Oh, Millennium Keeper, ILY. Keep on BAMF-ing, my friend. Dude was seriously so much fun to write, I can't help but smile when I revisit the character. Also, is this the first time that John made something out of darkness? I think it is! This is an important moment, guys.
Oh, and tension! Yay!
Chapter Two
Ancient Being;
Millennium Keeper
John
It’s dark, I thought, are my eyes closed? No. But I can‘t see. Weird. I thought for a second, but could come up with nothing to explain my blindness. Maybe if I stand up, I thought, and I pushed myself up onto my feet. Suddenly I found myself able to see again, standing in a familiar place, the Burial of the Soul, except instead of the altar where the Souls had been before they were released, there stood an old Egyptian man wearing plain white robes. He spoke. “Welcome John, to the tomb of your soul.”
Karen
I had been pacing the hospital waiting room for almost a half hour, ever since I’d called Jen. Tucker had taken care of calling the others as he’d said, of which I was glad. At first I’d thought that we would be alright on our own, but almost as soon as Jen had answered my call, the feelings began. The feelings that we were on the verge of a huge battle the likes of which we’d never seen. So far those of us who were there waiting had heard nothing about John’s condition, and no one had attacked yet, thankfully. When I told Max about the mysterious feelings of danger, he insisted that the attack was already over and that Richard had actually been an Order agent whose job it was to take John out of the equation, making us weaker, but I knew better.
“No way,” I’d told him, listening to my Soul. “That kid didn’t have a bit of magic to him at all. He had a lot of duel energy, but no magic, and I doubt that duel energy alone would be enough to do something like this to someone who has a Soul.”
I can’t let my guard down, I thought, looking out through the glass double doors of the hospital entrance and up at the darkening sky. Maybe I’m being paranoid, John’s just sick, and there is no attack coming, but I hope not. If this is something other than an Order plot, then that means there’s nothing I can do about it.
John
“What do you mean ‘tomb of my soul’?” I asked the mysterious old man, becoming aware of a great power deep within him. “Who are you, and what do you want with me?”
“Ah ah ah,” said the man tisk-tiskingly, “one question at a time.”
“Fine,” I countered, “who are you? Speak fast.” I raised my arm, which inexplicably bore my Duel Disk, carrying my deck within it, and my shadow rose up and wreathed my hand, forming a crude blade.
“Okay!” said the man, raising his hands in a placating gesture. “Don’t jump the gun my friend. I am the Millennium Keeper. I have a warning for you, and a test. Which would you like first?”
Karen
It had now been forty minutes since my call to Jen. Finally the doctors had something on John. A nurse came and got Sarah, Tucker, and I and led us into the ICU. Max stayed in the lobby to wait for the others, since they were finally due to arrive any minute.
Once we were through the double doors leading to the ICU, the nurse led the three of us down the hall, outside of a room. There was a doctor waiting. The nurse walked away, and the doctor stepped forward. “Hello. I’m Dr. Thomas, your friend’s attending-.”
Before the doctor could finish his sentence Tucker grabbed him by the collar, desperate, and said, “Cut the pleasantries and tell me what’s wrong with my bro!”
Dr. Thomas twisted out of Tucker’s grasp and said, as he straightened his collar, “Just calm down. May I ask where the patient's mother is?"
"Out of town," Sarah replied, almost as hostile-sounding as Tucker, "and out of contact. I've tried, believe me. So just tell me what the deal is. I'm his sister."
"Well then," the doctor replied, "your brother is stable, at least for now, but we haven’t been able to bring him out of the coma, and all the tests we’ve performed have turned up nothing. The truth is, we just don’t know what’s wrong.”
“Then you’re useless,” said Sarah, pushing past the doctor and into the room behind him. “Now if you don’t mind, we wanna see him.”
Tucker and I followed Sarah into John’s room, followed by Dr. Thomas, who kept a good distance from Tucker. John lay there, unconscious, hooked up to several monitors, with an IV in his arm. If not for the beeping of the heart monitor, I could have almost come to believe that he was sleeping. But I knew better. John was in trouble, and it was up to the Duel Force to help. And we would help, no matter what.
John
“I’ll take the warning first,” I said, keeping my blade at the ready.
“Good choice,” Millennium Keeper replied. “Your team, while protecting your body back in the waking world, will face a force more powerful than they are, sent by your enemy to take your Soul of Darkness, the strongest of the twelve. Your body has been thrown into a coma because your mind and your spirit are out of balance with your Soul. I have infiltrated your mind so that I can help you restore balance and unlock your true power before it’s too late to save your friends and yourself.”
“And how,” I asked, “will you do that?”
“With your test,” Keeper replied. “Or, more appropriately labeled, our duel.”
I smiled, letting the Shadow Blade melt away and become black smoke. “Well then, if it’s a duel you want, it’s a duel you’ll get!”
Karen
I sat down next to my best friend’s hospital bed. Tucker and Sarah had just reluctantly left to rejoin Max in the waiting room. I closed my eyes, and looked into my Soul. I smiled weakly at what the Soul of Imagination told me, opened my eyes and said, “John, I can sense through the Soul that only you can help you get better. I want to help, but I trust my Soul and I trust you. I know you’ll come back to me as soon as you can. But something bad is about to happen, I can feel it."
I paused, knowing that John almost definitely couldn't hear me, but feeling the need to tell him anyway. "John," I said, "You don't know how much I rely on you. I'm not the Duelist that I was when we met. I don't want to be that person anymore. But if it means giving you the time to come back to me, I will do everything in my power to become that person again. But we’re gonna need you, so hurry and get yourself better, okay, just in case I can’t handle what’s to come.”
Jen
Monty and Lawrence got on the bus several stops after mine. They, Kris and I rode together the rest of the way. We got off and walked the half block to the hospital, running into Rocky and Kimi minutes before we arrived. They lived closer to the hospital, but their route had dropped them off further away. I noticed that the only one of my newest companions wearing a jacket was the spikey-haired Monty, and wondered why the tall, overly-serious Lawrence would wear only his tight t shirt with the dragon footprint and khaki shorts in the forty degree Fahrenheit weather of the deepening night. Rocky wasn’t much better off, wearing that sleeveless t-shirt of his under that old army vest, but he kept close to Kimi, the cute, petite Japanese girl who he claimed was only his best friend, even though rest of us could see how much they liked each other, so I figured he was plenty warm.
We walked together the rest of the way. Even though we each had different degrees of experience with our Souls and their magic, and Kris didn’t have a Soul at all, we walked in silence, because every one of us was acutely aware that a powerful force was following close behind us, preparing to strike.
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