Yu-Gi-Oh: A Past and Future Pharaoh
Written By: Lady Lunar Phoenix
Beta By: Lady Lunar Phoenix
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Vivid flames rose up from the large holes that had been dug into the ground much like fingers reaching for the dark night sky and its multitude of stars. Bathed in deep golds, oranges and reds the area illuminated a great distance of desert sand. Soft warm colors to soothe the bite of the chill autumn night with the softest of warm colors.
It was peaceful for them, no sounds of distant, curious coyotes, or wild stray dogs, just the sharp cracks and snaps of the flames. The warmth of the flames bathed the leather coats tinting their brown to a soft golden tone like honeyed wood. It illuminated the jeans and sneakers that the men wore and the thick truck tires that had pulled out a short time ago. Even further in the distance their ride, a single engine plane was parked. Far enough away it was mostly the darker specter in the weakening light.
"You think this will work?" One man, his face hidden behind a gas mask, and his voice distorted asked casually.
"Works or not, at least we have more room for stock once the flames die down," his fellow replied.
Both men were dressed in warm autumn clothes, jeans and shirts with aviator jackets. From the distance they could have been coming off base with their militant hair styles. Who would question them if the masks came off? Wind stirred only slightly, teasing the flames higher into the cloudless sky.
"The numbers 'should' be enough to get the demon powered up," the first guy said pulling out his cellphone and checking the messages.
"Yeah, but we can't exactly confirm that they all got burned you know? The tunnels 'are' big and its not as though we flooded them out." The second person, only maybe half a hand taller than the first one noted with a faint shrug.
The flames were all they heard now, but when they had started there had been the atypically expected alarmed shouts from the supplies down below. Once the torch was dropped down the shouts and protests erupted into screams and shrieks of pain. But that had been a while ago when the last whimper that could reach them did. Leaving them standing there waiting for a confirmation text from base.
"Well its going to have to, gas isn't cheap and neither is getting it shipped out here," his colleague pointed out. But it 'was' a good point, they would be expected to make another shipment of supplies if this one wasn't enough. Boredom began to settle in, causing them to shift the weight of their bodies from one leg to the other. Only to move on to taking brief paced out walks to keep the blood flowing. Going back to the plane started to become an idea when finally a small beeping sound from a phone began.
The shorter man pulled out the phone and... then struggled to see anything, the screen was that bland dirty water brown and the words were in their static charcoal gray. Between the gas mask, the darkness, and the flames behind him he looked rather comical trying to see the message on the phone. He put the flames behind him and held up the phone.
Storm is dissolving. Secondary power source was tapped, you can go home.
The text was read aloud earning a raised eyebrow from himself as he took in the message.
"There was a storm? That shouldn't matter unless it was one of 'those' storms," he noted thoughtfully as he flipped the phone shut and slipped it back in its pocket.
"I guess they needed more supplies than what we could get from this spot," his current companion noted with a faint shrug. "But we can leave so let's go..."
"Yeah."
They walked over to where the lid had been left and grabbed the ropes attached to the slab of thick metal that served as the door. Between the two of them, and a good deal of grunting, the pair began dragging a foot thick slab metal across the open flames. It was a slow process, yet eventually it was dragged into its spot. The heat from the flames stifling and all the more reason for them to pull harder until they were left in nothing but darkness. The flames smothered under the reinforced steel and if the area fell in? Well it could be filled in easily enough.
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The rings were useless without Mahaado and others... Well in hindsight, Ryou was left pondering if Mahaado could teleport people on his own were he summoned. The storm was starting to taper off, but he doubted the buses would be back at full swing in time for him to take one to the hospital. His table was covered with his game set up, as the spirits began giving him a play by play of what he was missing.
A visual display of the hospital for him to ponder over and wonder exactly how Yugi could find this the 'least' bit entertaining! It was maddening for Ryou! Many of the doors had been marked as blocked off, the power he had been told had gone down. Even the 'lights from the special walls' aka the computer screens, had gone dark. Panic was consuming the hospital staff as the life support equipment ceased function.
Kaiba may have saved everyone when Yugi took those bullets for him. But he wasn't going to pull it off again. Leaving a number of people perilously closer to the chance of dying than they were before. All because someone was trying to come after Yugi. Again... in fact the same demon was coming after Yugi only this time without Ryou's body as a tool.
He gravitated to the window as though he could see the hospital from the windows of his apartment. Only the city was in his way, and all he 'could' see was the roof of clouds created by Kaiba's divine nature. Rippling waves of clouds across the sky, though now he 'could' see the sky above as the rain, which had been savage, now was lessen.
"Take heart my dear son, the Pharaoh's living High Priests are by his side. Both Malik's older siblings are there and with the General no harm should befall the pharaoh," his thief mother spirit spoke in a soothing tone, attempting to comfort her agitated son.
"Yes, but Yugi left them in my care..." He inwardly winced at that comment, yet the expected squealing of her 'baby thief being a king' or some other such nonsense never came. She nodded thoughtfully, a quiet smile on her face causing him to blink in surprise. "What? You usually act all overly elated when I take charge of something."
"I... I'm sorry about that. I admit I was a bit overly excited about being with you again and the chance to see how you have grown. Granted you're far too pale for my taste, but that is what these people are so there's that..." She shrugged apologetically as she moved to sit beside him. Unchanged and no different than the night he watched her get dragged off and killed by Yugi's uncle.
"I may have been too expressive and I fear I have caused pain in my friends' heart because of it..." She admitted, causing him to turn a bit to focus more on her. Granted he had a duty to the others, a duty he couldn't fulfill at the moment. She was looking at him with a quiet pride, but there was also remorse and shame in that gaze. Her brown eyes taking in his pale features, and for a moment she lifted her hand as though to touch his hair only to remember at that last second. She couldn't.
"Your hair was brown until that night, by the time the Pharaoh's uncle was through your hair had turned all white." She commented with a faint regret in her tone. "Yet at least you lived, she wasn't so fortunate, she never got to raise her son."
Ryou blinked and lowered his own gaze in recognition of such a loss, and it explained why the Village Eldress seemed fascinated by children. He had thought she never got the chance before she died, she seemed a bit younger than his own mother. But 'losing' a child? "Still birth?" He asked gently.
She shook her head though, then gave a weak ironic laugh, "stolen from the crib in her room. She was unable to stop the thief... Ironic is it not?"
Ryou sat there taken aback by the ironic twist, a 'village of tomb robbers' yet their own leaders' child was stolen from them?
"I didn't realize I was hurting her until recently, her husband was visiting another village at the time and so he is not here with us. He got to pass on, she's a prisoner, I'm sure she would have wanted to have moved on so she could hopefully entreat Anubis. Perhaps He could be willing to tell her what became of her little boy... But that didn't happen and here I am with you and your father..."
"I understand, infant mortality was already high enough, for the baby to be stolen though..." Ryou shook his head and looked down at the mock up of the hospital. His 'father' had brought reports of missing children, how people were starting to go missing. But not the nice, neat, well to do ones, the ones from the shadows. 'Lost children' he called them, and now that Ryou thought on it, his ancient father seemed rather invested in that department. He had been checking on the children and now Ryou suspected he had an idea as to why.
"I guess anything lesser than this demon doesn't require the same level of 'need to be evil' that Zorc requires." Ryou noted as he stared down at the game field. Only for his head to snap back up, "a fiend? Kaiba and the others are going to face off against a 'fiend' at the hospital?" Granted the spirits were learning modern words at their own pace and interest. But there was something off about how they said 'fiend'.
Instinct made Ryou automatically fear that they meant 'demon' as in Zorc, but the casual way they stood around his apartment was strange to say the least. After all, Zorc had a history with them, causing them to react pretty strongly when the demon was mentioned. This wasn't strongly anything and it was probably the only reason he wasn't hitting any type of alarm button. "Why are all of you so calm about a fiend at the hospital? Are we talking a Duel Spirit or an actual fiend..."
"It is not a fiend... in the game that you play..." One man said gesturing his unease at pinning anything down. "But it has all the form of one, so I'm not sure if we could call it a summoned Spirit, a fiend, or a demon."
"Lovely," Ryou grumbled as he settled back in his seat, his eyes lowered to the game field. "There's nothing I can do until the storm is over and by then... If Kaiba is protecting everything via the storm, the fact that its dissipating while a threat is 'growing'..."
'He's at his limit, or he's trying to choke hold his own abilities and caused the storm to ease up before it was safe...' Ryou thought to himself, while forcing out the small snide voice in the back of his head that suggested he didn't realize a summoning was happening.
"Kaiba, just summon Dark Magician and have him pick us up, you can do that right?"
It was a rhetorical question in the end.
Of course Kaiba 'could' do that. Summoning a Duel Spirit only required a connection between summoner and aspects of the Duel Spirit. Being a God on Earth though, meant that Kaiba could override that and just summon Mahaado the way Yugi could. Like Yugi he undoubtedly wouldn't, as Mahaado wasn't just a mindless spirit, but a human soul.
"Find out what the others are doing, if I need to call them or have them on the ready because I need to know if they're free." Ryou instructed the spirits in front of him before closing his eyes. "At best, I won't have to, and Kaiba, Isis, and Rashid can protect Yugi on their own. Given that they have their Ka beasts restored they should be fine. At worst..."
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His bald head tingled...
Rashid opened his eyes in confusion only to be met with a darkness deep enough to question if he was even awake. He blinked a few times as he strained to see 'anything' before finally voicing his concern. "Isis?"
"Hmm... Gods have I gone blind?!" Isis' voice was as startled her hands thrust out into the darkness struck him as she swept her arms out to find 'something'.
The soft shades of blue of the limo had gone out, the tinted windows ensuring that there was no real way to see the front of the limo either. Only the sound of the rain ensured that the outside world even still existed. Inside the limo the heat that had been generated to help dry off the pair was becoming stagnant. While outside, where the barely visible lamp posts had glowed, only darkness reigned. Whatever lights that they could see appeared as distant as the stars themselves, wobbling through the falling rain, occasionally drifting from side to side. Undoubtedly vehicles that had been forced trapped on the road.
"Did... did the whole hospital, and everything 'outside' the hospital lose power?" Isis asked as she turned and moved closer to the side of the limo that would show the hospital intake entrance. Only it was dark too. No interior lights? "Shouldn't the hospital have its own power sources for emergencies?"
"We should make our way inside... Yugi is going to need us I fear," Rashid pushed himself up from his seat, his clothes now in that crinkly stiff state between scraping rough and still unpleasantly wet.
Isis, who was already at the door, opened it and climbed out into the chill night air and shivered. It instantly refroze every bit of her as the sound of a car door near by opened.
"Ms?" Isono called out over the the steady fall of rain but in the darkness he could have been calling from across a chasm.
"We're going to go and help Seto, we'll be ok," Isis explained as she felt the wall that was Rashid climb out of the limo beside her.
"Very well ma'am," Isono called out before climbing back into the limo.
At least that's what she hoped he did because all she heard was the weighted sound of the door shut again.
"That poor man, I am beginning to feel for the staff that now has to deal with all of this," Rashid noted speaking in their native tongue. Moving off in the darkness, before trying to remember just how many steps was it until they reached the sidewalk.
"Indeed," Isis answered as she followed the sound of his steps to the best of her ability. "The storm is dissipating, either he's unable to sustain it or the threat has passed. Only given the state of the hospital..."
"He's being worn down," Rashid agreed.
"True rest, he went straight back to work the moment he opened his eyes..." Isis sighed in slight annoyance. "So stubborn."
"Stubborn enough to go it alone and we crumble because he's not here..." Rashid agreed with a resigned sigh. This wasn't going to be an easy walk he realized as he walked along the sidewalk towards where he faintly recalled the entryway. The only time the pair really came to the hospital had been in a mad dash to reach Yugi and Seto. They never took the time to really examine the lay out of the hospital and now they were going to have to find a way up to the floor where Yugi was resting.
He found the doors and, to his surprise, they slid open easily under his hands allowing himself and Isis to walk in. With the first pair of doors passed through, the eerie silence of the place began to take shape. Once they passed the second set of doors and the silence didn't break, the pair began to share a strong fear that everyone in the hospital was dead.
"Ex... excuse me?" A voice, meekly called out from the darkness off to the left side of the room. Her voice bouncing anxiously across the walls and towards the pair of Egyptians.
"Yes?" Isis answered as she zeroed in on the sound of the voice and slowly made her way across the room.
"I deeply regret to inform you that there seems to be a problem with our power at the moment..." the voice called out, attempting to sound professional when she clearly wanted to be somewhere safer.
"We noticed," Isis replied with a half smile, "we here to check on our friends."
'Friend' was now such a happily loaded word. 'Boss' was a better one, 'God' a great one, but Isis settled for 'friends'. After all they were treasured friends long before the world caved into their happy, idealistic life.