landing on top of Evil Bakura's spiritual image. /Wow, how'd I get here/ he asked, looking around.
Crushed under the fallen Egyptian lad, Evil Bakura glowered at Yami, who was smirking more triumphantly than ever. ((God dammit, I hate you.)) he said.