AN: I have no excuse. I am very, very sorry.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my OCs and the plot.
Ray sat in Lisa's den in relative quiet as he tried to figure out what Joan might have meant while waiting for his sister to wake up. The only thing he could think of was whatever was wrong with the barrier. He didn't see much when he provided a buffer to Amy, but what he did see was startling. He very nearly asked her if they really could make a difference, but didn't dare interrupt her concentration.
The quiet was disrupted by frantic ringing of the doorbell. Opening it, he saw none other than Mokuba standing there.
"Where's Seto?"
"Come on in," Ray said, standing aside. "Your brother's asleep right now, but you can wait for him to wake up. I'll tell you what happened in the meantime."
Explanations had to wait while Mokuba assured himself that, yes, his brother was all right. He then had to reassure him that Lisa, who he'd grown fond of in the weeks that she'd been helping his brother, was all right as well.
"What happened?"
"Well, your brother's simply suffering from exhaustion. He did quite a bit, and it's no wonder he needed his sleep," Ray started. He then sat Mokuba down in the kitchen, with a small meal in front of him, and proceeded to explain everything that he knew about the barrier and what had happened with the repair efforts.
"I don't understand all of it myself. The duties of the card-speakers are unknown to me. But I do know that my sister would have likely died if it wasn't for your brother."
"So I've been told," came the exhausted voice from the doorway.
"Lisa!" The twin concerned exclamations were accompanied by both people jumping to their feet.
"You shouldn't be up," Ray said, ushering his sister to a chair and sitting her down before preparing another plate of food for her.
"As long as I don't overtax myself, I'll be fine," Lisa responded, swallowing two pain-killers before starting on her meal. "And there's no risk of that. If I so much as try to go to even the second plane, Wingweaver will have my hide." After a moment, she turned worried eyes to her brother.
"The barrier. You saw it, right? Did we succeed? I don't remember what happened when my charms gave out."
"You didn't repair it, no," Ray answered. "From what little I heard from the card-speakers, you only strengthened the barrier slightly, buying yourselves time.
"Oh, and that reminds me. Joan contacted me with a message for you. She said that I needed to tell you 'soon' but that was it."
Lisa, already pale, paled even further at the message. Standing up on slightly unsteady legs, she made her way to the back room where she made her charms. Grabbing a few strengthening ones, she put them on, hoping that they would help her recover her strength more quickly.
"What's soon?"
"The barrier," Lisa said, before realizing that Mokuba didn't truly understand. "Mokuba, do you remember when I said that the cards were coming to life?" At his affirmative nod, she continued. "That's not truly accurate. The cards are already alive, and live in their own world. There's a barrier, also called the veil, that separates our world from theirs. Through the planes, they can communicate with psychics such as myself, but their world and ours are kept firmly separate. This keeps us from entering their world, and them from entering ours.
"The Dartz incident must have weakened the barrier."
"I've been wondering about that," Mokuba interrupted. "How did you know about Dartz? No one involved told anyone about him."
"Wingweaver told me," Lisa said. "The cards all knew who it was that tried to interfere with their lives, and had no problem telling psychics that they were connected to.
"As I was saying, his interference seems to have weakened the barrier. The cards believe that he forcibly opened a door in the barrier by creating a rip in it. We thought it had repaired itself when things settled down. Card-speakers like myself were too drained psychically to check the barrier, and in truth it's located at the very edge of the sixth plane, and touches the world of the cards. Going that high in the planes, even with the soul-cards, is dangerous, so we rarely venture to check on it."
"Why were you drained?"
"We spent the entirety of the incident trying to figure out just what the monsters were doing in our world, and trying to convince them to return, or failing that, not harm anyone. We were only marginally successful. And after everything had resolved itself, none of us were up to so much as entering the first plane for weeks. Checking on the barrier was out of the question. None of us knew about the barrier being weakened until the cards warned us.
"If the barrier is destroyed, again monsters will manifest in this world. And I don't think that the card-speakers will have the strength to try and speak with them." Lisa sighed and put her head in her hands. "I wish that we'd been warned about the barrier immediately. By the time we knew about the problem, the barrier was little more than holes. If we'd known sooner, then we could have tried immediately, with several short attempts instead of the massive one we were resorted to. Hopefully it was enough to allow us to make repair attempts in bursts.
"Joan's message probably means that the barrier will fall soon. But foreseers have a saying 'The future is not set in stone.' Most of them, despite seeing the future on a regular basis, don't actually believe that what they see will definitely come to pass. More than once, they've seen something come about, and it didn't happen. Their visions usually come to pass, but it's possible that they won't. Though Joan does have an incredibly high accuracy rate..." Lisa shook her head and decided to not worry about something she had no control over. Joan's vision would either come to pass or it wouldn't. In the meantime, she could do nothing until she had regained her strength.
A noise from the doorway alerted her to Kaiba's presence.
"Big brother!" Mokuba jumped up and hugged his brother, receiving a small one in return.
"Kaiba," Lisa said, standing up. "Wingweaver told me what happened. I owe you my thanks." Unsurprisingly, Kaiba didn't answer, barely nodding in acknowledgment that he heard her.
"And I might have a way to do so," she added after a moment. "While I'm sure you don't need it, whatever funds my business can provide you in aid of this amusement park that I hear you plan to build are yours. You need only ask."
"Thank you, but I'm sure we can afford it," Mokuba said with a smile. "Besides, you helped my brother not too long ago. You don't owe us anything." Recognizing an argument she couldn't win when she saw one, Lisa nodded in acceptance and dropped the subject.
Instead of searching for another line of conversation, she grabbed a pile of schoolwork and set about the task of completing it all before she had to go back to school. Next to it was a pile of paperwork concerning her business that she needed to complete soon.
"I heard that they finally got the mess cleaned up from the 'freak accident' at school," Ray said with an amused grin on his face when he noticed what his sister was working on.
"I needed an excuse to be out of school for weeks and didn't have enough time to come up with a better one," Lisa said with a shrug, not looking up from her work.
"What are you talking about?" Mokuba asked.
"The pipes bursting," Lisa said. "It wasn't a freak accident like everyone thinks. After all, why would pipes that were in good condition burst for no reason? And why would water take so long to drain? I'm connected to many water-attribute cards. I simply asked for a favor. The fact that they were able to burst the pipes and keep the water level so high in the first place is just more proof that, yes, things are very, very bad right now." She glanced up for a moment to see the surprised and vaguely disbelieving expressions on the brother's faces.
"You can believe or not. It doesn't change the fact that it's true," was all she said on the subject before focusing solely on the work in front of her.
"Hey, can I ask you something?" Mokuba hesitantly spoke up after several long moments of silence. Lisa glanced up briefly and nodded.
"Why is this barrier breaking so horrible? When you mentioned it the first time, you said people would die if you couldn't fix it. But the monsters came before and no one was killed."
Lisa looked up fully at the question and set aside her schoolwork with a sigh. She then grabbed a large piece of paper and three pens, a red one, a black one, and a blue one.
"This is the card's world," she said, drawing a horizontal line about a third of the way down the paper in red. "Every card that you know, and that haven't revealed themselves to humans yet, lives here. It's where they belong."
Jumping down to the bottom third of the page, she grabbed the blue pen and drew another horizontal line. "This is our world. It's where we belong."
Grabbing the black pen, she drew two broken lines. The line above the blue had several gaps, each about twice the length of the tip of the pen. The line below the red had even smaller gaps, and there weren't as many of them.
"These are the card-reader's planes. Technically I should be drawing several more lines with smaller and smaller breaks, but this will do to explain things. In these planes, card-readers can speak with any of the cards they choose, or simply spend time with them. But neither psychics nor cards ever actually leave their own worlds. We just... Telepaths have the ability to astral project. This is similar. We're partially detaching our consciousness from ourselves to do so. How much we detach depends on how high in the planes we go. In the first three planes, I can easily carry on a conversation with a card and a conversation with someone here. In planes four and five, I can still pull it off, but it's much, much harder. In the sixth plane, the only place I'm aware of is the planes. I see nothing here, I hear nothing here, and if someone were to try and attack me, I would be completely vulnerable.
"This has worked for cards and psychics for thousands of years. I've never been told much about this. Wingweaver and the others don't like talking about it. But from what I'm told, around five thousand years ago, humans started interfering with this working system. They managed to force the cards out of their world, through the planes, and into ours. I'm not sure how they found a solution to keep this from happening, at least for the most part, but I do know that it just doesn't happen except for very rarely. I got the impression from the cards that it irritated them that a few humans could still force them into our world, but it was tolerable.
"Then Dartz did something to repeat what had happened so long ago. Cards were ripped from their world into ours. They didn't have a choice in the matter. And it was all that psychics world-wide could do to simply keep a fractured peace until things settled down.
"Now the barrier that keeps their world from the planes is almost destroyed. The barrier separating our world from the planes has always been all but non-existent. No psychic can change that, it's how it was made to be. Cards cannot stay in the planes. Not for very long. And it's difficult for them to remain in their own world when there's no barrier. Psychic Kappa described it once as if there was a metal belt around my waist, and not far away was a large magnet. I could resist the magnetic pull and keep myself away from it, but it would be hard, and it's not something I would be able to do for long. In this scenario, our world is the magnet.
"The cards are angry, Mokuba. They've finally found a way to keep themselves from being ripped into our world, and now someone's done just that, and damaged the only thing keeping or world and theirs separate so badly that any day now, they could physically manifest here. I used to love going to the sixth plane. I was close to all of the cards I hold so dear. Now every time I go there, all I can feel is the rage. Rage at Dartz for destroying the peace they finally managed to make for themselves. And more, rage at card-readers who did nothing to stop the barrier from getting to this point. Part of our job is to do just that. Make sure that the barrier is intact. And we've failed at it. The cards I have a connection to love me. They feel no resentment towards me, and shield me from the wrath of cards that do. But the only thing protecting other psychics from their rage is the cards that love them. The sixth plane holds a very uneasy peace, and no psychic knows how long it will last. So we avoid it.
"Before, we managed to shield humans from their rage. But it took so much out of us, that we're all still trying to recover. We cannot do it again. It requires too much strength that we just don't have. Soul-cards might, might heed us if we plead with them to stay their hands. And they might entreat other cards to do they same, and those cards might listen, but that's a lot of 'mights' and even if a hundred cards listen to us, and two hundred cards listen to those cards, there's still so many more that almost definitely won't listen to reason and will simply give into their rage.
"And honestly, as much as I hate it, as much as I don't want my nightmares to come true where cards walk among us and give into their rage and strike the humans who they feel have wronged them... I can't blame them. They were wronged. Blaming them for their anger is like blaming you for being angry at a bully, or trying to defend yourself from harm. We're trying to stop this from happening. But I'm afraid that it's all too little, too late."
Seeing that Mokuba was upset at this, Lisa smiled slightly.
"Don't worry. Even if I can't do anything, your brother is intimidating enough that even without the Blue Eyes White Dragons, cards will likely avoid him. And he won't let anything happen to you. And we're not giving up on the barrier. The other card-readers and I will rest, recover, and then try again."
When Mokuba smiled back, Lisa smiled a little wider, then went back to her school work.
"Mokuba will probably be safe. I just hope we can keep the rest of the humans safe." Surreptitiously glancing at her multi-colored prism in a nearby mirror, she saw that it was cracked down the center.