As a scientist more accustomed to tinkering with engines and atoms than analysing the human mind, Yusei nonetheless had been forced to learn about how his own brain worked in an effort to abate his nightly fits. Yet even experts found the line between consciousness and subconsciousness was blurry and the line between asleep and unaware even less distinguished. All that he knew was that the cerebral inhibitor allowed him to wake up with all the physical sensations of a well-rested night yet without that awareness which came from natural sleep. From his perspective, he had just asked Joey to turn off the medical device if the timer failed and fully expected to see the insane blonde appearing in his vision again. Having his vision crowded with various faces and a pen gently scraping across one cheek was not anything that he could have reasonably expected.
"Joey." There was a unified freezing act. "Did I miss my invite to the party?" There was no way to explain his way out of the situation but Joey put on a look of polite confusion as the pen instinctively dragged itself back into motion.
"Nope," Capping his marker again, he stepped back and started minutely shuffling behind Tristan. "Came to wake you up exactly as you asked. Nobody believed you were some sleeping prince so they all came to check it out for themselves." It was nearly a believable story. Yusei might have accepted it if he'd woken up even one minute later.
"Uh-huh." While Joey only had the mind of a child, there was an actual child standing beside Duke and she was rolling her eyes as the dirty blonde rocked with silent giggles. Although, Yusei did clock moderately amused faces on half the adults as he slipped a shirt on. Whatever was on his face was only funny to people with a more weathered sense of humour and no maturity whatsoever. "Did you draw a penis on my face?"
"Not a penis, no." Téa had only joined after Joey had already set to work on his masterpiece. Trying to argue that he should stop halfway had given him the rest of the time necessary to complete his work. Walking into the en-suite, Yusei examined the handiwork in the lengthy mirror.
"Not bad." Compared to Jack and Crow, the attempt was remarkably tame. Whiskers, a curly moustache, a pair of rimmed glasses stretching to his ears, and a lightning bolt on the forehead for style.
"Care to explain what that was all about?" Joey's explanation left a lot to be desired, as always. He'd only been partly listening when Yusei explained and most of what had filtered in had slipped right back out again. One aspect he had been able to prove was the unresponsive nature of the sleeping figure who was currently trying to erase the evidence.
"It's officially referred to as 'a unique long-term neurological condition of unknown origins which causes extreme neurological and physical fits during the occurrence of Rapid Eye Movement sleep cycles'." He glanced at the crowd clustered in the mirror. "What it means is that my brain tears itself apart if I fall asleep and I can't keep fragile items near my bed."
Realisation dawned on Rebecca's face. "And you use a cerebral inhibitor to prevent your brain from reaching the REM stages which can trigger your condition."
"What's with the emphasis?" Then he saw the rings still around his eyes and realised what must have happened. "What did Joey say it was called?" The elder Wheeler was doing a very innocent whistling impression as the pretend frames were dabbed away.
"A celery injector." Wheeler the younger had no qualms about revealing her brother's shortcomings and was a hair faster than Mai.
"... Okay." Once again, the misunderstanding of that morning was only a few minutes ago for him as opposed to the hours that it had been for everyone else. "Is this like the garlic coffee?" It took a lot for a man with a drawn curly moustache and ring glasses to divert attention. Still, certain questions demand investigation and all eyes turned to Joey where he attempted to explain how his masterful attempts to thwart the vampire menace were only undone by the vampire menace staunchly refusing to exist.
"Not to be cruel but what's the point of Illyasster trying to kill you if you're already dying?" Duke was asking the same question that Yusei had been asking himself since the trial had revealed his inevitable medical demise. He'd suspected they might know before but everyone in the world knew now.
"The only reason I can think of is that they think I'll still be a martyr if I die of natural causes." He paused to consider the magnitude of his words. "Less unnatural causes. People who see me working until I die will admire my selfless dedication. People see me die prematurely like Yugi and Jaden and assume that I was too invested in being the King of Games to do my work properly." Diverting innovation was easy enough with vast sums of money. Throw in historical disgrace and there was hardly any need to get open the chequebook.
"How much longer do you have?" Anyone but Rebecca asking would have been insensitive. She knew the pricelessness of having few enough days left to take count.
"Maybe a year, if I'm lucky and careful." He dabbed away the lightning bolt over his eyebrows at a slower pace. Most of the ink was still drying and readily came away at his attempts. "Eight to ten months in most reasonable estimates." Yusei dropped the towel back on the counter and smiled sadly at the young girl. "I've got enough time to help my friends one last time and get my affairs in order. My doctor says I won't even feel it at the end; I'll just get tired and go to sleep."
While he had sworn not to reveal the future, there was no doubt that the last segment was a covert implication of her grandfather. Only Joey and Duke could detect the subtle misdirections of an experienced Duellist. In an extreme doctor-friend-patient-friend version of confidentiality, Ogino had privately expressed that his pathways were likely going to chaotically degrade towards his end. The last eight to ten weeks of Yusei's life would be a painful descent into insanity, chaos, and agony as a lifetime of neural connections were eradicated with each passing night. Each sleep could bring the waking nightmare of not even knowing how to breathe or his neocortex losing the precious information on how to keep his heart beating.
"Now," Dragging the conversation from the depressing and embarrassing paths took a lot of effort but Yusei still had half a curl faintly gracing his upper lip. "Joey was mentioning steaks right before I had my nap. I know some side dishes that go great with them."
"I didn't think we had any steaks." And Tristan didn't need his tracking skills from the JSDF to know if steaks came within twenty metres of him. A bloodhound with a decade of experience stood an equal chance but couldn't cook them afterwards which was the most important part. "Except for the one I've been marinating in the fridge."
"The thing is," Joey left a faint afterimage as he fled the room at speed. Tristan waited exactly three seconds before departing in hot pursuit. His traitorous best friend never stood a chance.
"Sorry about them," Even Mai sometimes managed to forget how 'exuberant' Joey could get. "They can be immature sometimes." Fate never misses an opportunity and there was the sound of something smashing in the far distance.
"Don't worry about it." He shared an inside glance with Téa. "My brothers are just as bad." Stories of squabbling siblings would gradually spread outwards over the course of his visit until even Serenity felt he was exaggerating a few points.
Thin slices of chicken sizzled gently in the pan as Yusei aggressively stirred it around the confines of the metal pen. Even though that mysterious sense of timing was suspended under the application of his cerebral inhibitor and he woke up without that instinctive understanding that the hours had passed, the rest of his body proceeded apace. It was unsettling to blink and feel an entire meal vanish into the pits of his stomach so his first action was always to top the tank back up. As a good guest, he had extended that into an offer for dinner. What he had hoped for was a discussion on progress for finding whomever else had arrived from the future. Instead,
"What if you have to sneeze while you're asleep?" Watching a man arise from a comatose state to perfect functionality within ten seconds was fascinating to the group. This backwards era had yet to develop clean energy or discover multiphasic states, of course they'd see him as a huge scientific leap.
"I sneeze." After deflecting questions about what the device was made from and how it operated, they re-established the boundaries around future knowledge. Unfortunately, Duke had figured out how to ask questions about situations which could arise while Yusei was in their present.
"How did you calibrate for the difference between intentional and unconscious forms of movement with regards to habitual muscle control?" Speaking with Rebecca was starting to split Yusei into two moods. On the one hand, he melted to see someone her age with such an interest in science and an intellect capable of keeping up. However, there were times when her immaturity bled through.
"Lifetime habits appear to have become deeply ingrained enough that they do not require specific differentiation." No, he didn't have to worry about pooping in his sleep. "Rice noodles or egg noodles?"
"Steak." Tristan was his unlikely ally in this predicament. Joey would inevitably have asked the most (and most irritating) questions except that his brother-in-arms was still ready to use his arms to beat Joey every time he opened his mouth. The marinated steak was still a sore point between them.
"Egg it is." Boiling the water would have killed the conversation for a few minutes except that Pegasus had sprung for a silent kettle. Boiling the noodles would only take a few minutes and Yusei was already moving to take full advantage of that time. "Mai, would you mind stirring the vegetables while I get some bowls?"
"Honey, this hair does not do steam." Mai was a wonderful cook when she wanted to be and had fair notice. Dipping in for a quick stir was not worth the damage to her locks. "I'll get the bowls and Joey will help dish out the food." Being romantically involved with Mai Valentine meant a lot of hateful looks, even more envious ones, and being abruptly volunteered for a variety of tasks. Joey was already moving to continue cooking by the time that Yusei realised he had been forced from his protective cocoon of playing chef and thrust back under the spotlight of interrogation.
"Did Illasstar do it to you?" Téa had landed directly on the question which helped Yusei keep sleep at bay longer than nearly any other; had this happened to him by chaos or by design?
"I don't think that Yliaster did this." Stressing the correct pronunciation, he found the constant mistakes strangely aggravating. Yliaster was hidden from the entire world, their every movement a secret from anyone who might have the power to expose them. At least he could make their name known. "They would have gone after my family if they were capable." Proving a negative was impossible. If Yliaster hadn't done it, there would be no evidence to find and he'd found exactly no evidence of a cause.
"Could it have been something at your science place?" Serenity knew as little about the SRC as the rest of her family yet it made sense that the head of the facility would be exposed to far more experiments than the average member. Any combination of chemicals could have caused Yusei's brain to start melting and overworking.
"I've got a theory." Chewing a piece of chicken, he internally processed the story for any contaminating knowledge it might contain. "My friend, Bruno. He fell into an event horizon. A black hole." Everyone except Joey and Rebecca had blank looks at the original term. "Musume helped me save him but there were problems. When I got out, my mind was fractured. There are still parts I can't remember but that's when I started having trouble sle"
"You went into a black hole?" Rebecca was a kind girl under normal circumstances but she was displaying the sort of intellectual hunger that placed Din on several watchlists. "How did you avoid the effects of time dilation?" Extreme pressure caused by the concentrated mass on space-time would slow the passage of relative time near itself. One minute near the black hole could be hundreds of years outside.
"Proportional asynchronous temporal focal point." Thousands of years passed outside the event horizon only for their exit point to remain perfectly tied to New Domino, circa about an hour later.
"Gravimetric pressures?" Sudden waves of crushing forces swirled inside a black hole like seas of mass-induced gravity. The others in the room broke off into their own conversations as the pair continued to enthral each other in the pinnacles of science.
"Quantum stability field with relative scope." Keeping them safe in a bubble of normality was apparently within the limitations of a Shadow Duel. As curious as he was to how far that protection could stretch, Yusei was willing to leave the boundaries of knowledge comfortably where they were.
"Firewall?" Ah, the burning intensity of energy which squatted at the heart of a black hole. Space-time so tangled and gnarled that it had no recourse except to explode and ignite forever. Only a hotly debated theory until it had nearly seared him from existence.
"Magic." Which was enough to make Rebecca slam down her chopsticks in outrage. "I'm kidding! Musume refuses to tell me what happened and I don't remember." Yusei didn't believe that Musume knew what had happened in the void of twisted reality. She'd have mocked him with the knowledge until Akiza forced the truth out if there was any to be had.
"Then the firewall theory is true?!" Yusei was the one to slam down his chopsticks this time. A few warning glances threatened anyone who threw as much as a sour glance toward Rebecca but he had a higher reason to be upset.
"Can you stop that!" Although science only had heavily reinforced theory (even in his time), the exceptional circumstances which had led to Bruno's rescue also provided a truly terrifying exposure to the truth behind the myth. Rebecca had drawn that truth from him with terrifying ease.
"Don't worry." Duke continued to slurp down his dinner. "She's done it to everyone. Only reason that Dungeon Dice Monsters got sales rights in California was because she asked the governor to explain why things couldn't be sold and then asked which DDM had." The exact reason Rebecca had a growing income for 15% of Duke's share of the California profit margins was because the permits had been rejected the same day she had invited him to attend a science conference on game theory.
"Hey, you're the one who forgot to call your lawyers in the drive over." She sniffed pointedly. "Not my fault you left the two of us alone." Internally reminding himself for the fiftieth time not to underestimate the budding prodigy, her guest silently turned to the far end of the intellectual spectrum.
"Joey," Treating the dirty-blonde to a wide smile, Yusei was nearly as happy to finish the sentence as he had been irritated Rebecca had tricked him into sharing future knowledge. "I've got a job." One that only he could do. "Tomorrow, I'm going to teach you about Synchro Summons. You'll be able to protect yourself if Yliaster comes after you first." And the knowledge of how to perform a Synchro summon would be self-containing as the design was still about fifty years away from release. "Once I get my Duel Disk to link up, I can scan the Duellist Network for any anomalous readings and that should help me track them down before they find out I'm here." It was a plan as elegant in its simplicity as it was brilliant. However,
"What do you mean?" Yusei had fallen prey to the second mistake of any time-traveller: assuming that the destination will work just like home. "That Duellist Network thing. Never heard of it." Joey's own simplicity wasn't unique to him this time – faces up and down the conversation were shrugging or looking elsewhere for answers.
"Oh, that radar gizmo?" Yusei let out an audible sigh of relief. "That only tells you where the nearest Duellist is. They can refuse a Duel if you find them but that resets every week." As Duke continued to detail the drawbacks of the system which would one day form the backbone of Duel Monsters society, Yusei mentally retreated into the screaming confines of his own thoughts.
Without a way to filter through potential opponents, he'd have to catalogue any Duellist he came across and hope that he could get through enough in a week to locate whoever was from Yliaster. Even if he managed to do enough to make any real progress, it'd require him constantly exposing himself and giving away the advantage of him being there in the first place. He currently had an advantage from being an unexpected factor yet that anonymity was all that protected him. A few days of preparation could be enough to make him as vulnerable as if Yugi was still here.
Brinner - the most important meal of the day!
Reviews - the most important part of the story!