MM: We/I are/am getting back to Crazy Wedding Vows! Though I/we am/are still lacking in inspiration, something seemed to have magically changed our/my mood(s)!
Bakura: MWAHAHA! Change of Heart is a great card to play on that/those fool(s)!
Marik: Why are you talking with parenthesis?
Bakura: Because we don't know if the Muse(s) are one or many, remember?
Marik: Oh yeah! It/they has/have MPD, like us!
Bakura, drily: Yes. Except it/they isn't/aren't nearly as intelligent as me!
MM: Uh-huh. It's "as I," dummy!
Yami: I WILL NOT BE IGNORED ANY LONGER!!!! I am PHAROAH! I am owned by no one, at least not by the creepy Mystic Muses! Neither is all of Yugioh! Unfortunately, this plot is absolutely hers, so I'm screwed!
MM: You got that right, dearie! Let us all continue now, shall we?
Chapter 3
Tea's Teatime Session
"MWAHAHAHA! Our plan is proceeding perfectly! We shall rule the world in seven days!" cackling like a maniacal penguin on a leash, Ryou Bakura stalked around, reminding Marik of a pecking chicken with its wings spread in a Frisbee-throwing position.
"Cock-a doodle doooooo!!!!!!"
Freezing with his arms and legs in the air, Bakura crashed onto the couch as the sparrow family landed on his stomach, tilting their heads to the left and studying the convulsing five-thousand year old.
"YEAH! Our plan is going great despite the fact that Yami drove his car over the edge of the white cliffs of Dover and hadn't been seen by a human for the last two weeks!" Marik enthused, doing the can-can as a black bag in the corner of the room hopped forward surreptitiously and banged its unfortunate head on the desk.
"Yes! We ever so wilily planned that incredibly believable escapade so that Tea wouldn't suspect our kidnapping her husband!" Bakura screamed, picking up the midget in the black bag and tossing him up in the air. With a blubbering "WEEEEE!" Yami twirled in the air like a blind bunny and bounced upon landing on the foot-deep carpet.
Leaping over the desk like a power-hungry kangaroo, the blond Egyptian dug his fingers into the black plastic and shredded it faster than a rabid wolf would.
"AHHH!" Screaming, he leapt to his feet, waving his foaming white fingers around in midair and tripping over the sneaking roots of the palm tree in the corner of their office. "The rabies is all over me! I'm going to die! I must suck away the poison!" Stopping mid-stride, Marik suckled his fingers as a worried Bakura wrung a handkerchief in the corner, sitting on a drooling Yami. Sticking his ten fingers in his mouth, Marik sucked till his face turned red as a raspberry.
"Hey! Rabies tastes good! It tastes like whipped cream and cheesecake and strawberry cheesecake and blueberry cheesecake and Tiramisu and pudding and vanilla ice cream and glutinous rice balls and moon cakes and normal cakes and cream and Yami's hair!"
"HEY! Don't you dare eat my pudding hair!" a breathless voice squealed from beneath Bakura. "It's a professional secret! No one else can make better pudding-hair than Yami-Atum-Atemu-Sumo-wrestler-duelist-champion-king-of-everything-that-ever-existed pharaoh!
Ripping off a section of Yami's hair, Bakura held his victim's mouth open like a turkey's belly as the sparrows sat on his lip to watch the show.
"Marik! You have a highly developed sense of taste!"
"Yes I do! And it tells me that this is so-called rabies is from our dessert cabinet! Yami tricked us! Look, he actually has a body and some flub on his muscle-less arms now! Though his legs are still thinner than wires," he added, walking over and landing a punch on Yami's beach ball-sized stomach.
"NO! And Tea's coming over this afternoon for her teatime my-husband-is-dead grievance session! We need those snacks!" Hopping off of Yami, his convenient stool, Bakura pulled on a jacket and stuffed the pharaoh back into the blackness of his bag. The white-haired man ran around the desk and drew out a dozen padlocks and ten meters of rope, locked up the bag ran up to the second floor, and dangled the bag, plus its living cargo, out the window. Wheezing, he collapsed back on his couch in the zillion-dollar office. Marik had already disappeared off to the nearest convenient store.
"MUST GET CHEESECAKE SO I CAN RULE THE WORLD!"
Speeding wrecklessly down the road on his roaring motorcycle and ignoring the traffic lights, staring girls, piles of police cars and larger piles of crashing vehicles, he pulled his motorcycle into a gargantuan leap over the five-story-tall convenient store and landed on the street behind.
Blinking, he looked upon the gorgeous, dirt-streaked window of the shabby toy store of Domino, owned by a certain old man with gray, fizzy hair who looked awfully like Yami, except for the fact that he had packed on a lot more weight around the stomach and constantly wore an orange peel over his head. At the rate that Yami was gaining weight, though, the Pharaoh may actually soon catch up to the toy storeowner.
Dashing in with his helmet in his arms and Brother Sparrow snoozing within, he dumped one hundred pennies on the counter.
"Old Mister Moto person! I need two dozen cheesecakes, three Tiramisus, five bags of tea, and one pot of hot water, plus whatever you think a good tea party should have so I can kill Pharaoh Yami, who is in Yugi Moto's body, who looks awfully like a younger version of you, without anybody ever suspecting anything!"
Blinking blankly up at his only customer in the past five days who didn't have spiked or crazily dyed hair, the shop owner grinned like a bucktooth chipmunk and turned around to dig in his pile of tea-time toys. "Okay! Coming right up! Would you like that in hollow plastic or solid rubber?"
"Of course solid, silly! Feeding customers of our jillion-dollar Marikura Marriage Counseling hollow stuff that has no cream will never do!" Grabbing the boxes of toys, he balanced tiers of teetering tea-things and wobbled out the door.
"…and five dollars for those plates, makes…thrity dollars and seventy-nine cents, Mister!" screeched Mr. Moto happily, shaking his abacus to get the calculation beads back in order.
"Thank you! There're 100 cents on the counter! Keep the change!"
Words mumbled by the dozen boxes, Marik gave the job of balancing everything on the back of his motorcycle to Brother Sparrow, mounted his panting vehicle, and sped away, trying desperately to avoid the talking black cat snoozing on the road and the palm tree jay-walking across Humbug Avenue. Two seconds later, after dashing two holes through the walls of the convenient store, five through Bakura's ramshackle home, and two more through Tea's bathroom, he managed to reach Marikura Marriage Counseling and collapsed on top of the bag labeled KIDNAPPED PHARAOH: DO NOT OPEN.
"I got all the wares! I saw Tea putting on lipstick and trying to pick out a dress when I accidentally crashed through her house! I think she threw out all of Yami's stuff. Very encouraging sign. I'm not stupid enough to not realize that these foods are fake, but they were 82.9374832 cheaper than the real things that they sell from the old freezer in that medieval convenient store. Besides, Tea is too blind and deaf and unable to smell to recognize the difference."
So saying, the Egyptian blond helped Bakura to rip open Mr. Moto's products and set up the tea tray on the table by the couches. Suddenly, the clouds hounding the sun caught up with their prey, and with a bloodcurdling scream, the golden orb vanished beneath the ravaging claws of the wisps of white.
"Yes. And now, everything is in place. Mwahahahaha…" cackling to himself, Bakura seemed sane for just a moment.
"I will comfort her with a million lulling words, and once she leaves, tearily thanking us for all our help, we can dispose of the Yam!"
"What Yam? You mean Yami?" He had cut Yami's bag from its location dangling from the ceiling, and was currently testing the blade that he had in his pocket on the fake Tiramisu.
Marik shrugged, kicking the snoozing bag under the tea table. "There isn't much of a difference."
A gentle tapping took their attention, and, as Marik sat down at the table with his laptop, "courtesy" of Seto Kaiba—his company warehouse never had a lock on it, and everyone in Domino knew the password was "Kaiba rules the universe"—as Kura ambled to the door and whirled it open with a flourish and a swishing bow.
"Miss Tea Gardner, welcome! Allow me to express my partner and my most sincere and grieving apologies for the recent demise of your beloved husband. We didn't even have a chance to finish our counseling, just when it started going so well!"
Taking Tea by the arm, he escorted her over to the tea table, took her million-dollar handbag, feathered hat, scarf, gloves, and coat and stuffed them into the drawer of the official office desk. She crossed her legs and fluttered her masquera-laden eyelashes, resting her two-inch-heel boots on the puffy black bag conveniently stashed beneath the coffee table in front of her and patting her paper-thin puce green dress. Her perfectly pruned hair stuck up like chicken feathers from the back as she ran her fingers through it, and her bloody lipstick became a strawberry paste to her ever-hungry tongue.
"So, Mr. Ishtar…you look great in that jacket."
"Thank you, Miss Gardner. Kura, would you like to start the session?" Marik asked as his partner crawled over, served tea, and sat down across from his target.
"Yes. Great idea, Mr. Ishtar. I believe that your husband died in a freak accident in which he flew over the white cliffs of Dover?" he asked, pulling his brows together in a very sympathetic frown.
Putting a hand to her nose and blowing it without a handkerchief, she put her knuckles to her forehead as a sparrow hopped around, picking out hair for its nest and leaving behind a warm pile of something or another on her scalp.
"Oh, it was horrible, indeed! But I think I'm definitely ready to move on. I'll just tell all those newspaper people that he died very unfortunately, then…" she blabbed, smiling demurely at Bakura.
"Riiiiight. Well, it's just absolutely wonder that you are one hundred and ten percent okay, and that Pharaoh doesn't have a single heir to inherit the now-lost Millennium Puzzle," Bakura continued.
With a bang, shards of glass throttled their engines and charged across the room, impaling themselves in the door and the accompanying wall. Dancing in pain, the wall hopped from foot to foot as the room's three untied occupants leapt to their feet.
"NOOO! MY SPARROWS!" With a Matrix-style swirl, Bakura flew through the air, white hair flaying the air as the remaining pieces of shooting glass cleaved through the flapping tails of his coat. Landing across the table, he slid, grabbing the nest of sparrows and tucking them under his jacket as the walls caved in with a crackle and a roar.
"NOOOO!! My potted plant!" Dashing over, Marik seized the pot with its quivering resident and dashed across the room, jettisoning Tea out of his way in his attempt to hide the plant behind the safety of the bomb-proof couch.
"We're safe!" Tea shouted, kicking the black bag attempting to worm its way out from beneath the shaking coffee table.
Her eardrums rumbled and tucked themselves into her ear as a roar louder than a supernova on earth ripped through the fabric of space, accompanied by a stippling shower of spit and mucus.
"Hey look! It's Joey Dog Wheeler's Red Eyes!" the widow screamed, hopping up and jumping into the creature's gaping mouth just as Joey ran into the now-destroyed counseling center.
"Go, Red Eyes! Find Yugi's remains so I can steal those Duel Monster cards that he always hides in that pocket on that metal belt that he always has looped around his nonexistent waist!"
Hopping toward the black bag that the Red Eyes snorted at, Joey, under the watchful eyes of the owners of Marikura Counseling, ripped a hole through the plastic, avoiding the padlocks and ropes all around it. Groping around, he tore the cards from a mumbling, snoring, coughing, and sneezing Yami, mounted his Red Eyes, watched Tea crawl out whilst covered in dragon spittle, shouted "DRAGONS AWAY!" and disappeared into the depths of the cosmos.
Watching the dark masses of Joey and Dragon and Company thrum into the distance, Bakura and Marik folded their arms and nodded in quiet approval.
"That Wheeler is finally learning a thing or two about real life," Marik announced, taking Tea by the arm and setting her down on her now torn-up seat, stuffing a rubber cheesecake into her mucus-dripping hand.
"Yes. That is the smartest thing I've ever seen him do. Actually manifesting his Duel Monster in physical form isn't half as impressive as stealing from the corpse of his best friend," Bakura mused, patting Tea on the back.
"WHAAA? I'm dead?"
Crawling out of the bag, Yami stared up at his companions. The two males blanched visibly, then turned their eyes to the woman sitting between them.
"Y-Y-Y-Yami?!"
Turning burgundy red, Tea reached down, grabbed the collar of Pharaoh, then jerked him up to eye level.
"You JERK! You were DEAD!"
Confused, Yami shook his head. "No, I wasn't."
"Yes you were! NO! You said that just to trick me!"
Rubbing his hands together as his face started to turn blue from his wife's strangle hold on his collar, he smiled weakly at the crimson eyes of Tea Gardner.
"I really didn't! I-I-I was kidnapped by aliens and left here! Yes! I-I-I was looking for you this whole time! And here I am! Ta-da!" Weakly, he clapped his hands together in triumph.
"NO! Aliens don't exist!" Ms. Gardner shouted, as a troop of UFO's floated past the gaping hole in the wall and some green Martians took snapshots of these strange human zoo animals.
"Well, I tried! I really did! I really, really did!" Yami whined as Tea started shaking him back and forth, then threw him onto the coffee table of phony foods and landed a horribly aimed punch in the teacup next to Yami's ear.
"Darn! That was supposed to go in your face! Pretend that that went into your face!" she commanded, hitting the easier target of his bloated stomach.
"Yes Madam! Ouch ouch ouch!"
Bakura shrugged his shoulders as Marik cracked his knuckles malignantly.
"At least we can make more money out of them," the King of Thieves suggested wearily as the Pharaoh scratched at Tea with well-groomed nails, then decided to tear at her hair.
Shrugging, Marik allowed the new duck family in the neighborhood to wander through the hole in their office wall and enjoy the spectacular show. After-lunch walks seemed of utmost importance and fashion in these new invasive-species families.
He grinned widely as a check for ten billion dollars slipped from Yami's pocket as Tea's fist said hello to his leg.
"Money's good."
Yami, holding cold ham to black eye: Stupid Mystic Muses…
MM: WAAAAAH?!?! At least you're not dead! That's a good thing, right?
Marik: No.
Bakura: Nope!
Sparrow Family: NO WAY!
MM: Wait. YES! I/we need him to punish! I/we need him to vent my/our rage on so I/we don't destroy the world! I/we—
Marik, throwing Yami's black bag over MM: So, adieu till next time, my faithfuls!