Ria. Oh jeez, Ria. I planned on Ria being a one-time character, here just to represent crazy fan girls, and to address the fact that I keep saying that John is pretty famous, and yet we've never met anyone who sees themselves as his fan, but I liked her so much that I actually replaced another half-developed fourth cast member with her for the rest of this story. She's crazy, and opinionated, and strong, and Latina, and eventually gets kinda deep, and I just love her.
Chapter NineRia, the Eccentric Girl
I did some checking after a few days. I knew my opponent’s faces now. It was easy to discover their names. The Lightsworn Duelist was Shin, a Duelist with a reputation as a hard-hitting tournament competitor from the Southeastern United States. The other Duelist was Sky, a former US champion. Both Duelists had disappeared for several years following tragedies in their lives.
Typical Order member backstory.
I felt sorry for them, I really did, but that didn’t change the fact that they were jerks.
Luckily, it was easy enough to avoid them. They were staying in Mid Dorm, and we didn’t have any shared classes. If all went well, I would never see the Card Takers again. Either way, they were out of my hair, at least for a while. I could get back to my life.
I started to pay more attention in my classes. I still didn’t learn much, but at least I was finally giving Duel Academy a fair shake. Now that I wasn’t sleeping through my classes, I really started to notice the time I was spending away from Karen. I really missed her. I still had Thomas to keep me company, but as good a kid as he was, he was a little chatty.
Weeks passed. It came time for end of the quarter exams. Like with the entry exams, there was an extensively easy written portion, followed by a dueling portion. I was really looking forward to the dueling portion. So was Thomas. Karen wasn’t. She doesn’t like dueling much anymore. I’d known for a while that she was tired of the destruction that dueling represented. She’d caused so much of that destruction as a member of the Order, and then later as a member of the Duel Force, and she wanted to create something for once.
That’s why she’d gone into card design, and I really respected her for it, even if I didn’t quite understand it. But even card design students had to duel in their exams, even if it would count as less of their overall grade. I guess the professors thought that game deign students needed to know the game they were designing.
Every student would participate, and no student would have any control over who they faced. Neither would the teachers. Pairings would be completely random. Card design students would be mixed in with the rest. Karen didn’t think it was very fair. Neither did I, but there was nothing either of us could do. The Academy staff members had made up their minds.
I offered to whip up a little Shadow Magic and fix the pairings so that Karen would face me, but she figured that fixing results wasn’t really fair either. She decided to just let fate run its course.
There are two rooms inside Duel Academy that are set up specifically for dueling. One is like a large indoor stadium. It has one raised central arena surrounded by enough seats for the entire student body and all of the professors, and then some. The other is less extravagant. It is a large, open room with several Duel Disk arenas drawn on the floor. It’s the closest thing that Duel Academy has to an indoor school gym. This second room would be used for the dueling exams. Students who were finished with their duels, or who were waiting to duel, were welcome to hang around and watch their classmates compete.
My duel was early, against a kid named Mitchell. He used a Roid deck that relied on combinations for power. I knew this about the Roid archetype, but I still made the mistake of allowing one of his combos to sneak up on me. Now I was facing down a monster with incredible power. It was a massive tank-like drill with eyes and a face: a living weapon in the truest sense.
“My ‘Super Vehicroid Jumbo Drill’ (ATK: 3000),” my opponent declared, “attacks and destroys your monster.”
The huge drill-nosed monster bore down on my ‘Summoned Skull’, ripping him apart. My Life Points dropped (2700+2500-3000=2200).
“The star of High Dorm blue,” my opponent said, tugging on the tail of his yellow jacket, “is at the mercy of my ultimate combination machine monster. And because ‘Jumbo Drill’ was Fusion Summoned using ‘Vehicroid Connection Zone’, he can’t be destroyed by any card effects.”
I smiled, “But what you didn’t realize was that I know a thing or two about machine combo decks. My cousin uses one of the strongest machine Fusion decks in the world, and I have my fair share of machines myself. In fact, when I saw the direction that your strategy was going, I saved up the cards needed to create my own machine Fusion monster. One that’s more powerful than yours.
“I play ‘Painful Choice’,” I declared, “choosing five cards from my deck and showing them to you. You add one to my hand, and I discard the rest.”
I fanned out my deck, and picked out the mechanical blue torso ‘X-Head Cannon’, the mechanical red dragon, ‘Y-Dragon Head’, the tiger-headed green and yellow jet, ‘V-Tiger Jet’, the flying blue missile pod, ‘W-Winged Catapult’, and the yellow tank with the stalk eye, ‘Z-Metal Tank’. My opponent, as a player who specialized in machine combinations, knew full well what was coming. With a look of frustration on his face he said, “Add ‘W-Winged Catapult’ to your hand."
I did, discarding the others.
“In that case, I summon ‘W-Winged Catapult’,” I said, and my monster appeared. “Next I activate ‘Soul Release’ to remove my other four magnet monsters from play, and I pay two thousand Life Points (2200-2000=200), activating 'Dimension Fusion', to summon the four of them to the field.”
The sky split open and the other four machines descended from it.
“Like your monsters,” I said, “my monsters combine. But unlike yours, mine don’t need a Spell card.”
As I spoke, my five machines transformed and combined into a tall, humanoid combination mecha, like something out of Super Sentai, with broad wings and various cannons placed across its body.
“Introducing,” I said, “my ‘VWXYZ-Dragon Catapult Cannon’ (ATK: 3000). My monster can remove one card from play per turn. So this turn, I’ll remove from play your ‘Vehicroid’.”
The giant mecha fired its cannons on a special frequency that gave the beams an appearance of lightning. The cannon fire zapped the ‘Vehicroid’ and it disappeared.
“Now I attack,” I commanded, “with Cannon Firestorm!”
My monster fired its cannons one after another, hitting my opponent with each shot. His Life Points disappeared as quickly as his monster (2900-3000=0).
Mitchell scowled, “Oh man. I knew I’d lose. I knew it.” He turned and started walking away. I started to say something, but I was interrupted.
“Oh! My! God!”
I jumped, startled, and turned toward the source of this unexpected voice. What I saw surprised me. I’d never seen someone more excited before. She was jumping up and down, clapping her hands repeatedly.
“I can’t believe this! It’s you! It’s really you!”
I blinked thoughtfully, “Do I know you?”
“No,” the girl said, “but I definitely know you. Oh my God! I heard you were going to school here. Of course I heard you were going to school here, since it’s why I decided to come. I heard it, but I’d never seen you! I’m your biggest fan in the world!”
I blinked again, out of confusion this time, and said, “I think you have me confused with someone else.”
“No! No I don’t. I know exactly who you are! You’re John. You were the leader of the Duel Force, and you won the second Grand Championship! I was there. I was watching. You were amazing! I absolutely love you! I know everything about you!”
I frowned, “Well that’s just slightly creepy.”
Thankfully she didn’t hear me. She was jumping up and down squealing. Yes, that’s right, squealing.
“I’m Gloria,” the girl said, “but you can call me Ria. Everyone calls me Ria because, come on, who wants to be called Gloria? Anyway, oh my God! That was amazing. Your duel. It was amazing! I never thought I’d get to see you duel up close like that! I always wished, but I never thought it would happen!”
Then she looked calmly right into my eyes and asked, “Wanna pick up some coffee at the cafeteria and then go back to my room?”
“I, uh-.”
“John!”
Oh man…
I turned around, toward the sound of this new voice, and there was Karen, jogging over to me, smiling.
Oh man. There are so many ways that this could be unpleasant.
Karen reached me, “Hey. My duel’s coming up. I just got the name of my opponent. Someone named Gloria Hernandez.”
That’s when Karen noticed Ria. She looked her over, from her dark hair and her olive skin, down to her red uniform.
Then she looked over at me, “Who’s she?”
I frowned, Here it comes.
“I’m Gloria,” Ria answered for me. “How do you know my man?”
“What? Your what?” Karen demanded, almost stammering.
“My man,” Ria answered. “Johnny and I are dating.”
“Hold on,” I said, backing away from Ria, “you, uh, asked me out, and I didn’t even get a chance to answer. And I was gonna say no.”
“I understand that you’re just saying that, Sweetie,” said Ria, putting her arms around me, “but you don’t have to hide our love anymore.”
I pushed her away, “Come on! We just now met.” I looked at Karen pleadingly. She looked mad. More so than I’d ever seen her. It was scary.
“You’re lucky I believe you, John,” Karen said. Then she seemed to have a realization, “Wait, Gloria? You’re my opponent?”
“I am if you’re Karen.”
“Yeah,” Karen said aggressively, “I am.”
“Well then,” Ria said, “that explains why you seem so worked up. You’re afraid to face me.”
“No way.”
“Oh yeah,” Ria pressed. “You’re scared little girl. So why don’t you leave and let a big girl take care of Johnny.”
Karen’s hands balled into fists and she seemed about ready to swing them. Ria wasn’t far behind.
“Okay ladies,” I said, stepping in between them, “let’s calm down. How about this, you two are supposed to duel, right? So how about if Karen wins, Ria, you have to stop, uh, propositioning me, but if Ria wins, she can ask me out all she wants.”
I shot Karen a look that said, Not that I’d ever say yes.
Karen smiled in the distinctive way she does when she’s serious, “Fine.”
Ria smiled as well, “You’re on.”
“I’ll just hang out over here,” I said, “and make sure nobody kills anyone.”
“You’re going down,” said Ria. “Johnny’s mine.”
“We’ll see,” Karen replied, and one of the fiercest duels I’ve ever seen began.
Card of the Day:
Super Vehicroid Jumbo Drill
Played by: Mitchell
Because homage.
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