And here it is, the crossover special that I mentioned in an earlier post, between my DA and DE casts. Yeah they are my own characters, so it possibly isn't really a crossover, but just another story, but I like to think of it as a crossover. It sounds more exciting. Also it clearly isn't a Duel Force story, it is a story of these two spinoffs. After all the only characters who appear are from those spinoffs, so I think "crossover" fits. Comment below and let me know what you think of it!
Chapter One
The Appearance
John
Sometimes life sucks for a while,
is hard for a while, and you never think it’s gonna get easier. You think that
things will never equalize. You make the best of things as they are, and you
even come to enjoy overcoming the obstacles that pop in in your life, and you
eventually convince yourself that things are okay. You become content, but
content isn’t exactly the same as happy. When you are content, you’re only
satisfied with things as they are without changing them. When you’re happy, you
find enjoyment and satisfaction in everything that happens to you, and in every
possibility that presents itself. When you finally find happiness, you just
want the tough times to be over for good.
I know a lot of you reading this
know what I mean. Businessmen, teachers, stay at home moms, students, soldiers,
everyone has it tough. The degree of toughness ranges, and as Humans, we deal.
It’s what we do. Just look at me and my friends. We seem to be magnets for the
forces of evil, but whenever they attack we smack them down and then we
continue on. We deal. And don’t get me wrong, I have fun curb-stomping baddies
from time to time. It’s just that, ever since achieving my dream of being
sponsored as a professional Duelist by a big-name company, namely Industrial
Illusions, I just didn’t want to go through all of that anymore.
That’s not to mention my other
big reason to be happy, my girlfriend Karen. We’d gone through and survived our
rough patch, and things were better than ever. She’d still get annoyed from
time to time by my tendency not to be more consistently mature, and I still had
a bad habit of pushing her buttons in retaliation of her more grating
tendencies, or just to get a rise out of her, but we both understood that we
were just looking out for each other in our own ways. Overall, things were
great.
Realize that there is a lot more to
this story than what I have the time to write here today, so I’m going to write
this as if you’ve read the rest of what I’ve written. Sorry. If you want to
know the rest, you’ll have to read it for yourself. Either way, this story
begins only a day after my last story ended. My friends Thomas and Ria, Karen,
and I had recently been given full run of a cruise ship belonging to our new
employer. A (mostly) fully stocked and staffed cruise ship. Pegasus, my new
boss, had yet to give us any real instructions. The crew was heading to port in
New York Harbor, and was still several days out. Me, I found that boring and
spent most of my time trying to annoy the crew into taking us somewhere more
interesting, like Hawaii, or the Bermuda Triangle.
My most recent attempt involved
using the magic of my Soul of Darkness to manifest a pirate’s hat and stand in
the control room issuing orders to the command crew while waving a broomstick
around like a rapier. When the most I managed to get out of them was a series
of disgruntled stares, I finally gave up, saying, “Fine then, I’ll go play
pirate on the deck.”
So I traipsed through the interior
corridors and out onto the exterior deck, whistling the theme to Pirates of the
Caribbean, dissolving my hat back into my shadow, and twirling my broom a few
times like a baton before leaving it propped against a door frame. Aside from
our destination, Pegasus hadn’t given us any instructions except to have fun,
and that’s what I was determined to do.
You know, I thought, out of
nowhere, I could have just made them go where I want. I still could. I have
the power.
That one gave me pause. I never ever
considered using those powers, the darker powers of my Soul, the darker powers
of myself, especially on just some normal guys. Those powers were the
powers of my darker half, my secret dark side that I could never let out. Every
time I used those powers it meant letting him a little closer to the surface.
That was something I couldn’t let happen, that I wouldn’t let happen. So
I shook it off. I’d just been forced to use those powers more than usual
lately, that was all.
I kept walking, past unmanned
booths that would have been sources of entertainment for the ship’s guests, had
the ship actually been transporting guests, and toward the large swimming pool
in the center of the promenade. Thomas and Ria were there, lounging by the
pool. They’d been swimming, but now they were just lying in the sun, curled in
each others' arms, just looking at the sky. When they spotted me, Thomas spoke
up.
“Hey John,” he said, “if you’re
planning on taking a dip, then I think you might be a little bit overdressed.
He was right, of course. He and
Ria, however, were dressed perfectly for the occasion, Thomas wearing green and
white trunks, and Ria dressed for success in a pink bikini and over-sized
sunglasses. Me, I was wearing my favorite old faded t-shirt and
weathered black jacket and jeans, and the black-light purple spherical
crystal pendant, the Soul of Darkness, that I always wore around my neck.
“Nah,” I replied, “no swimming for
me today. I was looking for Karen.”
“Last I saw her,” Ria told me, “she
was up near the front of the boat, but I dunno for sure. Chica doesn’t tell
me much, ya know.”
I chuckled, “True, thanks.”
I made my way forward. The deck of
the ship was huge. There were signs that it had recently been retrofitted. The
ship was more than a few years old, but most of it looked new. New floorboards.
New windows. It was snazzy. When I reached the forward deck I found Karen
sitting cross-legged on some of those new floorboards scribbling in her idea
book. She was wearing an airy, lacy white top (I think it’s called a blouse?),
capris, and her cute-nerd glasses, which she only ever wears on the occasion
that she's scatterbrained enough to lose one or more of her contact lenses. By
the way she was scrutinizing her work, I could tell that she’d struck some kind
of inspiration.
“What’ya workin’ on?” I asked,
sitting down beside her and looking over her shoulder. It took her a second to
even realize that I was there.
Without looking up, she answered,
“You know that project I’ve been working on for Teacher?”
“Yeah,” I said, “what did Pegasus
decide to call it, Synch-up?”
“Synchro,” Karen corrected. “Well,
I’ve been thinking, the working concept of the Synchro cards puts them in the
Fusion Deck, and makes the cards white, so what if I can create something like
an opposite Synchro, a Dark Synchro, with a black card. It would be harder to
summon, but more powerful, and there could be one’s that mirrored specific
Synchro monsters, like an antithesis thing.”
She leaned over, resting her head
on my shoulder, “I dunno, Teacher probably won’t do anything with it, but-.”
“It’s still a fun idea,” I said,
finishing her thought for her.
“Yeah. Anyway, Teacher said he’s
already working out the kinks in the Synchro idea. He’s even made up a few of
my prototypes to play test. He’s being really hush about it (like that’s a
surprise), but there could be Synchros in booster packs as soon as next year,
if everything goes well. As his Pro Dueling team, you, Thomas and Ria could be
the first Duelists to use them.”
I was nodding my agreement when one
of Karen’s sketches caught my eye. It looked like my favorite monster, ‘The
Fiend Megacyber’, but all evil-looking and armored up.
“Hey, what’s that?” I asked.
“Just a Synchro idea I came up with
for you, but I’m not sure I like how it turned out.”
“I like it,” I assured her. “Did
you make one for you, too?”
“No,” she answered, going back over
some of the sketch’s sweeping, intricate lines with her pencil, “but if
Teacher’s even okay with making unique Synchros for us, which I doubt he will
be, then I might.”
Finally she actually looked over at
me, “Sorry for talking your ear off.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek,
“What’s up?”
“Breakfast?” I asked.
“It’s almost noon.”
“Brunch then. The kitchen has just
about everything.”
She smiled and nodded, “Sounds
good. I’ll meet you in the galley. I wanna drop my notebook off in our room
first, and grab my contacts. I forgot ’em.”
“Did you now?” I teased. I kissed
her on the cheek, “Okay, see you there. Just don’t take too long or I’ll order
for you.”
She made a face, “No way I’ll let
that happen again.”
We laughed and got up to go our
separate ways. We’d each made it exactly three steps when I was overwhelmed by
a wave of sensation coming through my Soul. A sensation of power so intense
that I’d only ever felt something like it once, though this was definitely
different than the Dark Divine Dragon. That’s when it appeared, a swirling
black cloud above us, twice the size of the ship, crackling with energy so
intense that it made my skin itch. Karen and I looked up into the darkness, and
I could feel that it was alive, and that it wasn’t here to make friends.
Moments later Thomas and Ria joined us, looking down on the forward deck from
the railing just above us. “What the hell is this thing?” Ria demanded, still
in the process of wrapping her bikini-clad self in a towel.
“How should we know?” I replied.
“You’re the ones with magic-y
things!”
She was right, of course. I
concentrated, and my Soul of Darkness began to glow. My domain of darkness
touches almost everything in existence. I can see, feel and touch anything that
touches darkness, to some degree or another, even thoughts and memories, or
other magic. There was magic in those clouds, which weren’t really clouds. They
were more like the darkness itself, but I couldn’t command them. It was
disconcerting.
“I don’t know what it is,” I told
my friends, “but I don’t like it. It’s,” I struggled to put the feeling into
words, “menacing.”
Just then the electricity building
in the cloud began to overflow, jumping between the clouds and the ocean and
the deck below them. They caused little damage to the ship itself, but I got a
feeling that if they hit a person, it would be an entirely different story.
“Inside,” I told my friends, “now!”
The four of us turned in unison and
ran for cover.
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