Un-betaed.
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Chapter Seven: Currents
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The hotel's ballroom was grandiose, magnificent, and utterly over the top, with several chandeliers, and oil paintings in oversized gilded frames. The clearly Western style of the room confused Hermione, but she put the thought aside easily, mentally tagging the oddity as likely an outdated fashion, before staring at the actual inhabitants of the room.
The milling duelists were much out of place. There was no organization, or ringleader, but only bands and clumps of people, talking. The only unifying aspect was the duel disks.
Hermione shifted, looking again at the door, before switching to look at Mai. She still didn't quite know what to think of her. It was odd, but she missed Hogwarts. Even if house stereotypes weren't accurate, she would at least have an idea of where to start with Mai.
Many of the looks Mai drew did slip down to her nonexistent neckline, then further down, but when they spoke to her, but Hermione also caught how more often than not, the gaze slide to her duel disk.
Hermione's own duel disk was light on her arm, but her deck felt heavy in her pocket. There was the undeniable urge to go back to her hotel room, but the memory of the otter held her back. It was easier not to think about it in a crowd. As real and wondrous as it had been, the idea of why it had appeared scared her.
Mai suddenly sighed, a deep sigh laced with relief.
"What is it?"
Mai looked over and then away, and her she said in too light a voice, "I just noticed that someone wasn't here."
"Oh." Hermione wanted to pry, but didn't.
Mai looked at her, almost waiting, but a slow smile grew as the silence between them almost became comfortable. Mai stretched her arms, and her smile turned to a fierce grin. "Figured out why we're all here?"
"No," Hermione admitted.
"Ah," Mai said softly. "You aren't looking then. Do you feel you have somewhere else to be?"
"Well, yes!" Hermione tried to say lightly, but the words came out as snapped. "I have other things to do."
Mai looked at her, eyes blank. "Do you? What did you come to Japan for then?"
Hermione looked away.
"I see."
"I have something else to do tonight." A dozen lies sprang to mind, but not even half were believable.
"More important thandueling?" The question was asked with incredulity, but there was uncertainty in the tone.
Hermione shrugged. I need to make up spells so I can save my friends and a secret world, seemed a little more than unlikely. But with the faces of Harry and Ron resolving in her mind, a memory of all them laughing in the common room almost echoing in her thoughts, she met Mai's eyes
She nodded. "Yes. More important than dueling."
The other duelist flowed around, and they both stood, staring each other down, daring the other to break. Mai wanted something, but so did Hermione. Peace for a night to study, and plan her stay was not much to ask.
Mai then laughed, breaking the tension. "Yes," she said, almost silently, the word wedged between chuckles. "You..."
"I what?" asked Hermione.
"You have fire in you, girl. Question is," Mai paused dramatically.
Hermione arched an eyebrow, ready to play her game, as long as Mai got on with it. If it got her peace, she would do it.
"Do you have the will to back it up?" Mai paused, and her eyes flickered over Hermione, searching her. "There's a reason not to many woman are among the top duelists. Of the top of my head, I can only think of a few. A girl in America, not even thirteen yet. She's a brat; I think she'll burn out once she notices boys. The other is actually your fellow representative, Maria Kaur, but she's only come to Japan twice, out of all the times she's a had chance to."
"And?" Hermione prompted.
"I've seen only one other girl with talent and drive like yours. We had half a duel before I saw she was skilled beyond exceptions, but utterly devoted to her a friend, and was only dueling for him."
Hermione then smiled and knew from slight narrowing of Mai's eyes, it was an odd one. She smiled a little more broadly, thinking of Harry. "Wasn't that enough of a duel for you then?"
"No. I forfeited after I lost one of my prized monsters. She wasn't going to play again. I want a rival, not just an opponent."
"You think that I--" The final words choked Hermione. All she had wanted when she had come here was a place to practice magic under-age, and some time to test to her spells. But this--
"You maybe that woman, you may not be."
"But there's plenty of other people!" Hermione gestured wildly around. "There! Dinosaur Ryuuzaki over there. Didn't he win this year's Japanese Nationals?"
"And lost last year's," Mai drawled. "Besides, I've beaten him already. He's too weak. He's hit a glass ceiling. He can't play the mind games far enough."
"Jonouchi?" Hermione cast around. "You've talked to him before."
Mai's face clouded. "Perhaps once, but after... That option was no longer available after Battle City." Mai looked away.
Hermione nodded faintly, wishing she had taken a chance to get a glass and a drink from one of the many pitchers of ice water set out.
"Besides," Mai said suddenly, "Most men are distracted by these." She took deep breath, and her chest strained at the corset, the curve of her breast suddenly clear.
Hermione flushed, and then looked away quickly. "Ah. Yes, that would be a rather distracting technique to some."
Mai chuckled. "Precisely. That's why I'm asking you. Do you think you could be my rival?"
Hermione settled on a quick shrug. "I can't go to tournaments. I have school."
Mai nodded, not seeming particularly unhappy. The early tenseness, and intensity had drained away. "Hmmm. Talk to me after tonight then. HEY!" She yelled, waving. " Roba, I want to duel you!"
"I thought you wanted-" Hermione began.
"To duel you? Later." Mai flashed her a quick, half-feral grin. "Later. Duel a few others tonight. I don't need a fast answer."
She left in with a sharp turn, and her swirling curls almost touched Hermione's dazed face.
The turns in the conversation had left Hermione more confused, and Mai still hadn't told her what was going on. Look closer? Mai had said something like that, but all Hermione could see were duelists, gathering for no apparent reason.
So then, that meant an obscure reason, that most of the duelist had picked up on, enough for this to happen with little to no communication. Was it some type of little known custom to meet and greet the night before the tournament?
Mai and Roba where not the only ones dueling; across, the room she could already see two duelists --one she recognized as an Australian duelist that was said to be among the top twenty in the world --according to the magazines, and the other a lesser known New Zealander-- in the final steps of their duel. Normally, she thought that the duel might have drawn a crowd, but the other duelists where barely watching, too busily looking elsewhere...
...Looking elsewhere for opponents. Hermione blinked at the realization, but couldn't find anything that would contradict it. While there was a tournament the next day, the duelist had already begun the fight. Maybe this had something to do with the mind games Mai had mentioned.
However, Hermione didn't feel like dueling, for all that she could feel the deck in her pocket.
What she had done earlier in her room, bring a card's image to life, preyed heavily on her mind. She had never been much given over to accidental magic, even when she had been a child. It had been easy for her to find something, before Hogwarts. She'd always had helped search for lost keys, planners, and books, finding them in a place the others had sworn they had searched, but it had been a quiet talent, nothing blatant. She had been every so surprised to get her letter.
To have called up, created, or called up the card-otter was something beyond what she had ever done accidentally. If she had done it in England, the owl from the Improper Use of Magic Ministry would have already been at her window.
In all honesty, Hermione admitted to herself, she was now scared. She was half-afraid to go back up to her room. If she did, she would practice and test more spells, until she fell over from exhaustion.
If she did try to do more magic, she might do the same thing, and the thing would be back.
One of the problems with being as well read, was that she could thing of all sorts of things that creature could be; the ideas ranged from a shape-shifter, to magic wave, given form by her thoughts. Other, darker ideas lurked in the back of her mind. There were curses, slow acting that were virtually undetectable, but drove the victim into inescapable madness. Death Eaters knew them. She'd read her history books, the brutal, honest ones not in the curriculum, that showed just why Harry was so revered as the Boy-Who-Lived.
That train of thought brought her right back to her worries about spell casting, the limited time she had in Japan, and its more lenient laws. It was a circular pattern that was going though its third loop, when she distantly realized that someone was asking her something.
"You're the English girl, right?"
The man who asked wasn't much older than her, but had a scar on one cheek. His hair was comparable to that of many other duelists, slightly unkept and sticking up everywhere, expect for the think ponytail at the nape of his neck. His outfit was odd, but everything about this whole card game was starting to seem more than strange to Hermione.
"Yes."
"Ryota Kajiki," the man said simply, pointing at himself. "You have a water deck too. I looked up the record of duels in England."
Hermione shook her head, "No, my deck has a focus on water cards, but it's nothing more than that."
"You really are new," Kajiki smiled. "Do you even know what's happening right now?"
Hermione looked at him suspiciously. Mai's help she could understand; it was almost a 'we girls should stick together' attitude mixed with a longing for an equal. This man had looked up what little past she had dueling. Why?
"I think I have a good guess," she settled on saying.
"It's the real tournament," Kajiki said, shrugging. "None of us are happy with the set-up for tomorrow. It's almost as bad and regulated as Nationals, but the prize isn't nearly as good."
"Nationals really that bad here in Japan?"
Kajiki looked at her oddly. "They're infamous for it. If you're playing in it, you're only after the prize money, or maybe trying to get noticed. This is your first international tournament, right? You might want to consider going to yours for more rankings."
"You always this helpful?" Hermione asked.
"Only to people I want to duel." He saw her disbelieving look, and the grin on his face eased a little, becoming less forced. "I'd even feed you if I thought you would duel me later. Surely that information is worth one quick duel."
"It's nothing that I couldn't have figured out myself," Hermione bristled.
"Here's a little more then," Kajiki said softly. "Both Yuugi Mutou and Seto Kaiba are here too, and neither of them have been seen since they checked in,and went to Mutou's suite on the sixth floor. I don't think they're going to be down here tonight, which means anyone can win."
Hermione shrugged, even if the idea of dueling did seem a little more attractive. Better perhaps then sitting in her room and writing a list from memory of long term curses that could cause delusions.
Her deck was already out of her pocket, and her hand had almost placed it into the proper slot on the duel disk before she consciously realized that she was going to duel.
"Fine," Hermione said, throwing her plan to go back to her room and research more to the wind, "We can duel."
Kajiki grinned, and let his own duel disk activate.
Hermione followed suit, and drew her hand, fanning the cards out. The hand wasn't perfect, but she could probably make due with it. Probably.
Kajiki seemed more thrilled by his hand and began the duel by placing a monster face down on the field, along with another card face down.
Hermione judged it likely to be a trap, and followed suit, laying one of her weaker monsters. A turn later, she regretted her restraint when his trap activated. She knew she was now dueling at a very different level, and suddenly the glimpses of strategy she had seen reading reports of major duels dizzied her. So did the lack of high-level strategy she had used when putting together her own deck --which while still quite serviceable, had a few fatal flaws. Not the least of which of those were a lack of versatile magic cards, but she felt something more than that was missing from her deck.
She was slightly confused a few times when her still very new knowledge of Japanese didn't quite mesh with what Kajiki was saying, though it was obvious that he did love the sea. She couldn't quite understand whether he was trying to become a marine biologist or a fisherman.
He was... odd enough, that she was starting to think that he really did mean he wanted to become one of the world's greatest fisherman. When he sacrificed yet another fish to play an even bigger fish, she was nearly sure of it... but this 'bigger fish' had over twenty-five hundred attack points.
The duel became harder, and unnecessary thoughts were shoved aside as the sheer exhilaration of each card caught Hermione. It was easy to stop thinking about the half-finished calculations she still had to do, easier still to forget about how she would need to set up the next set of answers to transmute into wand motions and words.
Each card flip became a motion that meant everything, a chance to win to be gained or lost.
Both their decks over half played, Hermione won, her lithe Rusalka, a vengeful water-maiden, destroying Kajiki's Flying Fish. It was a weak monster to have played late in the game, and Hermione held her breath as it shattered. However, the single card Kajiki had left on the field remained face down, and his life-points dropped to zero.
He looked at her as he put his deck back together. "You're still rough in a few places," he said, his earlier exuberance gone. "But... we all get stronger." The silence stretched between them a moment longer, and then Kajiki shrugged. "Get more practice in tonight. There are a few other heavy-hitters that aren't here tonight, but chances are --if you go far enough tomorrow-- you'll duel one of them."
"Thanks," Hermione murmured, still not exactly sure where her earlier resolve to go back to her room had gone to.
"I'll see you around."
A few moments after Kajiki left, she was challenged again, and then after that, again. Duels began to blur together, but later she would be able to clearly remember the card order and if she won or lost. However, as she played, Hermione was hard pressed to remember anything but the immediately now and what should be happening in a few turns.
It was a pure freedom to play.
The air in the ballroom had become stale after several hours, too many people packed into one room, and Hermione finally found time to stop, and go to the restroom. She stared at her reflection for several minutes, before going out of the hotel entirely, gasping in fresher night air.
But, even there, the thrill of the duel found her.
An arrogant boy, with moon-white hair and a duel disk found her.
"Let's duel." He grinned, and it was smile too wide to be called a smirk.
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