The Who- Pinball Wizard


The more prevalent the talk became, the harder it became for the listeners to pick the bits of reality from the onslaught of fiction. His name was uttered in secret, and with reverence, among those who truly grasped the enormity of his accomplishments. One fatal flicker from his simmering eyes was known to cause blindness in the impure, to leave a cold vein of fear in their hearts that could never be warmed or soothed away. His footsteps were echoes of the god's names. The world was re-created every day in his image, and it existed solely in the space between his fingers.

He was Seto Kaiba, and he was the greatest pinball player that the universe would ever see.

Each time he entered the arcade, patent leather shoes tapping off the time as if he had created it himself, silhouette carving out the shadows, light reverberating off him, a hush descended over the crowd as if noise had simply forgotten how to exist. All eyes turned to him; he pulled them in on his little finger and spun them lazily around his head like a golden yoyo. He loved the attention, but he would never let them see it.

His movements created new and unknown fields of gravity as he weaved through a neon sea of sticky game consoles with the ancient and violent grace of a stoic soldier set on glaring the life out of his enemies. Every inch of him was cool, smooth, flowing, and rejected the earth as something incurably inferior to what he felt he ought to be. The children worshipped him, carved his initials into their foreheads and lived in constant, thrilling, fear of his unpredictable wrath. The Arcade Elders, those who had witnessed the erection of the first Pac Man pixels from the drivel and dirt of the previously gameless world, every day reveled in their golden gold luck, that they, unworthy entities that they were, should be fortunate enough to see this enchanted creature walk the earth and breathe among them.

Whispers followed him like the silky ruffles of evening shadows. They said that one touch from his long, delicate fingers could turn garbage to gold. He could heal the sick, pluck money from the air, became invisible after the onslaught of nightfall, would never die, didn't bleed.

The rumors meant nothing to him, the people who made them even less. They were merely negative space, not worth his attention or his time. Upon entering the slimy, throbbing underworld on the Domino City Game Station, his senses took on new forms. Unnecessary distractions melted into the floor, the world lived and breathed solely to honor his very existence. He left behind his notion of what it meant to be human and soaked in the glory, if only for a few dazzling moments, of what it felt like to be God.

He had eyes only for the silver ball, darting in and out, raging across the board like a polished, perfect, silver bullet of fiery, vengeful wrath desperate to crown itself king of a soulless world. It was an eternal eye, gazing forever into Seto's own and running through the mazes of his soul. The controls were the warm, enveloping hands of a distant friend, half-forgotten lover. The bells and rings and chinks and whistles were a wistful, jerking hymn, sung in a language that only he could speak. Every movement was carelessly precise, unnecessarily elegant, and breathtakingly quick but clenchingly, unbearably slow. His movements bent time and threw it away. His focus was sharp enough to shatter glass, the waves of his concentrated, hurried, red breathing intense enough to carry satellite transmissions. He was the sun, all his admirers thoughtlessly and inescapably trapped in his addictive orbit.

The universe was not his. He was the universe. One whisper of his name, one allusion to his existence, was enough to bring the faithless to their knees and beg uselessly for pity.

And life wore on. The days built up as quickly and effortlessly as the initials "SK" climbed the score charts and eventually toppled them with youthful, dashing, and arrogant ease. Some might have hated him for his inhuman talent, but they were all too dazzled to do anything but allow him to snatch their breath away and beat out their cognitive ability as if it had been a tired old rug. He mutilated the idea of what talent was. He was not only a class by himself, he built his own university and laughed at the idea of admission.

One day everything changed. The world stopped turning, plants rejected the sun, and water began to flow uphill. He was usurped.

It happened slowly and suddenly, subtly and painfully, sharp as lightning but clung, stuck to him for days and gnawed at his bone marrow. He had sensed it the moment his feet had hit the black laminate floor. The air felt different, endued with inspiration and energy when, during his absence, it should have been saturated with the dreary and heavy hopelessness that his nonappearance tended to inspire among the mindless arcade junkies who licked the tip of his shadow and polished the air that he breathed. But not today. Things were not right, and he was determined to find out why.

Streamers of noise danced up and down the walls. They were laughing, cheering, applauding at something or someone that, contrary to any rational human assumption, was not him. The infuriating knowledge poked and pricked at him like beams of fire, luring him deeper and deeper into the festering heart of the arcade, determined to find the source of this unsettling disturbance.

He could immediately see that there had been a massacre. The floor was littered with the tell-tale signs of carnage: the splattered intestines of popcorn bags were listlessly limp and scattered, spilled soda soiled the floor like thick streams of heady red blood, the air was tainted with the pungent odor of burning, twisted metal.

And there he was. The tyrant, the murderer, the antichrist incarnate, with his stupid flowerly head and oversized pants. He stood pleasantly in the center of the chaos, disgustingly unaware of the violent disturbance that he had haplessly and idiotically wrought in the Natural Order of Things. And he was smiling. And waving, the jerk, waving at him.

"Kaiba-kun!" Yuugi smiled, childishly running his hand through his hair. "What are you doing here?"

Kaiba was floored. What was he doing here? What was he doing here? What was he doing here? No matter which word he chose to italicize the question was equally revolting. That was the question Kaiba should have been hurling at him, the disrespectful little shrimp that still needed a booster seat to see the blackboard! What heretical musings had crossed his microscopic mind that he had decided to traipse in, defiling this sacred temple of recreation with his exasperatingly ungodly presence?! It was beyond belief, floating along merrily on its charming little way somewhere on the darkest fridges of the universe, commonly referred to the Area of Irrational Ideas, with such pleasant conspiracies as sleeping, having fun, and Marxist economics. And friendship. He couldn't forget friendship with Yuugi hear, practically smothering him in huge, fluffy kitten-shaped pillows of it.

"Nothing." He snarled icily, trying desperately to make himself look as potentially dangerous as possible.

"Bet you came to see master Yuugi at it, didn't you, mister?" a pre-pubescent and greasy-faced middle-schooler interjected. "Yuugi Motou's the best pinball player there is!"

Yuugi blushed sheepishly and gingerly brushed the flattery away, as if afraid to break it. "I'm really not that good…"

"Are you kidding? You're epic, man! I mean, just look, you have all the high scores!" He gestured enthusiastically to the score chart which was, unbelievably, completely inundated by the beaming, sickening letters "YM."

Kaiba peered into the board, desperately mining for answers in this surreal situation, but it would have been easier to tell time in a Dali painting. The board offered no answers for its sudden and painful betrayal; it merely buzzed and flickered on like a fourth of July parade in the middle of December. Seto's head snapped incredulously between Yuugi and the board in a maddening cycle, unable and unwilling to accept the dish that destiny had served him. This was beyond possible. This was like the pope calling to say that Gozaburo had been given a first-class ticket to heaven, like getting anything less than a perfect score on a test, like kids suddenly deciding that drugs weren't cool and that they had never liked sugar that much, anyway.

"This. Isn't. Possible." Kaiba hissed out between stony, bitter teeth. "Do you have any idea what you've done?"

Yuugi's face was a puzzle of confusion. He had no idea what kind of disaster he had created. It was like he had announced the discovery of particle physics in the thirteenth century and left to a bunch of rural French farmers to fill in the rest while he went out for tea. Kaiba could hear the apocalypse bells ringing with heavy metallic glory in the distance. The air stunk with Armageddon.

"Sorry Kaiba-kun…I was just playing pinball. Do you know how?"

"No."

"Wait, you look a little familiar, aren't you the guy who—" the pesky little child was trying to interrupt with more pointless commentary. Kaiba shoved him aside.

"I wouldn't waste my time on a childish diversion like this." Kaiba sneered before storming off, making sure to leave plenty of thunderclouds behind for Yuugi to wallow in as he wondered, to no one in particular, what he was doing at the arcade in the first place.

Kaiba didn't rest. Determined to cleanse himself of the unholy feeling of failure, he scoured the world from the 24 inches of his computer screen, determined to find the perfect glove to fit his immaculately groomed hand: the one game that would guarantee him success, glory, validation. After hours of tireless questing, he found his panacea: delicate series of intricately rendered monsters, entrancing spell cards, and the one that captivated him to eternity and pulled the air from his lungs: the majestic Blue Eyes White Dragon.

This was it. He was certain of it.


It's so unlike me to write something so unabashedly silly, but this song happened to come on while I was doing my homework today and I was struck with a sudden flash of inspiration. I realize that it's not exactly cannon—the original idea was just to have a description of Seto's epic pinball-playing powers—but I wanted to bring some conflict into the story to add some drama XD.