Despite it being a cool, Fall Saturday, Phil was sitting in something that he had never imagined being in again – a dugout. More precisely, a dugout in the baseball field that had been built on the grounds of Duel Academy quite a few years ago when the baseball craze had swept through Japan like a tidal wave. Phil had never even imagined that Duel Academy would even have a baseball field in the first place, but it only took about a week or two after the tournament ended for Jaden to drag his friends out to the field. Jaden, of course, simply wanted to run around and have fun, even Phil could see that. Chazz joined out of rivalry with Jaden and Phil, while Bastion poked his head in with interest once he found out about the importance of stats in the game. Soon after that, Alexis ventured out of the Obelisk Blue dorm out of curiosity after hearing the faint sounds of Chazz and Jaden arguing, and then shortly proved her competence as an umpire. Naturally Alexis’s inclusion brought Mindy and Jasmine to the bleachers to watch, which snowballed into Syrus and Chumley joining them with copious amounts of grilled cheese sandwiches and popcorn. All the while Phil relaxed in the dugout of Jaden’s team, taking a break from the action while he watched Chazz try to bean Jaden in the face with a ball.
“You know, Phil, I hadn’t pegged you for someone who would ever bother with baseball, or sports in general.” Lumina mused from her seat beside Phil. Even she had found some sort of spirit for the game, as before the first inning was even over, Lumina had managed to procure a giant foam hand emblazoned with ‘Go Team J’ on one side and ‘Team C Sucks’ on the other, which she waved enthusiastically whenever something exciting happened.
Phil shrugged contently, his eyes sneaking peeks left and right to make sure there were no other people in the dugout before he replied. “Aw, you got me right on that, actually. Never been much one for sports, but I did play a bit of baseball growing up. Not that I wanted to, though.” Phil laughed slightly at the memory, and then continued. “My mom kinda just forced me into it so I would actually get some exercise as a kid. Hated every second of it. But,” Phil shrugged once more and gestured to his fellow players. “When I left school, got into the ol’ nine to five, I realized that it’s worth it if it means you can spend at least a bit of time with friends. So if it means I have to play some fucking baseball? Then it means we’re playing some baseball all right.”
Lumina looked back at him with a considering expression. “That… hm. You actually sounded somewhat mature there.”
“Ah it comes and goes.” Phil made a so-so gesture with his hand, and then at a whistle from Jaden, who had made it to second base, he got up and grabbed a nearby bat. “Time to go crack some skulls, ay?”
Phil hardly made it to the exit of the dugout before Chazz gave him a death glare from the pitcher’s mound. “YOU’RE GOING DOWN IN FLAMES JENSON!”
“Hehe. Lumina, what did I say. Worth it to hang out with the boys on a cool Fall weekend.” Phil quietly remarked to the tanned women with the sporty foam hand behind him, and then bellowed a joyful reply back to Chazz with all the force his lungs could muster. “I’LL FUCKING BASH YOUR SKULL IN WITH MY BAT IF YOU HIT ME AGAIN PRINCETON!”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Not even ten minutes later and Phil was back in the dugout, this time with a mutinous expression as he held a bag of frozen peas to his forehead and tried his absolute best to let Ms. Hibiki’s lecture about ‘not chasing Chazz around the field with his bat after an accident’ go in one ear and out the other. However, the snickering coming from Lumina was proving much harder to ignore.
“ – and I had best not look up from grading papers again to see you chasing someone with a baseball bat again!” Ms. Hibiki finished, turning around with a huff and mutters of ‘kids these days’.
As soon as she left, Chazz sidled up to Phil, clearly amused by the turn of events while Jaden cheerfully jogged around the field after hitting another ball out of bounds. “No detention this time, huh?”
Phil shook his head in wonder. “Nope.”
“Should we get back to it then? I think Jaden’s almost done running.”
“How many home runs has he got now?”
Chazz snorted. “I lost count after we got to double digits.”
“Huh.”
“Yup.”
“Guess that means it’s my turn to bat again?” Phil wondered as he watched Jaden perform a victory dance to the small number of spectators seated in the battered wooden bleachers.
“Unless Syrus is back from Nurse Fontaine’s yet and still feels like playing.”
“He shoulda’ worn a helmet. We told him.”
“Yup.”
“Hey Chazz.” Phil half-turned to face the Obelisk Blue while he grabbed his bat once more.
“Yeah?”
“If you bean me in the head again, I’ll bash your skull in.”
“Only after Ms. Hibiki goes to the teacher’s break room?”
Phil rolled his shoulders in anticipation while Chazz walked towards the pitcher’s mound. “Probably best to wait ‘till then, for my sanity at least.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
“STRIKE TWO!” Alexis yelled, the sharp sound of her voice not even making Bastion jump anymore as he feverishly wrote on the pad of paper he had brought with him once Phil had mentioned that there were some ‘crazy stats’ involved in baseball. How fascinating, really, that a sport that seemed so simple on the outside would have such depth to it. It was similar to the very same card game Bastion had attended the academy in the first place to master. Strategies, planning, bluffs, double-bluffs, and all-out strong players. Still, if there was one variable that had been added to this blessed Fall afternoon that made Bastion rather unsettled, it was one of his fellow Ra Yellow students that was watching the game with a rather unpleasant look in his eyes. Dimitri. Bastion had never managed to catch his last name, but there was something he didn’t quite… like about the boy. It wasn’t Dimitri’s tendency to copy decks. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with that, or at least that was what Bastion thought on the matter.
If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Chazz, of course, was incensed when Dimitri challenged the Obelisk Blue not even a week after the tournament with a nearly identical copy of Chazz’s deck. It all mattered little though, the decks were not one-to-one copies and Chazz’s possession of both a copy of Dark Armed Dragon and Light and Darkness Dragon proved to tip the scales towards Chazz’s victory, but that did little to sooth the prickly boy’s rage. Jaden proved to be a much calmer opponent when Dimitri challenged him a few days ago, merely finding it ‘cool’ and ‘rad’ that Dimitri also had an Elemental Hero deck. However, just like Chazz, Dimitri was vanquished quite easily in the face of Jaden’s almost mind-boggling luck.
Bastion had to hold back chuckles at the memory of it. Hell, if he hadn’t seen Jaden’s luck with his own eyes, on repeated occasions at that, Bastion would have dismissed it as sheer chance. But, after discussing the possibility with Phil and confirming the contents of Jaden’s deck, Bastion… well, he could only agree with the hypothesis Phil had put forward that Jaden had reliably abnormal levels of luck. No matter, seeing Dimitri’s face after his first brush with Jaden’s luck was worth it, and Bastion was confident that the new deck he and Phil were in the middle of workshopping would be more than enough to overcome that hurdle when it was complete.
However, that brought Bastion back to the matter at hand, the matter that had interrupted his fanciful wonderings over the statistics of baseball, and his considerations of joining Phil’s team once he had made headway on said statistics. Dimitri. It hadn’t been apparent to Bastion at first glance, but there was something… wrong about the boy. Was it merely some sort of sixth sense? Or was it something that the little grey cells in his skull were picking up on? Bastion would have dismissed the first possibility before coming to Duel Academy. Phil had managed to change that, Bastion admitted to himself. Just by talking with Phil and seeing with his own two eyes the duel spirit of Jinzo, his mind had been forced to open itself to possibilities that had once felt to him like quackery or pseudoscience. Besides, there was that one article he had found in a moment of idle research, one that mentioned the possibilities of sixth sense being tied to the remnants of animal instinct. Well, if that research was correct, Bastion could clearly tell that his so-called ‘animal instinct’ was telling him that Dimitri was up to something.
Curious. Curious indeed.
Bastion had never considered himself as particularly introverted, and he got along with most people well enough, managing to maintain a cordial relationship with even someone as difficult as Chazz. He often found himself laughing with Phil, hiding his crush on Alexis to prevent straining their friendship, assisting Jaden, Syrus, and Chumley with forgotten homework, and overall enjoying the school life. Yet why did he feel so uneasy about being near Dimitri?
Bastion frowned to himself, wracking his brain while he watched Phil chase Chazz once more around the field with a bat after the latter had lobbed a fastball right into the center of the helmet the former had acquired not long before. A small voice in Bastion’s head asked if he should intervene, at least until Bastion noted that Phil wasn’t running as fast as Bastion knew he could, and the two boys were cackling like madmen the entire time.
Syrus plopped down beside Bastion with a sigh, nursing a bag of frozen peas to his head, already in the middle of bemoaning to Bastion that ‘he would never forget to wear a helmet playing baseball again’.
Bastion nodded absentmindedly, his brain still trying to ponder what Dimitri’s purpose in watching the game was, but soon enough his attention was brought back to the game as he watched Alexis the umpire send Phil back to the dugout to be replaced by one of their classmates.
“Say… I don’t mean to say that there’s a problem with Alexis playing, but I honestly didn’t know she bothered with baseball. I always thought her passion was Duel Monsters.”
“Fair point.” Syrus nodded as he stopped in the middle of his grumbling. “We used to play a bit growing up. My big bro and hers were friends, and if they didn’t have enough people for their games they would drag us in. It was kind of scary for me, but I think Alexis was just happy to be able to hang out with Atticus. Turns out she got pretty good.”
A silence fell between the two as Bastion digested the information and they watched a few more students from Slifer Red and Ra Yellow amble out of the dorms to join the pickup baseball game.
“I never knew she had a brother, either.” Bastion realized. “Atticus… the name sounds familiar to me, for some reason.”
The blue-haired boy sighed. “He was one of the students that disappeared during the abandoned dorm incident. She doesn’t like to talk about it, and I can get that. Big bro doesn’t like to talk about it either.”
“I see…” Once more Bastion fell silent. Perhaps it was another way he had changed since the start of the year. Back then, he would have scoffed at a story of people mysteriously disappearing in the old, abandoned dorm. A ghost story, that’s what it was. But then, so was Jinzo. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs that were threatening to fill his mind. No sense in injecting too much seriousness into a beautiful day. “Well, Syrus,” Bastion said as he stood up and comfortingly patted Syrus’s shoulder. “I think it’s just about time for me to join up in the game. I’ll see about getting Chazz back for you, yeah?”
Syrus nodded with a laugh. “Yeah, sure thing bro. Though, it was kinda stupid of me to skip the helmet. Who knew Chazz had that good of a fastball?”
Bastion chuckled along with his friend, turning to move down the stairs of the rickety wooden bleachers to join the increasingly chaotic game happening below. It was the perfect time to join, considering even Alexis herself had nearly given up trying to keep order in favor of getting caught up in the fun.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Watching it all with an exhausted gaze from the window in his office, Chancellor Sheppard drained the last bits of the whiskey in his flask while he observed the baseball game. He sighed, shaking his head before tossing the metal flask into the nearby trashcan at his desk. Despite his misgivings over placing such extreme pressure on mere students, kids who should be out there dueling for fun and playing games without a care in the world, there was no choice.
None at all, at least if we wish for the world to continue living.
Sheppard let out one last bitter sigh, picking up his office phone as if it was made of lava while the fingers of his free hand tap, tap, tapped away on the metal lid of the accursed box on his desk. The box itself looked completely ordinary, but as Sheppard continued to tap on the lid, the box creaked open to reveal what looked like seven oddly-shaped blocks of wood with black markings scribbled on top of them.
“Sharlene, can you send Professors Crowler, Hibiki, and Bernardello to my office when you get a chance? Thanks.”