“It’s a mixed bag.” Bastion said with a sigh as he flopped onto one of the cushy chairs in the Ra Yellow commons room. It was one of those glorious seats that saw the stuffing nearly bursting out of the fabric with how packed full of feathers and other assorted comfy stuff it was. Such chairs were littered around the room as if carelessly dropped out of the rather large pocket of a passing giant – or placed by an administration department that wanted to give back to the students instead of lining their own pockets with tuition money.
“How so?” Phil said around a mouthful of chips he’d pilfered from the cafeteria before it had closed for the night. Another handful disappeared down his gullet before Bastion finished working his response around his head.
“Well,” He shrugged, “Half of the students are angry with you guys for not winning. The other half is impressed with how far you three managed to press the teachers. The first half might come around given time, I think. Some students have forgotten about the only other trio that has managed to push the teachers as far as you did.” Bastion leaned back in his comfy chair as he reminisced.
“I never got to see the duel in person, of course. It was a few years before my time. Still, I have a VHS recording of it in my room.” He shook his head and laughed at the thought. “What a legendary duel. Zane Truesdale, Atticus Rhodes, and Yusuke Fujiwara versus Professor Crowler, Ms. Hibiki, and Professor Viper, who was visiting from the West Academy. I think that time was the only year that the student team actually won the duel section of the split basketball/duel event. Hmm, and I think instead of basketball, it was tennis that year. They tend to switch around the sports part so it’s something new every year.”
Phil cleanly polished off the chips in the now-empty bag, chucking it in the general direction of the trash can in the corner and narrowly missing Lumina, who was enjoying a nice spot of tea in one of the unused couches nearby (because, as she put it, having a living body pass through hers while she was invisible was rather uncomfortable – so best not to take a seat anywhere near a group of students).
“That’s right. Didn’t one of them say they got banned from the event after their first year for being too good? I kinda heard them talking about it while we were dueling, but I didn’t pay much attention.”
“Correct.” Bastion nodded at Phil in confirmation. He got up, walked over to where the empty chip bag had fallen on the floor, and tossed it into the trash can. “It was pure, one-sided domination from the student team. Even Crowler couldn’t close out the point gap in the tennis portion, and Ms. Hibiki was the only teacher among the teacher trio who was able to fight on equal grounds with those boys. It was practically a 3v1. Then, about a year later, Yusuke and Atticus both disappeared in the abandoned dorm incident. So, perhaps it was not entirely because they were too good, but also because no one had the heart to ask Zane to participate without his brothers-in-arms.”
“Aye. I get that.” Phil sighed. “Just look at how Zane was before Atticus came back, and after. He’s still one stoic motherfucker, but damn he looks a hell of a lot happier now. I swear I almost saw him crack a grin the other day.”
Bastion grunted his agreement. The entire abandoned dorm incident was still an open wound that pained the entire academy. Sure, Atticus was back, but there were still so many other students that were never seen again after that incident. Soon enough, Bastion turned to other matters, just in time for Jaden and Chazz to walk into the commons room.
“Oh? The three strongest of this generation, gathered in one room.” Bastion smiled, partially in jest, and partially in all seriousness.
“Really?” Phil raised his eyebrows in incredulous disbelief and looked back at his friend.
“Truly. Zane and Atticus are of the older generation, so that counts them out. Technically, Zane should actually be graduated by now. He’s just hanging around to give Atticus some company. And while half the student body is still angry, you three went further than any student can claim to ever have the ability to. You three are officially the strongest of your generation in this academy, representing Slifer Red, Ra Yellow, and Obelisk Blue.”
“Haha, niiiicceee!” Jaden let out a long sliding whistle in surprise as he flopped down onto an empty chair, while Chazz went for the more dignified route of calmly sitting down on another chair.
“Yet we still lost.” Chazz observed. Unlike Jaden, Bastion, and Phil, he seemed hardly focused on the conversation, instead preferring to flip through his deck card by card, taking each and every card into deep consideration as he did so. A sparse handful of cards, no more than two or three, were set aside for removal, while a number that was roughly equal to that handful was waiting on the sidelines to be added.
Jaden casually shrugged Chazz’s pessimism off his shoulders like it was nothing but water.
“Potato potahto. It was fun, wasn’t it? Anyways, Phil, Bastion, check this out. I meant to tell you guys earlier, but I plain forgot with how excited I was over the duel!”
The two boys in question leaned forward in polite interest, a motion that quickly evolved into confused interest, and then extreme interest once Jaden produced something that looked like the end of a male audio cable with a string around the end and launched into an energetic explanation.
“So I was walking around Domino City with the rest of the gang during the summer, right? Then I split off when they went to go get ice cream to see if I could find anyone looking for a sweet duel. Turns out I missed out on seeing a crazy matchup between Zane and some pro duelist, but that’s just the way it be sometimes. Anyways, so I’m looking around for some card-playin' action, and this weird dude with super long hair and absolutely crazy eyes pops out of the crowd. And this dude, he’s gasping for breath, almost like he’s absolutely freaking out about something. He locks eyes with me, starts screaming gibberish, and then hands me this thing. Then he shouts that it’s half of some key and to never give it back to him, then runs off. He was fast, like Olympics level fast. I wonder if he used to be a track star when he was in school?”
Bastion and Phil shared a look, while Chazz paused in looking through his deck to raise an eyebrow at Jaden.
“A crazy dude gave you half of what he said was a key." Phil repeated to confirm, to which Jaden nodded in response.
That was… troubling, to say the least. By now, Phil could easily smell it – a plot convenience. That key was undoubtedly important, and by GX anime rules, there would probably be enemy duelists arriving on the island at some point during the school year to try and get it back through the always-fun avenue of murderous shadow duels. That was just how it always seemed to work. The Shadow Riders were like that with the key keepers. If the Tragoedia problem hadn’t been solved ahead of time over the summer break, Phil had no doubt that some stupid MacGuffin would have brought the bastard to the academy grounds to start growing his own body count.
The only real questions he had at this point were, what was the key for, who exactly wanted it, and how close were they to arriving on the island to start fucking shit up? So far, neither of his initial targets had shown up. Not the Light of Destruction, nor Yubel. Phil had no idea when the Light of Destruction would show, and he knew that Yubel was one of the final threats that popped up somewhere around the end of the anime. So, was this the light, or was this something else that he had no knowledge of? Well, not like that last bit was a particularly difficult achievement to get. He didn’t have knowledge of much of anything in the canon of GX.
“Something crazy’s going to happen with that key.” Phil eventually ventured a guess, which Bastion immediately echoed, before motioning for Jaden to safely stow it away.
Phil looked left and right. No one was peering in through the windows, and there were no visible duel spirits aside from Lumina (though, if there was a duel spirit in the area that wanted to be unseen by everyone, then there was no helping it).
“Keep it secret. Keep it safe.” Phil muttered toward Jaden. “Other than telling Crowler and Hibiki, of course. Loop them in tomorrow before class, they deserve to know. The moment anyone starts asking about that key, or sucks you into a shadow game, or tries to duel you with that key on the line, tell us. Something which looks that MacGuffiney is probably key to some super mega death ball-crusher weapon 9000. Probably something at the level of the Sacred Beasts, or worse. If someone tries to get it from you, we need to be ready to drop those morons ASAP. Plus, the guy who gave that key to you was some crazy hobo. Always trust the crazy hobos in situations like these. They’re usually possessed by some freaky demons or are on some really, really good LSD. Either way, you’re in for an interesting time.”
Jaden looked at Phil skeptically, but ultimately tucked the key into a pocket deep under his Slifer Red jacket. Then, he paused, almost as if he had remembered something else.
“Oh, right!” Jaden said, “Another weird thing, I keep having this recurring dream. I’m having fun, dueling people back-to-back in my super cool dream world, and then this purple monster with wings and some crazy, wacko smile shows up and starts staring at me. No words, just a whole lot of staring.”
Phil stared back at his friend.
“What the fuck? That is both weird and cool at the same time.”
"I know, right!" Jaden raised his hands. "Downright the weirdest set of dreams I've ever had, and that's counting the one dream I had a bit ago about this dolphin man who called me a silly man and asked if I was going to cry. A dolphin! Standing upright like a human! Calling me a silly man with a super high-pitched voice!"
“Perhaps it is a sign your subconscious is worried about something?” Bastion ventured a guess. “If a monster is regularly appearing in your dreams, one that has the same appearance every time and does the same thing every time, then that is hardly a coincidence. It’s a pretty well-known science fact by now.”
“Purple wings, wacko-smile, monster…” Phil muttered in thought before asking a question of his own. “Did this monster have an eye in the middle of its forehead? A really big one?”
Jaden smacked his hands together and excitedly pointed at Phil. “Yes! It did, actually! Are you inside of my head right now?”
“Right-o.” Phil heaved himself out of his chair and jogged over to his dorm room at the end of the hall, disappearing into it and coming back out a few seconds later with a singular shiny card in his hand. Showing the card to Jaden, he asked if the monster in the picture was the same monster that appeared in his dreams.
“Yubel…” Jaden muttered and gave the picture a good look. “Yup. The exact one. But, I’ve never even seen or heard of this card before. Why would it appear in my dreams?”
Phil shrugged. “I don’t know. Quite frankly, while I own this card, I don’t know much about it other than how to use it in a deck if I really want to. But if you keep dreaming about it, then there’s got to be a reason. Try… ummm…” Phil rubbed his chin while he thought. He knew Yubel was one of the final bosses of GX. However, lore-wise he didn’t know much more than that. What its goals were, any powers that weren’t listed in the effect on the card, its links to Jaden, all of it was unknown to him. Curse his lazy brain for never bothering to watch more than an episode or two of the anime!
“Try… you know what, since that Yubel monster hasn’t actually done anything other than show up and stare at you, try just talking to them normally? Be nice about it, maybe try and dream up some tasty drinks and get them to speak? At the very least you might be able to find out why that creature is showing up, if it’s like Bastion says and part of your subconscious, or if something magical is going on in your brain.”
“If it’s a lucid dream, then perhaps you can resolve whatever your subconscious is worried about by doing that.” Bastion smiled in agreement. “Since people can have a great deal of control over their actions in a lucid dream. Even if it’s not, just the act of recognizing that you’re in a dream when you see that monster can allow you to change the events of the dream.”
"Okay. Thanks, dudes, I will try. I wonder if that Yubel creature likes grilled cheese sandwiches? I'll ask Chumley to teach me how to make them as great as he does and try to copy that into my dreams. No one can refuse his grilled cheese sandwiches!” Jaden promised and thanked them with a large, beaming smile.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
“She’s still staring at you.”
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.
Phil glanced discreetly in the direction Bastion nodded in, toward the other end of the lecture hall.
“The chick in the fancy Obelisk Blue getup?”
"The very same," Bastion confirmed. “The jury is officially in. You’re definitely not imagining things, nor have you gone crazy yet.”
It had first been pointed out to Phil during breakfast, that a girl from the Obelisk Blue dorm had been asking about him. According to Alexis, she’d always been a bit… weird. Weird enough for a person as nice as Alexis to call her weird. Modifying her uniform into something similar to a princess’s dress, wearing a tiara to class, and talking about ‘princes’ all the time. She’d been a bit arrogant at first, but after Chazz wiped the floor with her in a duel one day, she calmed down a bit (but still didn’t lose a single bit of the princess getup).
“Princess Rose is still staring at you, Phil?” Syrus butted in, looking a bit jealous. “Isn’t she cute? I wonder what she sees in a coarse guy like you?”
Phil softly laughed and shook his head. From his point of view, Princess Rose looked like a total loon. No normal person dressed up like a princess on a daily basis. On special occasions? Sure. He wouldn’t judge. Every day? Damn right he would.
"I don't know man, if you're into her, why not shoot your shot?" Phil poked Syrus in the ribs with a half-teasing, half-serious grin. "The worst thing she can do is say no."
“Or laugh at me. That would be the worst-case scenario, pointing and laughing at me” Syrus groaned nervously. “No, I shouldn’t. It’s clear, she has eyes only for you.”
Great. Now, if Phil didn’t have a good ten years of mental age on the girl, then he might have gone over to her out of curiosity, perhaps with a willingness to at least try and see if things would unexpectedly work out. But with the situation he was in now, it would just be too weird. Now if it was someone more around his age range, like Nurse Fontaine… well, then it would still be super weird since he had the physical appearance of a teenager. Damned both ways in this world. Good thing it was all temporary. Phil wasn’t sure what he would do if his stay here was permanent.
“She might just be interested in you for the deck you played in yesterday’s duel.” Chazz abruptly mentioned from the next seat over, where he was enjoying a full-course breakfast he’d snuck into the lecture room from the cafeteria. Well, perhaps ‘snuck in’ was a bit of an exaggeration. More as in the teacher lecturing up front, a lady Phil couldn’t remember the name of, didn’t seem to feel like it was something worth challenging ‘The Chazz’ over. It probably helped that Chazz was still being low-key about it, to not disrupt the lecture. Just a man enjoying his breakfast without making a fuss over it.
“My frog deck?” Phil asked in surprise. He didn’t even know there was anyone at all in the anime, any of the anime series, that played frogs.
"Yup," Chazz said around a mouthful of eggs. “When I dueled her last year, she played some weird frog deck. Kind of reminded me of yours, but worse. I don’t think she ever summoned any sort of monster that had more than 1200 attack points.”
"And speak of the devil," Alexis muttered and held up a note, glancing at it for a second before handing it to Phil. "She just passed this over here. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised it actually made it over here. I thought one of the other students would have thrown it away as a prank before it got halfway over.”
Phil grabbed the small note from Alexis with a word of thanks, nabbing a piece of bacon from Chazz’s plate while he was at it. Between crunches of bacon and a good-natured glare from Chazz (who had plenty of bacon still on his plate), he skimmed over the contents.
“Meet me in the quad after class. Cordially, Princess Rose.”
“You lucky son of a gun.” Syrus groaned and pressed his hands into his head. “Why can’t I get love notes in class? This is like a top-tier school dream for me!”
“Well, shit," Phil muttered. "I hope this is just her own weird way to ask for a duel over who has the right to play frogs from now on. Otherwise, this is going to be awkward as hell. Bastion, how about you let her down for me? This sounds like kind of a pain.”
“Nope.” Bastion replied with a sly grin. “This is your mess to deal with. If you don’t want to date her, just be a man and say that upfront. If she wants to duel, then be a proper duelist and accept.”
“And if she’s looking for a date this weekend, point her my way.” Syrus forced out the hopeful words.
Phil looked back at the short Slifer Red and grinned, nudging him on the shoulder. “You got it man, I’ll gas you the fuck up in her eyes. Jaden, if I look at you and wink very obviously, dash over and join me in being a wingman for Syrus. A Flame Wingman, if you will. We’re getting him this weekend date come hell or high water if it turns out she’s interested. Oh, and Syrus, we aren’t doing any shenanigans here. This ain’t no comedy movie. If Jaden and I manage to convince her, just act like a normal human being and take her on the fucking date.”
“Ugh…” Syrus wilted into his seat out of sheer nervousness, clearly regretting his previous words and hoping that all Princess Rose wanted was a duel.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-Elsewhere on the island-
Vellian Crowler looked down with eyes that were as calm and placid as a windless lake. At his feet were two men in white coats, each with a shattered duel disk on their arm and splatters of blood around their bodies. A slight movement of their chests betrayed that those men still drew breath, but they could do little more than that.
“You reap the consequences of your own shadow duel.” Crowler sighed and unclipped a radio from where it was stowed underneath his Obelisk Blue greatcoat, ordinarily hidden away so the students did not have to worry about the new security measures that were new to the island this year.
"Little Cat, come in, please. This is Big Blue."
A moment of silence followed, and then the radio crackled to life as Lyman Banner responded. Crowler still felt a sliver of distrust toward the man, in part due to his actions in the Shadow Raider invasion, and in part because the man still blatantly practiced dark magic. The only difference was that his dark magic was no longer directed at the students of the academy. Baby steps, he supposed, and Banner had already proved to be a formidable, stalwart ally more than ten times over by now, saving both his and Midori’s lives on more than one occasion during the summer.
“Good morning, Big Blue. This is Little Cat. How may I be of service?”
Crowler cleared his throat and glanced back down at the two men. What he was about to say would consign them to a fate he would not wish on most people in the world. But the moment they trespassed on the island, Crowler felt little pity for them. And the moment they began a shadow duel out of their own volition with zero hesitation on their part?
He had lost every single iota of pity for them at that moment. Crowler’s blood ran cold at the thought of what might have happened if those men had run into a student instead of him. Especially considering that they managed to dodge the bulk of the security cameras and even somewhat subdue their presence so that Chaos Ancient Gear Giant took a moment longer than usual to detect them. No. There would be none of that. Not this year, not ever. He was a new man now, and no staff member on the island would ever be forced to explain to a grieving parent how one of their children died alone and afraid ever again.
“I have two more intruders for you. They possess white coats similar in style and color to all the others that have tried to infiltrate the island recently.”
“Excellent.” Banner purred back. “Please, send them to my lab as soon as you can. I have many ways I can make use of them. After I squeeze what information I can from them, of course.”
“Roger that, Little Cat. Big Blue signing off.”
Crowler clipped the radio back on his belt and heaved the two men over his broad shoulders without even a slight gasp of effort, such was his physical strength these days. Now, the only trick would be to take the longer, backwoods paths to the main academy buildings, in a way that none of the students would see him and get concerned. It was a slight bit weird, his students actually caring about what their professor was up to, enough to speak up in concern if they felt like he looked careworn or down. It was… nice. He actually looked forward to preparing and running his lectures these days.
Buoyed by what he could joyfully spend the next couple of hours doing, Crowler picked up his pace through the trees so he could hand the men off to Banner, hand his patrol route off to Midori, and get back in the halls of the academy. Still, there was one dark thought that lingered in the back of his mind.
“Hahhhhh… day in, day out. I wonder what kind of worthless scum is behind things this time?”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The sound of paws flitting across stone was the only thing that broke up the suffocating silence of the dark room. Soon, a door drifted open, pushed inwards by a pair of ethereal hands that sprouted from the back of a tawny cat with brown stripes across his body. Behind the cat were two men, barely breathing as they were callously dragged by their necks with the cat's tail like they were nothing but two moderately full trash bags destined for the curb.
Once the cat passed through the doorway, the hands disappeared, and the door drifted shut. A flick of the creature’s powerful tail was all that was needed to throw the two men across the room to land in a heap next to a series of strange glass bottles, polished copper cables, and unknown bubbling liquids that gleamed with nearly every color imaginable.
The cat stretched his spine leisurely and stood upright on a pair of two sturdy hind legs, almost like what a human would do. A clap of paws (another humanlike gesture), and the cat spoke.
“Now, now. Tell me, oh men garbed in white, what was your business on the island?” Professor Banner hummed to himself as he worked, not really expecting an answer to his question just yet.
A bottle of silver liquid was grabbed with one paw, while the other forced the mouth of the first man wide open. The liquid fell out of the bottle with a smooth motion and disappeared down the man’s gullet. Two seconds passed in which the room was silent until the man abruptly began screaming so loud that flecks of blood flew out of his mouth to splatter against the wall, where they joined several other dried bits of the scarlet liquid. The man’s eyes bulged, threatening to slip out of their sockets to dance onto the floor, and his mouth opened to start shouting some sort of odd, gibbering language that hadn’t been heard by mortal ears for over a millennium.
“Hm. Yes, that makes sense. You there,” Banner pointed with a single claw at a calm, long-haired man who was standing in the corner with a single claw, “Write this down, please. I assume that Vellian expects a report on this. Perhaps it will aid him in putting this puzzle together a little bit quicker. It should soothe Sheppard’s worried heart, at least. He may even stop asking me to make medicine to ease his stress.”
The long-haired man, one clad in a simple white dress shirt and slacks, who also bore a striking resemblance to how Professor Banner had once looked (before the cat incident), silently walked forward with a pen and paper ready. There was no life in the eyes of the human Banner, not even a flicker. It was nothing but a spare homunculus. One of the many that were once meant to be a disposable body for the true Lyman Banner, to help him survive his own weakness of body while he searched for a cure. However, as he was now in a cat’s body (one that suited him quite well), that sickness appeared to have mostly cleared up. It was the most unexpected conclusion to his collaboration with the Shadow Riders.
Pen scratched against paper as the man's gibbering madness was transcribed into legible Japanese, with one particular word, 'Light', underlined several times for emphasis. Banner nodded in satisfaction. It truly was a good idea to keep a few of his old homunculi around. A cat’s paws were ill-suited for using a pen and paper, after all, and why waste magic on creating a set of spirit hands if he didn’t need to? Eventually, both the man and the sound of pen and paper fell silent, and the process was repeated on the second man with nearly identical results.
Banner twisted his neck back and forth to produce a series of satisfying ‘popping’ noises. Whatever was going on in the world, he had a feeling it was about to get interesting… and that wasn’t even taking into consideration the telltale signs of the Rebis turning their eyes toward someone at the academy who was unlucky enough to hold their attention. Anything that distracted that corrupted alchemical byproduct from its usual rampage around the spirit world was nothing but ill tidings. A pity it was very homicidally insane by now, otherwise he wouldn’t mind taking advantage of the Rebis’s captured attention to perform a few experiments.
“That’s probably all.” Banner shook his head to distract himself from those foreboding thoughts as the second man finally quit rambling. “Might as well…”
Hm. What to do with those two. It would be a shame to waste two perfectly good batteries. They couldn’t have been particularly powerful, considering they fell to a duelist who, while formidable, relied solely on a duel spirit to deal with magical aspects of the world. Still, magic was magic. There was no denying that. High amounts of it or low amounts of it, a proper alchemist could take advantage of it no matter what.
Banner paused his thoughts and redirected his attention toward his latest project. There was that, he supposed. All it really needed was mounds of flesh that could at least technically be called mages. Skill or ability hardly mattered.
“Perfect. Would you kindly strap those two down? I can’t say for sure at this point if the combined backlash from losing their duel to Vellian and enduring the serum has fried their brains yet. It would be a pity if they somehow avoided becoming drooling loons, escaped, and traumatized some students. Midori might feed me to a dog if that happened. I think I would also feel quite bad for the students. They would not deserve being forced to look into the truth of our sad excuse of a world.”
Banner’s spare homunculus creakily nodded its head and dragged the two men toward a pure black metal spire that occupied the center of the stone room. One end was sunken cleanly through the stone floor, while the other extended high into the air to pierce through the ceiling, which was solid stone with a layer of wood on top of it. Near the base, where the spire met the floor, several silent men and women were thoroughly chained to the metal object from head to toe. Not even a single inch was spared for them to move, though at a glance, none of them looked hardly capable of moving. No, every single man and woman attached to it stared blankly into the air with the vacant eyes of a human being who was incapable of any sort of thought.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
-An hour later, in Professor Banner’s dedicated lecture hall-
Students filed one by one into the lecture hall. Some laughed excitedly with friends, and others flipped through various notes from previous class periods. All were looking forward to the class. Banner always found some way to make the often-esoteric field of alchemy amusing, instead of filling it with dry, boring equations or measurements. Of course, there were still plenty of those, but they were healthily divided up between a good amount of groan-worthy puns, amusing anecdotes from the professor’s extraordinarily long life, and just plain old goofing around. Those were the best classes, his students had quickly understood. The ones where you can learn while having a lot of fun. And maybe watch a cat blow a few things up for fun, which usually happened at least once per lecture.
The only disappointing part was that their feline professor never seemed to get around to explaining that weird black metal spire that was sticking out from the floor. Whenever a student asked about it, the question was always deflected with flawless precision from Professor Banner. All the students could tell that it seemed to bite deeply into the wooden floor, and was only a hair taller than someone the size of Professor Crowler, who capped out at nearly six and a half feet tall.
Well, considering how good of a teacher Banner had morphed into after his transformation into a cat, his students could let something like that slide at least. Plus, it was super cute when Banner wiggled his haunches and pounced up onto the podium to look his students in the eyes, something he did to start off every lecture.
Already, Banner’s amused purring filled the air as he did just that, looking into the eyes of every student one at a time to greet them with a warm smile before diving into the day’s topic.