~XxX~
"And then she said she couldn't tell me all! All! I didn't want to know all! I wanted to know three things!"
I finished my exasperated recounting of what happened earlier on in the evening to Mum and was busy demolishing a family size bar of Cadbury's with her, she looked thoughtful for a few moments, chewing slowly, before she speaking through a mouthful of chocolate.
"Maybe he's Yugi's Dad and that's why she can't tell you, because you'd tell Yugi." The look on her face told me she wasn't serious with her answer. I bit into my half, chewing too before I swallowed and reached over to my milky coffee, downing half the mug in one go. It may have been two in the morning, but we hadn't really crossed paths lately and needed a catch up. "And then it comes out that she's his Mother and he's actually her son and then-"
"No! Mum! This isn't Talk Show. At least, I don't think so." I paused and put down my cup before shaking my head, "No, I'm very sure that they aren't related. Plus Teá's 16, Yugi's 15, seriously, they would have had to have been really early starters." I shook my head, laughing slightly, "He didn't look old enough to be Yugi's Father…or Brother, I don't think." Mum snorted into her own mug of coffee before setting it down and finishing my thought for me.
"Then something really strange is going on...hey! Maybe it's the aliens!" I raised an eyebrow and leant across the sofa to smack her upper arm for mocking me, she laughed and threw a cushion at me, hitting me full in the face.
"There's no need to be so sarcastic about it!" I said, the irony of who was saying such to whom making me laugh again as Mum made a clicking noise in her mouth before looking at me.
"Hey, you had to learn from somewhere. But seriously, just ask again, if they're really your friends, they'll tell you when they feel good and ready." I paused for several seconds, mulling this advice over before nodding my approval, this aside, I couldn't resist a jibe.
"Since when did you become Trisha?" Mum scoffed at my question, throwing her last cushion at me. This time I was expecting it and caught it, throwing it back at her. The war was on.
~XxX~
"How does it work?" I asked, holding Joey's Duel Disk above my head and inspecting the underside, while I had been sugar-twitching my way through the clean up of the stuffing strewn front room after I woke up, my friends, (who didn't seem unduly offended by my outburst last night), had been entering the Tournament. Well, Yugi and Joey had, Teá and Tristan, not so much. Teá's reason had been that she didn't really duel, preferring to be the moral support, Tristan's came courtesy of Joey, who ribbed his longest friend with recounts of duels that he had lost to him in the past.
"I don't know the tech, but you put your deck in this bit," He pointed to the suspiciously deck-shaped gap under a large red circle, "and place monster cards on top, the magic and trap cards go in the gaps under here." He pointed to seven flip-out gaps that appeared to take cards in the same way a vending machine took notes.
"But how does it project the holograms?" I asked, prying open the top with my nails and looking at the circuitry that ran under the part where you placed your cards, angling the motherboard so it caught the light.
"Whoa! Hey!" He snatched it back from me and clicked the top of the Duel Disk back into place, "Don't break it!" I laughed and patted his shoulder.
"Don't worry, I wouldn't break your new toy." He shot me a look that was more amusement than annoyance, but still made me remove my hand.
"I don't know Sophie, I know there're projectors that come out of the sides, but you'd really have to ask Kaiba about that kinda thing..." Yugi answered, strapping his Duel Disk onto his wrist, he was cut off by Joey snorting, and Teá shot him a look of exasperation before we moved out of the alleyway, wandering though the streets before I asked another question.
"So what do we do?" I looked around the plaza we had walked back onto, Joey put his Duel Disk back in its box before answering half of my question.
"I'm going to tell Serenity that I've got a place in the Tournament! I'll see you later guys!" He said before running off down a side alley, I frowned after him.
"Who's Serenity?" I looked back at Teá, though it was Tristan that answered me, which was odd, considering we had barely exchanged more than a few polite hello's.
"Serenity is Joey's younger sister." He explained, "She's just had an eye operation and she's in the hospital. Joey's gonna tell her that he's in the Tournament so that she can watch him duel." I nodded, not unduly surprised that Joey was a Big Brother. He gave that sort of atmosphere. I smiled politely at Tristan to say thank you, he unnerved me slightly, he wasn't nasty to me, I just got the feeling that he could, more likely than not, take me in a fight. My "Fight or Flight" mechanism was set firmly to flight.
"So. What now? Do we just wait around for someone to duel?" I asked, gesturing a little impatiently at the teens and adults that were milling around, all them with a Duel Disk on one arm, leaving me feeling dangerously under-dressed. I drew subconsciously closer to my friends, safety in numbers running through my head. Again it was Tristan who answered my question, this time accompanied by a laugh.
"No way are we going to have to wait long, Yugi's the 'King of Games', Duelists always want to duel him." I frowned again, not seeing the correlation.
"But surely the very fact that he holds that title makes people think twice about attempting to beat him?" I asked, it just seemed more rational to stay away to me. Yugi shook his head.
"No, Duelists don't think like that, well, not all of them think like that. They want the title and they try to get it. It's all about the fame." He sighed in an almost disbelieving manner, shrugging at the same time, "I don't get it myself, I still have to do well in class like everyone else..." It was my turn to laugh, I didn't see the logic behind what the other Duelists did, but I now had a valid reason. Human Behaviour. The Psychology behind being called 'King of Games' was more of a superiority thing. Yugi seemed untainted by that arrogance though, which made me think that I was hanging around with the right crowd.
~XxX~
"What the hell?" I asked, stepping out of the coffee shop I had entered only moments beforehand to get myself said beverage, I had been in the shop ten minutes tops, but was now alone. In those ten minutes my friends had, in no uncertain terms, vanished. "Damnit..." I whispered under my breath, before slumping into one of the lime green chairs outside the shop. I fished my mobile out of my pocket, debating whether or not to phone Teá and ask where they were, something stopped me. It wasn't until I was sipping on my cooling latté that I realised why I hadn't phoned. My Mother's words were still fresh in my memory.
"If they really are your friends, they'll tell you when they're good and ready."
I contemplated this advice for several more seconds before draining my paper cup, throwing it into the recycling bin, and setting off in the direction that Joey had run. I figured that at the least, I would come across him.
I'd never really liked Talk Shows anyway.
A shrill whistle prompted a Pavlov's dog reaction from me as I ran towards it, into an alleyway. Three people were there, no-one I knew. I turned my back to continue searching when a voice I knew a little too well began talking. Frowning, I kept the turn going, spinning 360 degrees on the spot in a strange pirouette. Fortunately for me, I was at the other end of the alleyway and close to the buildings on the right side, blending in almost. Due to my distance I only caught snippets of the conversation happening between, who I now realised was a mugger, and Kaiba. The black-haired boy at his side puzzled me as to his identity but it was a fleeting question, overtaken as Kaiba set The Briefcase down on the ground in front of the mugger, revealing hundreds of cards, I inched closer to hear this development explained.
"-You beat me, you get every single card that you could ever want-" I watched as the mugger picked the cards up like they were fifty dollar bills, resisting the urge to sigh, the mugger was as much an idiot as his profession suggested. It was quite obviously a trap, even from the measly scraps of coherent, non-insulting, conversation that Kaiba and I had exchanged during class I knew that he wouldn't just give up that many cards in a fair fight. He had to have done something to either rig those cards so that they were useless, or he had something that he was so confident in that he would willingly stake those cards on it. As I was busy juggling my thoughts from my hiding place, I watched the ensuing Duel with something just a little below intruigment. That was, until everyone in the alleyway was confronted by a seemingly 60 foot tall blue behemoth that came form Kaiba's Disk. I shrank backwards into the wall I was leaning against, finding that my 'flight' button was stuck in the presence of such an irregular monster. The would-be-mugger fell backwards in the way I was sure I would have had I not had the wall to prop me up, Kaiba sniffed scorfully at him, picking up The Briefcase while the black-haired boy took the cards from the hands of the still shell-shocked man, separating what I guessed were the locator cards from the cards he had attempted to steal and handing them to Kaiba, prompting a smile from him. Another shock.
"Come Mokuba, we have a lot we need to do in preparation for the finals." Kaiba said to the child, who nodded as they made a move to depart.
"Sure big brother!" I almost lost some of my only-just-regained breath at that sentence, well, at least it now made sense as to why he wasn't being treated with the same disdain shown to everyone else, and why he had a whistle. Putting the new revelation aside for the moment I decided that if I was going to find my friends, I would have to swallow my pride. Stepping away from the wall and resisting the urge to clap slowly like a badly-written villain from a bodice-ripper novel, I made my presence known.
"Hey! Kaiba!" I yelled. Not one of my most adroit openers to a conversation, but it certainly got his attention, younger brother also frowning at me as he himself just glared before speaking.
"Callaghan. Were you hiding?" A smirk twitched at his lips and I resisted the urge to snap at him, remembering that I was going to ask him for a favour, shuddering at the thought.
"No. I was covertly observing, there's a difference." I took a deep breath as I stopped walking towards them four feet in front, "What was that?" I asked, deciding I'd ask a question I was more likely to get an answer to while giving him something to brag about that wasn't the subject of my next question coming. He regarded me carefully for a second before answering.
"I don't consider you enough of a threat for me to withhold that information." He sniffed, but I saw the look in his eyes that said that he was proud of that card, "Nothing is a match for Obelisk the Tormentor." I raised my eyebrow, biting down on the pun I so wanted to make, instead choosing to grit my teeth and look away, steeling myself. By the time I had done so the two brothers were in the street on the other side of the alleyway, I rolled my eyes and ran again, skidding to a halt beside them and bracing my hands against my knees, taking deep breaths. Once I had caught up with the two of them I looked up at Kaiba and Mokuba from my bent position.
"That" I said, panting slightly, "wasn't polite at all." I straightened, frowning at the expression of anger on the older brother's face and worry on the younger's. "What happened?" Urgency taking over all banter, Mokuba answered me as his brother barked a few orders into his Blue-toothed collar.
"Yugi's dropped off our maps, we can't find him and that's not supposed to happen." He said, at the very least being more polite than Kaiba. I turned to said brother.
"Huh, that's virtually what I was going to say before you walked off in the middle of our conversation." I braced myself for my next words, "I'm calling a momentary truce, I need your help to find my friends and they're always with him, we find him, we find the others, you find out how someone's beat your system, I don't ask why you've attached a tracking device to Yugi." He looked at me for several seconds, the tell-tale -thup-thup-thup- of a chopper approaching sounding.
"I don't take orders from you." He stated while I held back a scream of frustration, "But if you don't touch or screw up anything you can come with us." I frowned, he wasn't usually so accommodating, what was the catch? He looked up at the chopper as it hovered overhead, letting down a rope ladder with dangled between the two of us. He smirked at me.
"If you aren't scared of heights."
~XxX~