We interrupt this Yu-Gi-Oh! story to bring you cute domestic stuff! I guess the first chapter was a little bit like that, too, but here, with Rocky and Kimi, it just seems more obvious to me. Maybe it's because they're in their apartment, or maybe its just that I love writing these characters as a couple and find it adorable, but either way, it is what it is. And there is the creepy stuff in the second half of the chapter to make up for it.
Chapter Two
Scary Stories
Rocky
I stood across from Kimi on a
weathered red exercise mat in the spare room of my somewhat crappy apartment in
Tokyo, Japan. We were both wearing second hand Karate gi that I’d found at a
shop. Kimi’s was loose around her small frame, and she’d had to pin it up
almost as thoroughly as she had her straight black hair.
“I’m not sure about this, Robby,”
Kimi said, speaking Japanese.
“You’re the one who said you needed
to learn to defend yourself, Kim,” I replied in only slightly less fluent
Japanese. I’d made a point to learn over the last couple of years, and now I
could speak Kimi’s native tongue almost as well as she could.
“Talk is one thing,” Kimi replied
anxiously.
“Come on,” I coaxed her, “where’s
that positive attitude of yours?”
“Sitting in the corner,” She
answered, “where you can’t flip it onto its back.”
“You’ll be fine,” I told her. “Now
watch me.”
I showed her the hand motion again,
the one that we’d been working on all evening, “See, it’s not all too
difficult. When I come at you, just take a step and do what I just did and
you’ll be fine.”
I stepped in close, moving slowly,
swinging my hand upward toward her torso in a sweeping motion. Kimi brought her
hands forward, clasping my wrist, stepped, turned, and pinned my arm against my
back.
“Good,” I praised, “very good. Just
remember, the most common weapon you’ll see on the street will be a knife,
short enough to conceal, but still deadly, and the most common attack you’ll
see, especially from a more experienced knife-wielder, will be one similar to
the motion I just demonstrated. You’re going to be smaller than basically
anyone who’ll try to mug you, so ideally your next move would be to use your
new found leverage to pin your opponent against a wall, giving you a chance to
disarm them. Let’s try a couple more times, this time in real time, and then
we’ll move on to the best way to counter a slashing motion.”
“Fine,” Kimi conceded, “just don’t
flip me.”
“I’m not gonna knock you on your
back,” I told her.
She smiled mischievously, “Well,
not this early in the evening at least.”
She turned and looked seductively
back over her shoulder, making me blush, and resumed the starting position. I
moved to attack her again, but I was understandably distracted. Kimi moved
fast, grasping my arm, turning, and flipping me. She knelt down beside
me, smiling smugly, “How was that?”
I smiled up at her, “Not bad.”
“Hm,” Kimi said, lying down on top
of me, “I think I deserve a reward.”
We kissed passionately, remaining
that way for several minutes before we were startled apart by the sound of
someone in the corner of the room clearing their throat. I sprung to my feet,
ready to defend us both, “Who’s there?”
“Calm down Rocky,” came a familiar
voice, speaking English, “you wouldn’t be able to beat me anyway.”
I smiled and relaxed my stance and
replied, speaking English as well, “I don’t know. I seem to recall that last
time we fought, I won.”
The newcomer chuckled and stepped
out of the shadows. She was between mine and Kimi’s height with glossy brown
hair, and piercing, intelligent dark eyes, an ever-taunting smile playing
across her face.
“Hello, Rachel,” I told her, “It’s
good to see you. You could’ve knocked though…”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” my
old friend insisted, looking uncharacteristically embarrassed, and quite
amused, as she adjusted the dark-gray-colored metallic necklace that she wore,
tucking it under the collar of her scruffy dark brown jacket.
I saw Kimi out of the corner of my
eye, scrutinizing Rachel, “Robby, who’s your friend?”
“Right,” I said, gesturing toward
our guest, “Kimi, I told you about Rachel, my old friend from the Duelist’s
Elite.”
Kimi glared a little before she
finally smiled, a little falsely, and said, “Of course, nice to meet you.”
She offered Rachel a hand to shake,
and I could almost feel the tension spark between the two young women, setting
off my protective instincts to the point that I almost threw up a magical
barrier between them.
“Uhm,” I said, stepping quickly
between them instead, “it’s not that it isn’t good to see you again, Rachel,
but why are you here? I doubt you would have gone so far as to teleport into my
apartment unless something was going on.”
Rachel’s eyes darkened and her
expression grew grim, “Rocky, we need you again. The Elite needs you
again.”
Kimi and I got changed back into
our street clothes, which for me meant jeans, an orange long sleeve t-shirt,
and a survival vest, and for Kimi meant a sun yellow mini-skirt, a white
t-shirt bearing the name of her school in yellow Kanji, and a thin black vest
over top. Afterward we rejoined Rachel in the living room/kitchen where she sat
on an old run-down couch that Kimi and I had bought from a second hand shop
back when I’d moved in. It wasn’t pretty, but it was comfortable. Kimi sat down
in an equally run-down arm chair across from the couch (which had come with the
apartment, in case you were wondering), and I sat down at the opposite end of
the couch and turned toward Rachel. She’d helped herself to some tea from the
kitchen and was letting it get cold in her hand while she stared absentmindedly
out the window at the city below.
“Rachel,” I said, drawing her
attention back to the situation at hand, “I thought the Elite was over?”
“It is,” Rachel answered, “it was,
but a couple months back Prof appeared out of nowhere, as he tends to do, and
told me he was getting a bunch of us back together. He said that he’d
calculated a new threat, bigger and stronger than Emperor, and that we needed
to be ready in case it was something only our Shadow Magic could stop.”
“How many is ‘a bunch’?” I asked.
“Just me, Charlie, Marco, Marcus
and Raph. Prof wanted to bring you in right away too, but I convinced him not
to.”
She took my hand, “I knew you were
trying to build something, and I didn’t want you to have to relive everything
that happened.”
“Are you kidding?” I asked. “You
went through way more than I did.”
Rachel laughed and gestured and
Kimi, who didn’t seem very excited by how things were going, “You have
somebody. I don’t. All I know is fighting. Conflict makes me feel better, you
know that.”
I nodded, “Okay, then why did you
come for me now? Did something happen?”
Rachel looked upset as she
answered, “We fought it. We fought it, all of us together, and we lost. Marcus
was seriously injured, Raph’s still unconscious and we don’t know when he’ll
wake up, and Prof’s gone, absorbed into the thing that attacked us, along with
the Shadow Millennium Eye and Ring.”
“You guys were using the other
Items!?” I demanded, piquing Kimi’s interest. I’d refused to tell her much
about the Shadow Millennium Items after my time with the Elite, despite her
prodding, “Didn’t Prof say something about the Items having a corrupting effect
on the user? That they might have been the reason why Timothy went so far as to
betray us in the first place?”
“I get it,” Rachel said
defensively, “you think the Items are too dangerous, that we should have melted
them down, but Prof is sure that the Items won’t corrupt as long as no one uses
more than one or two at a time.”
She looked away, and I knew that
she was thinking about Timothy, who had genuinely wanted to do good until he'd
gotten his hands on enough of the Items that they twisted his goals into
something else.
“But why,” I asked, “why those
Items? I get why you keep the Necklace, it’s important to you, but is this
thing really so strong that you needed all of the Item’s? And who carried the
Rod?”
“Charlie wielded the Rod,” Rachel
answered. “He’s the best at controlling Shadow Items and their powers, at
keeping them from overwhelming him. Marcus carried the Scales, and Raph carried
the Pendant, since he has the most Duel Energy out of all of us. Marco wielded
the Key, even though the other Marco wasn’t really too happy about the
idea. And yes, Rocky, the threat is that big, that powerful. Prof
realized early on that without you there the Shadow Millennium Items were our
only real chance. They should have been enough, and would have been if the
thing weren’t so damn hard to damage. That’s why we need you now. Your powers
should be able to hold the thing together long enough for us to hit it, and
your Soul will more than make up for the loss of two Items.”
She looked desperate. She was
reeling. Rachel is strong and smart, but she isn’t a planner. She relies on
Prof for that, and now he was gone along with two of the seven most powerful
Shadow Items on Earth. Rachel wasn’t sure what to do. She was doing her best,
but she wasn’t sure.
“Making up the difference might not
be enough,” I said. “This thing survived all seven Shadow Millennium Items.
Even if I hold this thing in place so that our spells and attacks can hit it,
we need a plan. We need to be sure we’ll kill it all at once before it can
regroup.”
“I’ll help,” Kimi spoke up.
“I can’t ask you to do that,”
Rachel argued, “you aren’t Elite.”
Kimi argued right back, “I can
handle myself. Maybe you’d like to find out?”
Now I like Rachel. She’s one of my
best friends ever, and the only girl I’ve ever been remotely interested in
besides Kimi. I trust her. I’m also a little terrified of her, and if there’s
one thing you never want to do, it’s call her out.
Rachel smiled smugly, “Alright,
fine, let’s have a duel, and if you actually beat me, I’ll welcome you along.”
“Kim-,” I began.
“Don’t argue with me, Robby,” she
interrupted. “You’re always protecting me, but that can’t happen forever. I’m
going to beat Sassy here, and I’m going with you to fight.”
I smiled and reached across to her,
taking her hand, “I was just gonna say be careful. Rachel’s tough.”
Kimi smiled appreciatively and
nodded, “Come on, Sassy, we’ll use the exercise room.”
She stood up, grabbed her Duel
Disk, cards included, from its usual place on the side table, and made her way
into the other room, looking badass. Rachel followed.
I smiled, I have a feeling that
this is going to be interesting.
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