Chapter 6
Chisame was a little off her game. That was, to say, her virtual game: she'd gotten herself trapped in this magically-enhanced (UGH…did Chisame just seriously think the word 'magicall-enhanced''? ) version of the videogame Magic's Play when she'd crawled back into cyberspace to rescue Negi, the ten-year-old idiot who had somehow become her English teacher.
She hadn't even wanted to believe in magic, at first. In fact, she still didn't want to believe it. So, for the last several minutes, she'd been scolding herself for pushing her boundaries so far as to create a situation that would trap her in cyberspace anyway….when Seto Kaiba had showed up. She'd congratulated herself for requesting his help: he was supposedly a famous tech & game expert, and on her request, he'd come all the way from Domino City to meet her.
He'd told her in an e-mail about his hypothesis: if he could help her beat the game of Magic's Play, she and her idiot friends (technically, they were friend of Negi's) would be returned to the real world.
Of course, now, she couldn't even find Negi, let alone help Kaiba rescue him. She was just on the verge of telling Kaiba all of this when she'd heard a rustle coming from the direction of a nearby bush.
She'd gotten noticeably freaked out, and for good reason. Negi & Co. had only become trapped here in Magic's Play's Enchanted Forest game area in the 1st place after a rustling in the bushes had revealed a dragon that had scared her so badly that she'd lept out of cyberspace without them. Of course, Chisame thought as she stepped away from Kaiba to hide behind another nearby bush, Negi wound up beating that dragon, too, so she shouldn't be THAT worried…Not that I spend a lot of time worrying about that idiot. It's his fault that he got stuck here. She sighed, motioning for Kaiba and the gaping kid next to him (she thought she'd heard Kaiba call him Mokuba) to join her in caution behind the bush. Still, she thought, I can't just leave him here. He causes enough trouble as it is in the real world. Lord knows what he'll do here.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the snapping of a twig, and out of the brush stepped….Negi, himself!
That idiot! Chisame thought, standing above the brush to glare at her foolish sensei. Where has he been all this time?
"I've never seen a Magic's Play monster like that before," Seto Kaiba whispered from beside her, still crouching down in reserved caution. "Is that some sort of knight?"
'No," Chisame frowned, stepping over the bush to stand next to Negi. "This is my idiot friend who got trapped here."
As Seto stood to peek at the aforementioned idiot he'd heard so much about, dragging the kid he'd brought with him, Mokuba, into a standing position as well, Negi spoke up, smiling:
"Negi Springfield is my name," he said, smiling courteously with a polite nod of his head. "And, as you can see, I'm a wizard. Pleasure!..and, you are?"
Seto, grimacing down at the fantastically dressed child, said evenly, "The name's Kaiba. Seto Kaiba. And this is my brother, Mokuba. In case you hadn't noticed, your friend here," he said, obviously annoyed, indicating Chisame, who stood to his side, "called us here to get you out. Now, where are the other idiots," he smirked, "who're convinced they're 'trapped' here?"
Still smiling, Negi led them through the brush to a clearing, where the purple-haired girl Chisame knew to be Nodoka lay passed out on the ground, with Chisame's other classmate, Yue, in the guise of a wizard, standing over her. "Negi-sensei!" she called out as they approached. "Nodoka-san has fainted again..could you cast some sort of…Oh."
She'd just noticed the pouting form of Kaiba standing behind her teacher, Negi, and reluctant classmate (Chisame) who was currently going by the name of Chiu.
"Umm..Chiu-chan?" Yue said inquisitively, "Who is that…"
Kaiba cut her off with a gesture, interrupting frustratedly, saying, "I'm Kaiba. I'm here to get you out of this game. So, can you collect the rest of your silly little friends so we can actually get going?"
"Wait a second." Yue retorted, eyes narrowed in angry suspicion. "My 'silly friend', as you put it, Nodoka-san, is currently unconscious. Of course we can 'get going',as you say, Kaiba-san. But only after all of us are awake and ready to leave."
Kaiba shrugged, seething but in silent agreement, and sat down on a nearby stump. As Chisame sat down next to him to wait for Nodoka to wake up, they both blinked in surprise as the sound of footsteps approaching sounded from another bush.
Voices began to accompany the still-nearing footsteps as a girl's voice shouted, "Secchan! Wait up! Let me carry that firewood for you!"
An equally insistent voice responded, "Ojou-sama, it is not suitable for someone of your station to be seen carrying sticks! Trust me, I can manage this firewood until we are…"
"We're back at camp!" the first voice shouted, giggling, as it's owner, a silly-looking brunette that Seto saw was dressed as a newbie Healer character, crashed through the brush into the clearing where they sat. The brunette blinked, calling back to her partner, "Oh, look, Secchan! Another person playing Magic's Play has come to help us!"
'Secchan' stepped into the clearing with a stack of firewood just then. She was a more boyish brunette, who appeared to be dressed as a freshly-created Warrior character, if the impractical-looking armor she was (reluctantly) wearing was any indication.
"Oh, good." Chisame sighed as the two stepped forward to glance at the newly-arrived Kaiba brothers. "Konoe-san, Sakurazaki-san, you're back." Now that you're actually here, she thought harriedly, I can try to explain to you how I got this average mortal, Kaiba-sama, to come into cyberspace and help us.
Setsuna Sakurazaki, glancing at Seto, and Mokuba, who stood tentatively behind him, looked knowingly at Chisame, saying, "These two are simple Magic's Play players you recruited to help us successfully get through the game, correct?"
"Yes," Chisame replied, knowing full well that Setsuna had meant These people don't know we were brought here by magic, right?
"Kaiba-sama is a gaming expert from Domino City who I recruited to help us with our virtual reality simulator malfunction," she explained to the group, hoping they would understand the message to not discuss the actual magic that had gotten them stuck here around him. Nobody else needs to know that magic actually exists. Chisame told herself. He just needs to help us beat the game and get the heck out of here. We don't need him to know about the Spectrum Virtuale to do that. I'll figure out what to tell him about how I got us into 'virtual reality' later.
"Right now," she continued aloud, "we just need to beat the game. Kaiba-sama believes that if we can do that, we can get home."
"Is that true, Kaiba-san?" Negi asked curiously. "If we complete every level of Magic's Play, will we be able to go home?"
Yue agreed with him, saying, "Yes, Kaiba-san, Chiu-chan. If that is indeed possible, it would be our best course of action!"
"It doesn't matter if it's true," Chisame told them, crossing her arms in exasperation. "Right now, it's the only plan we've got. So no matter if this winds up working or not, all we can do right now is listen to Kaiba-sama in his advice in how to help us survive long enough to reach Level 3."
"Chiu-chan's right," Seto informed them. "Right now, all of you should just be worried about not getting game-overed because a dragon eats you, or something. Since this is virtual reality we're dealing with, I guess we should try to get some 'sleep', or whatever sort of thing like it Chiu-chan's virtual reality system can come up with. Sakurazaki-san, was it?" Seto inquired, pointing at Setsuna, who was building a fire in the corner. "Since you are the only Warrior character here besides my brother, Mokuba, I think you should stand watch." Smirking, he added, "You know, so a 'magical' dragon doesn't eat us."
Chisame, nodding, realized she was glad that Seto didn't believe in magic. It would be a lot easier to deal with being trapped here with these idiots if she knew someone else that thought they were as stupid as she did. Had Seto realized that her 'virtual reality system' was in fact a magical artifact, he'd have been forced to agree with these idiots that it was magic's fault they were trapped in this game..a fact even Chisame still didn't want to believe.
After they had all gotten their camp situated, Chisame sat down on a rock to speak to Seto. Lowering her voice, she told him, "I'm glad you came out here to help me. Lord knows these idiots would still be whining about how 'magic had gotten them trapped' if you hadn't been here to tell them to organize a campsite." Or at least, Chisame considered, they wouldn't have listened to Sakurazaki-san tell them to.
"Actually," Seto, sighing, said to her, "I have some…well, not exactly friends, but an idiot nemesis of mine and his pals who keep following me around, who act, well, almost exactly this stupid. So I can guess you can say I have experience with magic-obsessed morons, Chiu-chan."
"To tell you the truth," Chisame admitted, "these fools aren't exactly my 'friends', either. They're the pals of my nemesis, actually, who snuck into where I was working on, um, 'virtual reality', to invite me to tea." She laughed exasperatedly, shaking her head at the stupidity of the situation she'd gotten herself into. "Oh, and Kaiba-san?" she said, suddenly self-conscious for reasons she couldn't quite identify. "You don't have to call me Chiu-chan, if you don't want to. My real name's Chisame."
"I actually already figured that 'Chiu' wasn't your real name," Seto confessed, shrugging. "I sort of saw the surname 'Hasegawa' on your dorm room door when I first stepped into your VR simulator."
"Oh, you did?" Chisame said, blushing. Great, she sighed to herself. Now a complete stranger knows my whole actual identity. "But, yeah," she told him, resigning herself to the fact that he now knew her real name…not that she thought he'd actually tell her 'Chiu' fans, per se. "Chisame Hasegawa is my name. And, well, I already know yours. You're, like, famous. The famous Seto Kaiba. And, uh.." Chisame struggled to remember what she'd read about Seto on the 'Net. "Your nemesis, that you were telling me about, the idiot? That's Yugi Motou, right?" She remembered reading something about Yugi beating Kaiba at some card duel a little while back.
"Yeah, that's him." Seto agreed, scowling. "He is an idiot. He and his pathetic friends are convinced that he's winning duels because he's like, some 3,000 year-old magical pharaoh spirit, or something. He's also convinced that during our last duel," Seto seethed, scowling (Chisame guessed he was still bitter that the idiot, Yugi, had won) "we went back to ancient Egypt, in like, our past lives, or something, and watched each other use magic in some sort of ancient duel."
"That sounds hard to believe." Chisame told him.
'It IS hard to believe, Hasegawa-chan!" Seto scowled, obviously angry at even thinking about his foolish rival Yugi's cockamammy story. "And that's because it's impossible. Magic is not real. You know that."
I WISH I knew that, Chisame thought to herself, now scowling as much as Seto. But my recent experiences with that stupid Negi-sensei…and I'm STILL having trouble believing a kid like him could actually BE a sensei…have practically FORCED me to accept magic as a reality. Maybe magical pharaoh spirits aren't real, but, to be honest, the boundaries of what I'm willing to believe have been seriously tested lately. I mean, I've seen wizardry from that idiot Negi, time travel, robots like Chachamaru-san…Hell. I don't….
"I don't WANT to believe that anything else magical is real," she finished aloud, taking a deep breath and looking back at Seto, who seemed to be calming down from his rant as well.
"I don't, either, Hasegawa-chan," he told her. "But right now, we should just worry about getting these idiot friends of yours pack home so they can get back to their silly, little, magic-obsessed lives. They're idiots.. But we're going to need to work really hard to get them out of here."
Chisame nodded, resigning herself to the task. As the only halfway-sane people here, it would be her and Seto's job to get her idiot sensei and his followers home.
If I don't, Chisame reasoned, then I may never get back to what's left of my normal life.
And I, Seto thought, may never get my hands on the VR tech that created the lovely virtual Hasegawa-san that now stands before me!
"So, uh, good night, Kaiba-sama." Chisame told him, walking back towards the tent that idiot Negi had somehow set up for her and the other girls.
"Oh, um, good night, Hasegawa-chan." Seto said, making his way towards the tent he would be forced to share with the aforementioned Negi.
Staying in close quarters with her idiot classmates would be Hell, Chisame reasoned. But then, Hell, at least, was something she already believed in.
As she leaned down with this sobering thought to open her tent flap, she remembered something she'd wanted to say to her at-least-halfway-sane rescuer:
"Oh, and Kaiba-sama?" Chisame called to him as she heard him settle into his own official Magic's Play Newbie Pack tent. "FYI, if you want to…you can just call me Chisame-chan."
Flushing, she took his lack of response as an 'OK', and attempted to get some virtual sleep. She knew all too well that she'd need it.