The title of this chapter has a double meaning. Not only does John see Max again after probably three years, but we get to see a minor antagonist from book two again! Do you remember every minor antagonist that I've ever included in these books, especially the really annoying ones? Well then, you should remember this guy and recognize him when we see him! Otherwise, this chapter is mostly exposition and setup, but we do get a duel next chapter!
There will be one more chapter of this posted before I post Reaper again. I went back through my draft of this book, and it is longer than I remembered.
Chapter Two
Reunions
John
My Soul of Darkness reacted faster than I could consciously. As soon as I felt the rumbling of the blast, I subconsciously summoned up the power of the Soul. Moments before the flames of the explosion could reach Karen and myself, the many shadows in the cabin of the plane reached toward us and wrapped around us, forming a hard shell of darkness. The shell was blasted apart in the explosion, but we were protected. Banged up from bouncing around in the shell, and singed pretty badly from the lingering heat, but alive.
Oh, important thing, by the time the shell had dissolved, there was no plane beneath us, which, last time I checked, is never a good thing when you’re at cruising altitude. Needless to say, we fell.
“Get us out of this,” Karen called over the roar of the air as it rushed past us, “you know, teleport us!”
“I’d love to,” I answered, “but there aren’t enough shadows up here to open a pathway. And besides, we’d still be moving just as fast once we came through! Maybe your magic could conjure something up?”
“I’m trying,” she replied, her voice ringing with desperation, tears streaming from her eyes, “but I can’t concentrate!”
I was afraid, but I’d been afraid before. As I’d always done, I filed the fear away. This can’t be it, I thought, my life is only just getting started!
There had to be a way out of this. As a gamer, I had long since become convinced that any situation could be overcome in some way. I looked around. Amongst wreckage of the plane, I saw a singed shape. It had been torn open and the contents of its main section long since spewed forth into the sky around us, where they had fluttered out of sight, but whether it still held any clothing or not, it was clearly one of the identical duffel bags that Karen and I had bought for this very trip, and the end pouches were still closed and intact.
My cards! I thought. Going into strategy mode, I grabbed onto Karen and pushed her away, angling myself carefully so that, when I did, the equal and opposite force of the push sent me spiraling toward the bag. I collided with it, and nearly knocked it away before managing to get my arm through the one intact strap, pulling the bag close to me. I unzipped the end pouch and pulled out a deck box. I discarded the bag, which was empty now, and opened the box, and I was shocked when the cards inside rose from the protective container in my hand and went spiraling through the air.
Oh crap, no!
I didn’t have time to think about what had happened, though. I reached desperately for the cards, my fingers closing around only one. Without another thought, I concentrated on the card. My Soul flashed, and a thin, dark fog formed around me. From it emerged a form of a young woman in a pink and blue dress, wearing a witch hat, and carrying a wand. Karen’s ‘Dark Magician Girl’.
Oh shit, I thought, it was Karen’s deck!
This time it was a little harder to put what had happened out of mind, but I still did it and looked to the magician, who was dropping along with me, a concerned look on her face.
“’Dark Magician Girl’,” I commanded, “save us!”
The sorceress nodded, as if this was a really good idea, and then waved her wand. Karen and I were caught in a pink aura, and the ‘Dark Magician Girl’ carefully lowered the two of us to the ground in a dilapidated section of whatever city had been below us before she faded away, back to her card. Karen dropped to her knees, shaking with relief as much as lingering shock and fear, and I dropped down to her side to offer her what comfort I could. I was just relieved that the two of us were still alive, so much so that I didn’t see the large piece of fuselage that was falling toward us. It would have hit us, if a cloaked figure hadn’t pushed us out of the street, into a nearby alley. I rolled, and I hit my head into the ground, and I passed out.
When I came to, the first thing that I noticed was that someone had moved me to a different alleyway on what appeared to be the same run-down street. Looking out of the alley at the street proper, I could see some of the same boarded up windows as I’d seen as we’d approached the ground.
The second thing I noticed was that whoever had moved me had propped me up against a rather smelly green dumpster. The third thing that I noticed was that Karen was standing nearby, talking to a young man whose back was to me, showing me his short, self-cut hair. I might not have recognized him in his long, purple cape which barely hid the slight, physically unimposing form beneath it, except that I’d seen him in this getup before, years ago at Duel Academy, so, of course, I recognized this new arrival, who I assumed had saved Karen and myself.
“Max,” I said, “so you were the one who pushed us out of the way earlier. That actually makes sense. Where the hell are we?”
“One of the dirtier areas of Memphis,” Max replied in his characteristic dusky voice, that didn’t fit well at all with his light hair and blue eyes, as he turned toward me and offered me a hand, helping me up. Then he shook my hand, giving me one of his creepy smiles.
I nodded, and I asked him what was obviously the most important thing at the moment, “Uh, why are you in Memphis?”
“Well,” Max replied in a way that he tried to pass off as joking, though I could tell that he was actually a little annoyed (though to be fair he was balancing the two better than he used to be able to), “I was in Nashville for an Elvis impersonators’ convention and decided to drive the state.”
“You were chasing after some jerkbags,” I replied, borrowing an expletive from my sister, choosing to hone in on the joking aspect of Max’s tone rather that the annoyed one, “and you just happened to be in the right place at the right time to save our sorry asses.”
Max frowned, doing the thing he does when he blames himself for stuff that isn’t his fault, “I tried to get to you in time to catch you out of the air, but I was too slow. I did manage to recover this, though,”
He reached down to the ground at his side and lifted up another duffel, like the one that I’d opened in the sky. This one, however, was still closed and, miraculously, in basically one piece. Looking at it, I remembered what had happened in the air above us. I turned to my fiancé, “Karen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to-.”
“It’s okay,” she said, completely sincerely, “you saved us, and I still have the cards that matter the most.”
She showed me her favorite cards, ‘Dark Magician Girl’, which I’d dropped when we’d landed, and ‘Toon Dark Magician Girl’.”
“’Toon Dark Magician Girl’ happened to land nearby,” she explained, “but none of the others did.”
She seemed genuinely okay with this, but I still felt bad. Still, I knew better than to make too much of something when Karen was around, so I forced my feelings of guilt out of my mind. I took my duffel from Max and removed my deck and my Duel Disk from it.
“Take this,” I told her, handing her the Duel Disk, “in case you need to summon a monster. I can conjure one if I need to.” She took it and slid it onto her arm.
“I lost all of my clothes, too, but yours made it. I can borrow a shirt from you if I need to, but I don’t see why I would. And,” she said, somber, “the pilot didn’t make it.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “I know. I didn’t have enough time to save him, too. I’m not even sure how I managed to save the two of us.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Karen said insistently, correctly reading my mounting guilt.
“Yeah,” I relented, “I know, but it doesn’t make me feel much better. At least you’re safe.”
I leaned in and kissed her. Max made a choking sound, and I hit him in the arm.
“Yeah, okay,” he said, “you guys are cute, but we have a serious problem. Someone just tried to kill you.”
“We don’t know that,” I replied, “the explosion could have been an accident, like mechanical failure in the engine or something.”
But by now Karen was looking up at the sky thoughtfully. I followed her gaze to where a smoke trail from our falling plane still lingered. “No,” she said, “can’t you feel it?”
“What?” I asked her, even if I did already know the answer.
“Shadow Magic,” she told me. “Someone used magic to cause the plane to explode.”
I frowned and concentrated. My Soul of Darkness glimmered, and I could see the faint shimmering of the lingering magic in my mind. But why, I wondered, why would someone want to kill me and Karen? And why do it in a way that endangered so many other people?
Max smirked at me, “You really didn’t notice right off? You’re losing your touch.”
I shot him a retaliatory gaze, telling him that this wasn’t the time, but he just kept smiling icily. “Does anyone think that maybe this was just some random act of magical violence,” I asked, “or that our assailant thinks that we died up there?”
“I don’t think so,” Max replied, shaking his head, “in fact, I’m not even sure that they were trying to kill you, but I do think that they were targeting you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“There are plenty of ways to kill someone on a plane,” said Max, creeping me out and also weirdly impressing me, “and I can think of a few that would be a lot subtler than a huge explosion that you’d have time to block with your magic. If it were me, I would have blown out the windows to reduce the pressure in the cabin, and then, while you were busy with your emergency oxygen masks I would have cast a spell to invert the loss of pressure and crush you. Still block-able with a shield, but really hard to see coming.”
“That’s…macabre,” I told him, “but it makes sense. So what, you think that someone was trying to get our attention? Why?”
“Why would anyone want the attention of someone who is the former Duel Monsters world champion, and a powerful Shadow Magic user?” Max replied. “They want to play a game with you.”
I stared up at the smoke above, which was only just fading, a look of grim determination on my face, fighting to restrain my natural competitive spirit in the face of such a grim challenge, “Well, whoever it was who attacked us, if it’s a game he wants, it’s a game he’s going to get, because unfortunately for him, he’s caught my attention.”
Sarah
I really hate the mall. In fact my hatred for the mall is so great that it tends to get in the way of my love for the mall. I was sitting back lazily in my favorite seat at my favorite table in the Industrial Illusions Game Center in the North Checker Township Mall. My friends Jenna, Kris, and Amanda were sitting around the table with me, and they looked only mildly less annoyed by the situation that we were in. The four of us sat positioned so that we were facing the inner entrance to the game center, where a hundred or so Duelists were lined up, waiting to be interviewed for a chance to join the Duel Force.
Yuck.
Be we desperately needed members. Some Team Duel Teams are good with just four or five people, but we had members young enough that they couldn’t be available for every tournament and competition, so we needed probably a whole four additional relief members, and counting Tucker, who was only around sometimes, and Frost, who tended to leave any room that I happened to be in, we only had maybe 2/3 of one. It was slow going, though. Most everyone who we had interviewed so far had been a complete moron. I don’t like morons.
“No,” I said, almost as soon as the next applicant had said his name. His name was Keith. I’ve had bad experiences with two different Keiths, and I’m not about to deal with that again.
The next one, a short guy maybe ten years older than me, stepped up and replaced Keith. “No,” I said firmly before he had even had a chance to speak. He walked away, pouting.
I rolled my eyes, and when they had returned to their forward orientation, they were assaulted violently by a truly horrifying sight.
“Oh hell no!” I exclaimed, as Kris laughed at my side.
“Oh come on,” the figure before me insisted, his voice full of swagger, “you can’t deny it. The new Duel Force needs great Duelists, and there is no Duelist greater than Nate!”
He gestured toward himself with both thumbs and held the pose, like some sorta Fonzie wannabe. Double triple yuck.
“Go away, Nate,” I ordered. “I’ve told you, like, a frickin’ hundred times that you are not joining the Duel Force. Now go stare at yourself in a mirror somewhere and leave me alone.”
“No way,” Nate insisted, “Nate’s changed! Nate’s been workin’ to become a better Duelist and a less vain person ever since he lost so totally to your hot hot cousin a few years back. Nate’s endured countless hardships on his epic quest for betterment. Nate is worthy now! And besides,” Nate leaned in close to me and said in a cheeky, yet somehow still serious tone, “Nate is already up to speed on the whole magic thing, so you wouldn’t need to keep secrets.”
He leaned back and spread his hands dramatically, “Come on, what do you say, will you give Nate a chance?”
I stared with open contempt right into Nate’s exuberant honey-colored eyes and deadpanned, “You know, if this is you toning down your vanity, I don’t want to know how self-centered you were before.”
Nate blinked, smiling so wide that I could see nearly all of his pearly white teeth, “Does that mean that Nate’s in?”
I sighed and pinched my sinuses in a desperate attempt to stymie a coming migraine, “I’ll tell ya what, Nate. Duel me here, today, right now. If by some miracle you actually manage to impress me, I’ll give you a shot. But if you suck (and you will) you have to never talk to me again.”
Nate flashed his pearly whites again, brushed his blonde locks out of his eyes dramatically, and struck a pose which included jutting his hips to the side and giving me a peace sign (ugh!) and declared, “Nate accepts!”
That’s when I realized exactly what I’d gotten myself into, and pinched the bridge of my nose again, “oh crap.”
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