It had been a number of years since Phil had last flown on a plane. Domestic flights, international flights. He had done a few of both. He had also forgotten how incredibly boring they were if one forgot to bring in-flight entertainment and the fellow passengers weren’t too talkative.
Overall, the flight lasted about 18 hours.
In the first hour after Phil boarded the plane, Kaiba shut himself away in some sort of special office he had built into the middle of the plane. It had a door and everything. A lock that was Phil-proof, too. Shame.
Roland was busy flying the plane. He was a bit nicer about things when Phil broke into the cockpit, but after giving Phil a brief tour of the controls, Roland gave him the boot.
The rest of the plane was pretty cool. The size of the machine was somewhere in between the size of a generic Boeing 747 and the weird Blue-Eyes jet that Kaiba flew out of the ashes of Battle City. And yes, the jet was Blue-Eyes themed, both inside and outside. The constant imagery of the mediocre (yet iconic) boss monster was nearly enough to make Phil break out his own copies of Blue-Eyes White Dragon, just to see Kaiba’s eyes bug out of his skull. That, and to start calling it ‘Bluwu-Eyes White Dragon’, like a guy he knew at his old locals who would do it all the time to the anger of the regulars who were long time fans, and to the hilarity of everyone else.
However, that urge was soon crushed by Lumina, who was able to partially guess Phil’s burgeoning plans and stomped on them in their infancy under the name of not having Kaiba chuck Phil out of the moving plane to fall about 30,000-40,000 feet to the ground.
Shame.
So, with Phil’s entertainment options dwindling rapidly one by one, he sat back in a dark, forgotten corner of the plane and occupied himself with deck building. The last barrier between himself and insanity via boredom.
“Alright. Here’s what I’ve got so far.” Phil explained to Lumina. She was hardly paying attention, being much more interested in watching the sea poke out from underneath the clouds, a view that she had never really gotten around to seeing before.
“I got a fun deck. For funsies reasons. I have another fun deck built. Just in case I get bored of the first one. Then I have ol’ reliable, Chaos Warriors, for when I need to try. Backed up with Paleofrogs for when shit hits the fan.”
“Or you could just use your strong decks for each duel.” Lumina added disinterestedly. “Oh, look. A swarm of birds. Hey Phil, don’t you think those birds look a little bit larger than normal birds?”
“But that would be boring.” Phil countered. He completely ignored Lumina’s abrupt tangent about the birds. “With my two fun decks, I can choose to either introduce my opponent to the glories of communism, or rip out their entire hand like it’s the early 2000s.” Phil tilted his head in thought. “Oh, right. We’re in GX. I guess we’re actually in the early 2000s now. Anyways, this way I can keep things interesting for me as long as the duel doesn’t get too spicy. And if it does, I just bust out a BLS or ol’ reliable.”
“What about the aftereffects?” Lumina mentioned. She half-turned her head towards Phil with a concerned look. “Last time you XYZ summoned, barely five or ten minutes later you were like a walking corpse. And you only did it twice!”
Phil hummed to himself in thought. “Fair point. I’m not sure myself. Maybe if I keep doing it without dying, the practice might be able to get my weak earthling flesh used to the strain. I wonder if it’s because XYZs technically don’t exist in this universe yet.”
“Why would you say that?”
“Well, just think about it.” Phil sat up straight. His eyes flashed with interest as he delved deeper into the topic. “All that stuff Bastion said about duel energy during the Sacred Beast incident, it got me thinking. Duels and Shadow Games are kind of powered by duel energy, from what I understand. Just like the Egyptian duels of old with Ka and Ba. Those used the magician’s own energy, their Ba, to summon the monster, which was stored in a large stone tablet. Maybe that stone tablet had some sort of an effect to lessen the energy usage of summoning Ka. The cards that Pegasus created do pretty much the same thing when Shadow Duels are involved. They act as new forms or full-on replacements of those stone tablets. So it might be that since the XYZ cards I own either weren’t created by Pegasus, or aren’t recognized fully by the magic system, so my body has to use more energy than normal to summon my toad boys since they don’t have an official ‘stone tablet’. That could explain why I was in such bad shape. The XYZ summons took more duel energy than my body could create at that point in the duel.”
Phil rubbed his chin in thought. “Or it could be something totally different. Maybe it could be that the damage I take is the shadows or whatever that fuels the shadows noticing that I’m using a summoning method that doesn’t exist yet and not liking it. If that’s the case, though, I wonder what would be watching and judging now. The Shadow Realm used to be managed by Zorc Necrophades, but he got murderized by Yugi in the final arc of the original manga. It would have to be an existence on par with the god cards for sure. It took a fusion of the three to ice Necrophades in the first place.”
Phil’s eyes took on a distant look as he continued to voice his thoughts. “I guess I can’t be sure without more experience in this field, and without Bastion to talk with, but it sounds possible. Synchro and Link summoning might be similar, too. I think I remember that Synchro summoning required speed or something like that to summon properly. That’s why card games on motorcycles became a thing in 5Ds. Link summoning… eh I can’t comment at all. I never bothered to watch VRAINS. Maybe on my return to Japan I can check with Bastion and Banner. Bastion might already have some good ideas, and Banner’s some sort of super old alchemist. I bet he knows a thing or two about scary shadow magic. Between the three of us we can probably figure something out. Oh, and Tragoedia, too. I think he was related to Kul Elna, the birthplace of the millennium items, so he might know something. But how to squeeze it out of him…”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Phil kept bouncing around ideas with the quite disinterested Lumina until the moment Kaiba’s plane landed on the tarmac of the runway.
“Gentlemen, this is your pilot, Roland, speaking. We have landed at the Kaiba Corp Regional Airport in Sacramento, California. The time is 9:25am, and the temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Please disembark at your leisure.”
Phil cracked his neck and practically leaped out of the plane and onto the runway. As expected after Roland’s announcement, the sun was already beating down on Phil’s shoulders with a brutal amount of heat. The lack of shade only served to make it worse.
A hand patted his shoulder, causing Phil to half-turn to face Roland.
“Kid, I don’t know the details, or why you feel the need to do this, but good luck. New York is quite a ways away.” The man said. Though his eyes were completely hidden by a pair of pitch-black sunglasses, the slight warmth in Roland’s tone betrayed the man’s minute amounts of worry for the boy in front of him.
Roland then opened his wallet, handing Phil a business card and a bit of money. “When you’re done, find a pay phone and call this number so I know to send a man to pick you up. And it isn’t much, but here’s fifty bucks. It’s all I have on me right now.” At Phil’s disbelieving gaze, Roland shrugged. “Mr. Kaiba’s well-known enough that most places just send any bills straight to the office. It’s more convenient than bothering him.”
Phil raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Thanks dude.” He said after accepting the business card and money. “I’ll put it to good use, like not starving to death. That sounds pretty good to me.”
Roland chuckled at Phil’s grim joke. “Not starving to death would be good.” The man agreed and held his hand out, which Phil shook firmly.
“Good hunting.” Roland finally said.
“Good hunting.” Phil agreed.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
About half an hour after leaving the Kaiba Corp airport, Phil finally reached the first destination on his to-do list.
“Harvey’s Military Surplus.” Phil muttered out loud as he looked at the flickering neon sign in front of him and Lumina. “Righty-ho. This’ll be a precise strike.” Phil shifted his left foot uncomfortably. It had been a long time since he had felt the need to store money in one of his shoes, and he had forgotten how weird it felt.
Lumina rolled up an imaginary set of sleeves and slid a tough, no-nonsense expression across her face. Meanwhile, Phil set his own face into something similar to what a soldier would wear while traversing through a war zone.
“We’re gonna get those damn deals!” Both boy and duel spirit grimly said the words in unison before confidently striding through the sliding doors and splitting up to search through the cluttered, musty confines of the store.
“Found a compass with a glass covering!” Lumina called out to Phil from a neighboring aisle. “Three bucks, only slightly scratched!”
“Got our tarp.” Phil muttered in order to not sound completely insane for talking into thin air. He sent a nod of acknowledgement towards Lumina. “Ooohh. A bucket of rope.”
Phil ambled over to the bucket in question after checking the tarp for holes and loading it up in his arm. “Hm. Seems you just tell management how much you need, and then they cut it for you. I’ll have to fuse the ends myself then. Or tie them instead if I get super bored.”
“The knives are in back.” Lumina hollered again. “No luck on flint or magnesium yet.”
Phil nodded and immediately made a detour from his path to the checkout desk, grabbing the compass Lumina mentioned before checking out the small display case of knives one by one.
“Not the best, but it’ll do.” He eventually said. Most of the knives had some amount of rust on them, or were just blatantly overpriced.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Phil sat down on a fallen tree in the woods nearby with a sigh of exhaustion once their pinpoint shopping strikes were finished. Right beside him, Lumina leaned against a large walnut tree with her eyes closed.
“50-foot tarp, 20 feet of decently thick rope, a shitty knife that at least isn’t rusty, compass, and a handful of flint I found on the ground.” Phil listed off each item and compared it to his mental checklist.
“Workable.” Then he turned to the items he had found from the cheapo grocery store a few blocks down from the surplus store.
“Dried fruit, canned tuna, some only slightly stale bread from the discount rack, a few cans of veggies and beans, plus some cheap but large bottles of water. Ha. And those fools let me triple-bag everything at the self-checkout area.” Phil chuckled and moved over to his final acquisition – a large pile of plastic grocery bags he had used to craft a makeshift knapsack. It was the product of nearly half an hour of work, as the majority of the bags needed to be tied together to form the main part of the knapsack. A rope-like section of double-tied bags were used as a set of shoulder straps and a belt to go across Phil’s hips to distribute the weight as much as possible.
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“Fools! I worked as a bagger boy once! I know how to max out my bag count while still making it all look normal. I now have a super weird yet fully functional hobo backpack to carry my shit in. Combined with the power of my tarp, I can hold upwards of half my bodyweight in cool stuff on my back! Fear my wrath, cower before my might!”
Lumina shook her head with an exhausted chuckle. “You enjoyed all of that, didn’t you?”
“Darn right I did, lady. The dude at the military surplus didn’t even put any effort into haggling. I lowballed him to hell and back and he didn’t even try to stop me. I even have ten bucks still left in my shoe for emergencies! I was worried beforehand that my equipment and food would clean me out nearly completely, but I’m good. I’m too good. Fuck yeah. Haven’t lost those skills I honed during the ten-cent starvation diet ramen days back in college.”
Phil sighed at the memory.
“Man, there were a few weeks here and there where I was wondering if I would make it to my next paycheck.”
“So, what now?”
Phil heaved himself off the fallen tree and began to busily unfold the tarp. One end was threaded with an arm’s length of rope Phil had cut from the 20-foot bundle and tied to the tree Lumina was leaning against. Then Phil took his knife and grabbed a few sticks from the ground. A few quick strokes of the blade later and he had a handful of makeshift wooden tent stakes. A bit fragile for his taste, but they would get the job done until some metal of the correct size could be found. Those same stakes were then slotted through the metal rings that were evenly spaced out along the edges of the tarp to hold the structure down.
“I’ve got food, supplies, and temporary shelter. This means if the journey takes longer than I plan for it to, or if I get yeeted off the train unexpectedly, I shouldn’t die. Now it’s time to sleep off this damned jet lag. Train hopping when I’m this tired would be a bad idea. Mind poking me awake in three hours?”
Lumina cast a judgmental eye across Phil’s absolute mockery of a tent and nodded.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
It felt like one minute Phil had stretched out on the extra bits of tarp he pulled inside of the tent to act as a floor, and the next minute Lumina was poking him awake with a stick.
“Fuckin’ hell.” Phil groaned. “I forgot how much jet lag sucks.” He stumbled out of his tent with a further series of groans that would have made more sense coming out of the mouth of an extremely old man riddled with arthritis.
“Off to the train yard!” Phil shouted. He held a finger resolutely in the air, which wobbled along with his words in an almost drunken fashion.
“What about your stuff?” Lumina pointedly mentioned. Phil hadn’t bothered to gather up his tent or any of his other supplies.
Phil finished blinking the sleep from his eyes and shrugged. “I doubt there are any trains leaving soon, or at least if there are I should have enough time to get back and speed pack. I tied the ropes so they are easy to undo, and I can simply drape the tarp around myself like a blanket if I don’t have time to fold it. Plus my tent shouldn’t be easy to see from a distance, doubly so once I cover it with leaves.” Phil leaned over and began to collect handfuls of fallen branches and various pieces of undergrowth to lean against the dull blue walls of his tarp tent.
“Right now, I need to scout the place out in person. Online pictures never compensate for what I can see with my own two eyes. I also got a decent idea of timetables from my research back in Domino City, but those could always be outdated. The best way to make sure is to check the train station itself. Even if it’s nothing but a barebones station meant only for freight trains, there still should be some amount of information available. In order to do that, I need to not look like a hobo with a backpack made out of grocery bags. If I look too sketchy and not like the innocent, cute kid that I truly am, then the cops might get called.”
The trip to the station itself wasn’t particularly long. Phil had made sure to set his camp up in a small stretch of woods nearby, so only a few minutes were needed to get there if he jogged.
Once Phil arrived at the station proper, his words about the potential barebones nature of the train station proved to be completely true. To call it a train station was a bit of an exaggeration. There was a little indoors part with a receptionist, a break room for employees, and two benches outside. The indoor area was roughly the size of two average college or duel academy dorm rooms smashed together.
However, despite the lack of available timetables posted outside of the station, Phil was satisfied. There was at least a receptionist, and Phil physically appeared young enough to not make the lady think he was there to vandalize something. After making sure he was completely out of sight from the receptionist and any visible cameras, Phil carefully dusted himself off, straightened his jacket, and quickly did a mental run-through of how to act like a cute kid. Then with a thumbs up to Lumina and a whisper of ‘showtime’, Phil entered the building.
“Good afternoon, Miss!” He cheerfully called out.
The receptionist looked up from her newspaper to observe the slightly dusty teen. Her eyes traveled across Phil’s mustard-yellow Ra jacket, his short hair, and his worn tennis shoes.
Once Phil realized that she was waiting for him to announce his business, he continued to talk in his best ‘innocent student’ tones.
“Hey, my name’s Phil. Nice to meetcha’. So for my social studies class, the teacherman wants me to write a report on the importance of freight trains in America. I don’t know much about them, so I figured I’d start by going right over to the nearest station to see if I could look around!”
The receptionist couldn’t help herself in the face of Phil’s sparkling, innocent smile. She cracked an indulgent grin.
“What a hard-working kid!” She brightly said. “Well, normally we don’t allow this, but what the heck!”
The receptionist then stood up and walked around to the front of her desk to stand by Phil. She leaned over slightly to lower herself closer to Phil’s height.
“First off, I’m Marcy. Nice to meet you, Phil.” She leaned closer with a conspiratorial look on her face. “Just follow me and we’ll make sure you have all the info you need to ace that report!”
Phil pumped an imaginary fist while Lumina stood right next to him with her head in her hands. Already Phil was mentally preparing enough bullshit about the fake report so that he could impress Marcy further if necessary.
“Tricking that poor nice lady…” Lumina mumbled between her fingers. “Phil…”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
By the time the impromptu tour ended, Phil was able to get a very good idea of the level of security for the train yard (basically nothing aside from an elderly guard watching ancient security cameras in the back room), what sort of materials primarily ran through the yard (coal, what fun), and an excellent timetable for the trains coming through the station in the next three days. His sharp eyes also noted down the locations of the security cameras, the fact that their views were extremely limited, and that there were numerous blind spots. Oh, and Marcy also gave him an extra chocolate donut from a nearly empty box in the break room. Ten stars out of ten, would recommend.
The only unfortunate side effect was that Lumina started feeling so guilty about Phil tricking Marcy that she began to get nauseous.
“There there. It’ll be alright.” Phil comforted Lumina after cheerfully sending another round of shouted thanks towards the receptionist as he left the building. “This gave her a break from the boredom at least. She’ll likely never know that I had ulterior motives about the tour. All Marcy thinks is that she was able to help some random youngster make a really cool school report.”
The two began walking back to the campsite while Phil reviewed the confirmed timetables out loud one more time so Lumina could catch any mistakes Phil had made in memorizing the relevant ones.
“Okay. There’s a total of four freight trains leaving this particular station in the next 24 hours. One of them goes North through Oregon all the way to Portland, the second goes over to the West coast, the third hangs around the Mexican border, and the fourth heads for the Midwest. Obviously, I want the fourth. It leaves at three in the bloody morning tomorrow and makes stops in Reno, Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Omaha, and then St. Louis. I’ve never heard of Cheyenne, but Reno’s a big gambling town, and the other three are standard tourist stops going through the middle stretch of America.”
Phil gave a satisfied nod of his head once Lumina agreed with his plan. “After that I just need to wait until the final stop, get out at St. Louis, and then see which rail lines take me to New York.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
- A few minutes before 3am, the next day –
Phil massaged his pounding head. Even though he had made sure to go to sleep early the night before, it was never easy to wake up this early. Still, there were benefits. Hardly anyone was on the streets around three in the morning. Not normal people, not criminals, not hobos. Each person in each of those groups was sound asleep. As Phil would normally be. He glanced at the indoor receptionist area in the distance. Not even a single light could be seen. It made sense. Marcy would have no reason to be in this early, and the security guard was probably asleep. Phil made a mental note to keep out of view of the cameras just in case.
A nudge to his shoulder and the rustling of his grocery bag backpack caught Phil’s attention. Lumina was right at his side, pointing towards the only loaded-up train in the station. Countless wagons, stretching further back than he bothered to see, all hooked up to a locomotive that was sounding its horn.
“Showtime.” Phil muttered to Lumina. He slapped his cheeks a few times and stood up. One last glance at the directions he knew the different security cameras were in, and then Phil dashed towards the train. Its wheels were gradually beginning to turn as the metal behemoth picked up speed to leave the station.
One, two, three miles per hour.
The train picked up speed one mile per hour at a time, but it was slow to start, as all trains are. By the time it got to about five miles per hour, Phil was close enough to touch the nearest train car.
“Coal…” Phil muttered to himself upon glancing at the plastic-covered slip attached to the side of the car. He shot a quick glance at what little he could see of the top. “Definitely not full, I don’t see any coal poking out from the top.”
His decision was made. With a quick grunt of effort, Phil increased his own speed from an hurried run to a mad sprint towards the back end of that same car. A questing hand grasped the ladder on the side, and with a hop Phil was hanging off the side of the moving train just as it began to reach the six mile per hour mark.
Lumina soon joined him, though with significantly less effort as she simply flew on top of the car with a blast of her magic.
Then, Phil pulled himself over the ledge of the car, dropped onto the bed of coal that filled the container about half full, and settled in for the ride.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dimitri ran and he ran and he ran and he ran and he ran. He sobbed but he laughed at the same time. He didn’t know why he was laughing though. Every time he tried to ask where he was, the people around him, if there were any, looked at him strangely. Like they couldn’t understand what he was saying. She sometimes answered, but it was only reassurances instead of an actual location. The worst times were when the police were called. He could never understand what they were saying, but the meaning was usually clear: why are you here, stop being here, stop reaching for our guns.
He also usually fell asleep around those times. Dimitri couldn’t help it. He was just… so tired. His feet hurt. They hurt far worse than they ever had before.
“Child, you mustn’t stop running. You have so much work to do.”
Normally when someone hugged him in the past, Dimitri had always felt happy for the contact, for the warmth, for the reassurance. Her hugs felt sickly sweet. Like there was something wrong. And it felt wrong. Each time he slept out of sheer exhaustion, Dimitri woke up in places he did not remember falling asleep in. Sometimes he would wake up wearing different clothes. When that happened, it was usually just a different shirt. His pants stayed the same, and his shoes had long since disintegrated into nothingness. One time he even woke up wearing a bulletproof vest. It had a few bullets in it, but the vest was better than nothing, Dimitri figured.
He would have preferred some shoes. Some good, sturdy shoes. Running shoes, tennis shoes, hiking boots, even flip flops would do. No, on second thought, flip flops would suck to run in. As he ran and he ran and he ran he couldn’t stop running shewouldn’tlethimhecan’tfallasleepagainshetakesoverthen, his feet were gradually transformed into bloody mockeries of the original appendages. The last time Dimitri had dared to look down, before he had to stop doing that to prevent the miniscule breakfast he had eaten earlier that morning from coming back up, Dimitri had been able to see white specks of exposed bone poking out underneath the ragged scraps of flesh.
She hugged his shoulders again, whispering in a gentle, loving voice into his ears. It felt like her head was resting softly on his right shoulder, but when he looked, there was nothing.
“Brave child. So fearless. So strong. Let me take over. I can block the pain.”
Dimitri couldn’t help it. His own body betrayed him. It felt like there were a set of miniature Atlas’s from Greek mythology straining hold up his eyelids like it was the weight of the sky itself.
His eyes closed.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Dimitri wrenched open his eyes. The VHS tape was rewound… or was it fast-forwarded? He did not know this place. It was loud. So loud. The only other time he could remember being around something this loud was when his dad had taken him to visit a train yard when he was little. The conductor had blasted the horn, just for him. What a nice guy.
He looked down at his hands. A bloody knife was clutched in his right hand. On the floor below him, an elderly man in a black suit with gold buttons and a navy-blue tie was lying in a pool of blood. The man’s face was wracked with fear. With terror.
Dimitri blinked in confusion and mounted horror. The VHS tape was rewound. He dropped the knife with an air of disinterest and shifted on his feet, ignoring the screaming sensation of sickening pain that transmitted through his nerves each time he moved.
His arms moved out of their own accord and then straightened his new blue shirt. Dimitri looked around slowly to reorient himself. A… train? And for some reason his shirt had a patch that listed out the words ‘Sacramento Police Department’. Huh. That was new.
“Oh sweet child, how handsome you look now.” A motherly voice purred out from above his head. Dimitri’s left arm moved of its own accord, bringing itself up to his mouth so he could lick his palm. It moved again, this time up to the top of his head, and soon his hair was smoothed from its previous disorganized state.
He tilted his head in confusion. Why did he just do that? But before his train of thought could leave the station, Dimitri’s legs buckled as what felt like a pair of arms began to rest on his shoulders. He screamed in pain as the exposed nerves in his feet voiced their complaints to the management about moving.
“Come, my child. He is so close.”