Chapter One: The Bandaged Man
Yugi and the Pharaoh were standing in a dark alley, with red brick walls on either side of them. Rain poured down heavily onto their heads, soaking through their clothing and hair. The only thing that illuminated the trash bins and pieces of paper that littered the alleyway was the occasional flash of lightning above them.
"Pharaoh, where are we?" Yugi asked, looking around the creepy alley.
"I've never seen this place before," he replied. "I would certainly recall being somewhere this strange…"
Suddenly, another flash of lightning revealed somebody standing at the end of the alleyway. The person was a man dressed in a tan trench coat, black fedora hat, black pants, and black shoes. The strangest thing was that wrapped around his face and hands were white bandages, making him look like a mummy. Black sunglasses covered up his eyes.
The man stared down the alley at the two of them, not moving a muscle.
"Pharaoh…who is that?" Yugi asked, terrified by the man's ominous presence.
"I don't think we want to find out," he replied, also getting some sense of danger.
The two turned and started running down the alley, puddles of rain splashing up around them as they dashed through them.
The man held up his hands. White bandages suddenly shot out from them and flew towards the fleeing teens.
The next thing they knew, the bandages had wrapped themselves tightly around Yugi and the Pharaoh, pinning their arms to their sides and preventing them from using any magic or force fields to escape. The bandages started pulling them back towards the creepy guy.
Yugi and the Pharaoh struggled to break free, but the bandages only kept getting tighter and tighter.
Finally, right when they were only a few inches from the man, Yugi let out an ear-splitting scream-
-and sat straight up in his bed, gasping for breath. Once he'd finally calmed down, he flung himself back down onto his pillow, and murmured, "He almost had us that time…"
The Pharaoh's spirit appeared on the side of his bed. "Are you all right, Yugi?" he asked with an extremely worried look on his face.
"Yeah, I'm okay," Yugi assured him, "but these nightmares are getting to be such a pain…" He turned and looked the clock by the side of his bed. It was eight in the morning, and yet he felt like he hadn't slept at all. He stretched and let out a loud yawn.
"I'm so tired…" he groaned as he got out of bed. "Every time I dream about that strange man, I wake up feeling like I've been running all night…and I've had that dream for about a week now…"
"Whoever he is, he's certainly persistent," the Pharaoh commented.
"But what does he want with us?" Yugi asked as he walked over to his closet. "He doesn't say anything, we can't even tell what his face looks like, and he doesn't try to attack…he just brings us over to him." He yawned again as he pulled the door open. "It's so weird…"
"Yugi, if this dream is affecting you in real life, perhaps it's not just a dream after all," the Pharaoh said. "This being, whoever he is, could be attacking your friends as well."
Yugi paused, his hand stretched out towards the jacket of his school uniform. "Could be…" he said. "I think I'll ask them about it at school." He let out another loud yawn. "If I don't pass out from exhaustion first…"
