If you've been reading this far, thank you SO much! This is the last chapter I've written thus far, so let's get it over with!

Disclaimer: I don't own Yugioh or any of the characters I'll be using. I just have the right to think about updating this fanfiction. I also don't pretend like I have any affiliation with Disney other than enjoying their movies and their theme parks; the character of Mrs. Hermand does have a history, in which Disney proves to be a saving grace. If I ever finish Trebuchet, I just may write her story.

Chapter 8

Friday, December 3rd, 2004, 6:56 AM

Ms. Hermand was luckily not already there waiting for him when Kaiba turned the corner into the hallway where his office was located the next morning. He had considered what he was going to say to her even more during the night, and felt prepared enough to come up a sort of a deal that would leave KaibaCorp off of Disney's radar long enough, Kaiba supposed, for Disney to think Industrial Illusions was a weaker target.

What if he was wrong? Kaiba had never stopped to think about that. The words stayed in his mind, however; paying them no heed did not cause them to simply disappear. If Kaiba was wrong, which he was quite certain he was not, then most of what he had been planning on saying would sound as if KaibaCorp were trying to circumnavigate around Disney; that is, it would seem KaibaCorp were afraid.

And if Kaiba wasn't afraid, hell if is company were.

When he reached his office he brushed his hair again, combing it down a bit more after the helicopter ride had mangled it up. On his computer he saw that Hermand had found his email address, and told him that she would arrive at seven-thirty, just like before. The message came from late last night. She probably wouldn't respond to a message Kaiba could send back, so instead he passed the approximate thirty minute wait planning out his weekend and setting up some sort of meeting with Yoori, the new secretary that supposedly was showing up today. Kaiba frowned slightly when he realized that he did not tell Yoori when to show up today, so far all he knew today Kaiba was on his own as well. Kaiba was muttering in frustration when there was a phone call from the lobby explaining that Ms. Hermand had arrived.

"Send her up, I can see her now," Kaiba said. Several minutes later, there was a knock on the door.

"It's not locked," Kaiba called out.

Ms. Hermand stepped in, turned, and shut the door. Then she faced Kaiba and gave him another sappy smile that Kaiba only returned with a scowl. She kept smiling as she took the seat in front of Kaiba without asking for permission beforehand.

"How are you, Mr. Kaiba?"

"Fine. Yourself?"

"Perfect, thank you."

All trivialities. It was time to get started.

"About your partnership proposal," Kaiba began.

"I was hoping you'd bring that up later, but I suppose now would suffice," she sighed heavily.

"Why later?"

"I wanted to ask you a few things."

"Do they have to do with the proposal?"

"Not quite, but-"

"Then let's wait until we're partners before you start learning anything about me you don't need to know."

She looked up at him inquisitively. "You said until we're partners….so you accept it?"

Kaiba smiled politely, but did the crossing of his hands on his desk that was customary whenever he was getting down to business.

"Not quite."

She looked at him, eyes betraying almost anger that neither her expression nor her voice did.

"Excuse me?"

"Not without a few guidelines," Kaiba elaborated slowly.

"I see," Ms. Hermand said. "I almost thought it was a complete refusal."

Kaiba frowned. "No. Not yet. My guidelines are rigid and if you don't stringently follow them then it might become one."

Ms. Hermand's blue eyes gored into him, as if trying to chew threw his skin to see his meaning. Kaiba was in control now.

"Let's hear it," Ms. Hermand said, resigned.

"One," Kaiba recited, remembering his draft of what he was to say. "Almost anything that is customary to be said of a partnership I am saying now. No buying my stocks, no going behind my back and making business deals that hurt my enterprise. You know the drill."

Azure eyes gleamed in response. "But of course."

"Now for specifics. Two," Kaiba continued. "You will subsume Industrial Illusions Company."

Kaiba smirked when he saw Ms. Hermand's expression move from impassive to genuinely startled. "Why would you force us to do that?"

"Because that's the way I do my business."

"You'd better start changing if you're going international."

"Have you considered what would happen if we did?"

Ms. Hermand began to tap her fingers on the cherry desk. "You would no longer be a localized partner. You'd be bigger."

"Isn't that what you would want? What you'd be delighted to put out in staff memos?"

She regarded Kaiba cautiously.

"And what do you think of Mr. Crawford?"

It was Kaiba's turn to lose understanding.

"Why are you bringing him up?"

"I've already talked with him," Ms. Hermand said curtly, her sickening smile never leaving her face. "Quite frankly he wants the same thing to happen to KaibaCorp."

"He would. He's been after me for years, and now that your company has entered the picture he plans to use you to take my company for himself."

She looked at Kaiba as if he were a toddler that had said something incomprehensible.

"What does this have to do with your conditions, Mr. Kaiba?"

Good point.

"KaibaCorp can only really do business with you…" Kaiba was treading on eggshells now. "…with the knowledge that Industrial Illusions is gone. They will not stop with their incessant illegalities-"

"-They have done something illegal?"

"They bribed my secretary to pass on information."

She look faintly surprised.

"That is a new development for me," she murmured.

"KaibaCorp is perfectly capable of its own distribution of its technologies, and we already know the main key to Industrial Illusions' output, which is its efficiency in holographic technology. We have not implemented it in case they use a lawsuit. But I have firm case for myself now." Kaiba had moved away from the script and was talking rapidly and he didn't know where this conversation was going to end up.

"Both Industrial Illusions and KaibaCorp will collapse if you allow either of us to survive, at this point," Kaiba said. He didn't even know if it was true. How could Kaiba file a lawsuit over a slip of post-it paper? But he kept going.

"It's either us or them. And I'd be surprised if you were as frank with me as you already were with Pegasus."

In an instant, her plastered grin had been dropped completely. She gaped at him in astonishment.

"…so you're blackmailing me? Into forcing Disney to work with you? This is outrageous-!"

"No," Kaiba said calmly. "I'm laying the situation I find myself in clear to you. And I know that you've already been making deals with Pegasus."

Her mouth opened, and closed, opened, and closed.

"Now that you see where I stand…" Kaiba rubbed his eyes thoughtfully. How had that tirade just come across to her? Hopefully she hadn't taken it the wrong way. It was completely off script.

"Point three."

"Stop!" Ms. Hermand said, raising her hand. "I get what you mean to say." She paused, and Kaiba looked at her. Her eyes were furious.

"What makes KaibaCorp think they are more important than Industrial Illusions to us?"

"So you are choosing between us."

She bit her lip, softly, but enough to tell Kaiba that she believed she had made a mistake. She continued, on a different track.

"We have indeed made a deal with Pegasus already," she began slowly. "Your points are more…forward…than his own. However, backing out of what we have already agreed upon would be sheer folly at this point."

"How long has your…partnership…been going on?"

It almost looked like she cursed to herself for having mentioned a time duration in the partnership with IIC. She ran a hand through her hair, scratching it momentarily. She took a short sigh, and then suddenly sat up ramrod-straight, as if she had decided to act on an impulse.

"I am afraid I cannot accept all of your demands," she said, staring him straight in the eye. "I will tell you this. Disney does have a partnership already in place with Industrial Illusions Company. We intend to follow both of your…guidelines…as best as we can."

"Are you saying that they are contradictory?" Kaiba was intrigued now; wherever his rash blabbering had led him, it just might result in some information about exactly what the hell was going on behind his back. At this point Kaiba did not doubt something had, and perhaps Pegasus, or Ms. Hermand, or both, had gone back on their words, and hadn't expected the other to find out about it. Now Kaiba had pieced it together himself.

"They were," she admitted. "The vast part of our original plans with Industrial Illusions were withdrawn earlier this week." She didn't specify when. "You just might get your way, Kaiba."
Kaiba smirked. "That's nice to know. Nice talking to you."

She stood, apparently eager to get out of the office room and away from Kaiba. Ms. Hermand was undeniably disturbed by what Kaiba had said. Some part of it.

"Of course," she whispered, and she moved quickly to the other end of the room. "Maybe at our next meeting I can say more from our point of view."

"Naturally," Kaiba replied. More trivialities.

As Ms. Hermand reached the door, Kaiba overheard her say to herself, quite irritably, that both men drove abnormally dramatic bargains.

~ X X X ~

Kaiba checked his email three minutes after Hermand left, taking the time to compose himself. His brain was buzzing. What the hell just happened? Why didn't he just stick to what he had planned on saying? There was only one word in his head now. Disaster. Of course Ms. Hermand might want a meeting next week sometime, and Kaiba admitted solemnly that she would probably take charge of the meeting just as much as Kaiba had thrust his conditions upon her today. It was probably the most amazingly brash, amateur faux pas he had made. If push came to shove he could blame it on a "headache", which would be interpreted as the side effects of a seizure, but Kaiba didn't want to make himself look weak to the media or anybody else. Especially her and Pegasus.

Why the hell did he do that? What could have caused him to have abruptly moved on and practically threaten her? And what would Disney do now? He couldn't just apologize, because that would look as fake as it would probably feel writing it. Maybe somehow he was still brimming that Wheeler had dared come in and waste his time yesterday about his damn wedding. Who gave a –

The phone rang. Kaiba answered it hurriedly, to stop himself from fretting any further.

"What now?"

"Mr. Kaiba," shook a young voice that sounded like a new employee in the lobby. "There's someone here who wants to see you."

Kaiba growled a bit. "Is it my new secretary?"

There was some fidgeting. Then, a positive reply.

"Send him up."

Kaiba slammed down the receiver and stared straight ahead, musing over everything. It was almost like back a few years ago where everything seemed so blatantly cliché and inconvenient to him. It was happening again. The geek squad was trying to get back in his life, KaibaCorp was under fire again… at least Mokuba wasn't being kidnapped, and he didn't need to run another card game tournament. That would have probably thrown him over the damn edge.

He'd have to call Pegasus again too, damn it. He was sure that if Pegasus and Hermand had been exchanging info on KaibaCorp behind his back, they wouldn't stop now that they knew Kaiba was on to them. Knowing Pegasus, the act would just get more exciting. This time, however, Kaiba would have to plan his words far more carefully. Or at least adhere to them far more carefully, whichever actually worked for him.

A knock on the door. "Hello?"

"It's not locked," Kaiba almost yelled.

A young man entered as if he were some sort of spy. He looked awestruck at the sheer size of the office, and looked professional, even though he wasn't acting like it.
Then he saw Kaiba.

"H-h-hello, Mr. Kaiba. My name is-"

"You're my new secretary, right?" Kaiba didn't feel like introductions at the moment. "Good. The cubicle across the way from my office is yours. You have permission to throw away anything you don't need."

Yoori simply looked at him, perplexed at Kaiba's brevity.

"And by the way, I don't drink coffee. So don't ask me if I want any."

"O-okay," Yoori said, and bowed slightly before nearly running out of the room.

"Ugh," Kaiba muttered. Why couldn't he make acquaintances with a normal person for once?

~ X X X ~

Ironically it was the day Kaiba thought about how erratically inconvenient everything was that things began to move back to normal. Yoori was a meek kid that just happened to do amazing things when nobody was looking, which was fine for Kaiba because quite frankly he didn't want to have to spend his time thinking about what his secretary was doing. The few days thinking about Hiroko were the days that everything had gone bat-crazy, after all. Perhaps the best think was that, true to his word, Yoori hadn't bugged him about wanting a cup of coffee.

Kaiba spent the next few weeks, as Mokuba had originally planned, without contacting him. Most of Kaiba's schedule focused on coming up with an official execution of KaibaCorp's plan to go international, and several locales were chosen to become regional headquarters. One was placed in Frankfurt, Germany, near to where the von Schroeder corporation used to be headquartered (this move was more out of spite than anything, although Germany's economy was such that it was a good excuse anyway); another in Shanghai, China; and a third to be placed in Richmond, Virginia, United States. Richmond had been the interesting choice; it was the state capitol, to be sure, but it was by no means the major city that Shanghai or Frankfurt were, and Kaiba himself had not come up with that suggestion. Instead, a vice president with relatives in the United States had convinced him, somewhat shakily, that Virginia was a good place to launch things, but Washington (the nearest major city) was too obvious, and Richmond looked like a bolder move which could provide better payouts. More people, the vice president had given as an example, would prefer to move to the suburbs of central Virginia than they would shoving themselves into a smaller apartment in a foreign country where they couldn't speak the language. At least everyone Kaiba would hire spoke English enough to survive in the States.

As for Pegasus' threat to "watch his back", Kaiba saw no developments out of Industrial Illusions during the time period. Of course he had been watching them; to simply ignore them and focus wholeheartedly on progress would have been more than insane knowing how the meeting with Hermand had gone. Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer. Kaiba had no friends. So that left him only one burden to take care of.

It was almost like he had things back under control again. Things were normal. If it weren't for the occasional thought for maybe perhaps scheduling a meeting with Hermand, which never gained any precedence over what he had been thinking about previously, or for the fact a young man instead of a young woman was at work behind the desk in front of his office door, it would have been as if nothing had happened.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, Kaiba worked. He didn't celebrate them, for one because he wasn't a Christian, and he honestly expected other people to show up either.

Apparently a lot of people had bought into the free time the two days afforded, however, and had jumped on the western bandwagon and not shown up.

It was December 26, 2004, and everything seemed to be going normally. Kaiba arrived at work by seven, and at seven-twenty had called Yoori to arrange another meeting that wasn't originally on his schedule.

There was no response.

Kaiba went outside to find Yoori transfixed, watching the television.

"What are you doing?" Kaiba asked, almost casually.

Yoori flinched a bit, but then pointed to the TV, wide-eyed, as if he were a third-grade child hypnotized to his cartoons. "Look, Mr. Kaiba. It's horrible."

Kaiba scrutinized what he was watching. It was a news report from Indonesia about waves. Giant ones.

The tsunami started around thirty minutes ago just before seven this morning, spoke the news anchor, a video displaying the event she was discussing in the upper right-hand corner. There was an earthquake off of the small Indonesian village of Banda Aceh which caused massive shaking. We have not yet received word on how powerful these quakes might have been but some experts are already saying it could be one of the deadliest in modern history. We expect the waves to cause massive damage in Indonesia and Thailand within the hour…

Then it hit Kaiba. If they were going to move into the street club of international business, then this was their first Barbara Streisand karaoke. Kaiba almost swore under his breath.
The Boxing day tsunami was an international emergency.

Whew. That's over with! And so far, that's all of Trebuchet! I know, it ended with a realistic event-cliffhanger... I just never got past it!

PLEASE leave a review, because I'm not sure if this story is enough to keep working with or if I should just move on to a more contemporary idea of mine. I'd hate to abandon it, but if it would be a waste of my time, then I shouldn't waste my energy. I'll probably put up a poll on my profile concerning the matter.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully they'll be a next time...

~ Mardigny