Aniki Adams was not having a good day.
First, his coffee machine had broken this morning, turning one of his least favorite parts of the day into even more of a slog. Of course, he’d just gone to grab a coffee at a nearby chain shop. No big deal, right up until his car battery was dead because he’d forgotten to turn his headlights off the night before. His neighbor was nice enough to give him a jump, and he’d gone to grab his coffee. Just when he’d thought the day was starting to get better, the Yu-Gi-Oh tournament he was signed up for was canceled because the TO was busy this weekend.
Aniki Adams was having a rather bad day. Of course, he’d long accepted this and was now lying on his couch, dejected. After about fifteen minutes of moping, Aniki decided to just spend the day indoors relaxing. Nodding to himself at his sheer genius plan, he quickly went to grab his cards - He had quite a few that he hadn’t sleeved yet, and that was a travesty in his mind.
Still, sleeving cards only took so long, and eventually, he was back to square one: what to do today? Looking at his binder, there was one card in particular that stood out to him. Number 39: Utopia. The card of choice for the protagonist of Zexal, if he remembered correctly. He’d never actually watched that anime, of course. Life got in the way, and there were quite a few polarizing reviews, so he’d just stayed away from it when it came out.
He supposed he didn’t have much else to do anyway, so Aniki closed his binders and went to scavenge his kitchen. If he was going to spend the day watching anime, he was going to make sure he didn’t need to get up for anything later. That was always annoying.
Settling down with his pretzels, huge mug of water, and a few bits of junk food here and there, Aniki got comfortable and turned the TV to episode 1. Laying back onto the couch as the intro played, he couldn’t help but feel a bit sleepy, and his eyelids kept getting heavy. Mentally shrugging to himself, he decided that a nap couldn’t hurt. There’d be plenty of time to watch the show when he woke up. And so he closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep.
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Waking up with a yawn and a stretch, Aniki was still groggily wiping at his eyes when he realized that this was not his couch. Looking around, he wasn’t in his house at all. Much more awake with the idea that he was in an unfamiliar location, he quickly glanced around the room, taking note of anything interesting.
The first thing he noticed was that his binders were sitting on a nearby desk, neatly arranged. Odd, but he was just taken out of his home, so honestly anything could happen. The room itself was rather neatly kept, and was a pretty standard small bedroom, with a desk, and a dresser, on top of which was a small mirror, probably for adjusting a hairstyle.
Aniki’s first reaction was to pinch himself, and at the small stinging pain, he quickly tossed out the idea that this was a dream and began to panic slightly. He went over to the mirror, hoping to settle himself, but as he gazed into the mirror, the man looking back was not the man he was expecting.
Looking about 17 or 18, the man staring back at Aniki was pale, though not unhealthy in complexion. He had dirty blond hair, tied back into a quick ponytail and brown, almost hazelnut eyes. All of this slid into place, and it finally clicked in Aniki’s mind.
This was an isekai, and he was living it.
Sitting himself back down on the bed - his bed, he realized - Aniki gathered his thoughts. Iskeai, a genre about getting taken to another world, sometimes unknown, other times known. How he got here he didn’t know, but the important thing was where he was. This could either be really good, or really bad, all depending on where he was sent, and who he was sent as.
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Deciding to look through the desk he’d neglected to earlier, Aniki got back up and walked over. Sitting on top were his binders, all arranged in a row. Resigning to check through them later, he pulled open the top drawer, only to find what looked like a small arm brace with a screen coming off of it. Aniki didn’t recognize it immediately, but combined with what looked like a scouter from Dragon Ball, he pieced it together.
“It’s a duel disk. From… Zexal, I think?” Aniki questioned himself, but he didn’t recognize the design, and it was pretty clearly a duel disk of some sort, so it only made sense. Nodding, he was proud for figuring that out for only a moment before the realization hit: He was in Zexal, and he didn’t know anything about the show beyond the very basics. Why else would he have a duel disk and scouter? Although… wasn’t it called something else? Duel scouter didn’t sound quite right. Duel… gazer! That’s what it was called.
Sighing, Aniki shook his head to refocus himself. If there was anything he knew about the Yu-Gi-Oh animes, it was that every single one revolved around some kind of world-ending threat. Now, he was living it, and if the very little knowledge of Zexal he did have was correct, it revolved around the number cards. Number cards which he had quite a few of, most of which were really easy to summon.
Taking the gazer and duel disk and setting them aside for now, Aniki opened his binder for XYZ cards and was quickly met with several ruined cards, most of which could only barely be made out to be several number cards. The more pressing issue than his cards being destroyed, though, was the few missing spots where cards should have been. While he didn’t have the best memory, Aniki knew that more than a few number cards came out after Zexal’s release, and if the blank slots in his binder were anything to go off of… they were out in the world now.
Taking a small moment of silence for all of the now ruined cards, some of which were somewhat expensive, Aniki took the damaged cards and trashed them, reorganizing his binder as he did. Of course, not all XYZ monsters were numbers, and he still had quite a few left over, but it still stung to know that he was probably not helping in keeping the bad guys from having them.
Sighing, Aniki decided to explore his new home and opened the door to a card shop. A rather unexpected sight, but one he welcomed. There was no one around, and the sign on the door was flipped to closed, but a card shop was at least somewhat familiar. Aniki had spent quite a few hours in hobby shops at home, and whoever’s body he was now in seemed like the owner of this one.
The thought that he was in someone else's body made him cringe a little. Sending a small apology to whoever this was, Aniki looked through the back of the shop and found that there was no one else in the building. Odd, considering the age of his newfound body. Spotting a small breakroom, he found a computer with the username and password rather conveniently printed on a small note stuck to the back. Logging into the computer, Aniki was confused. He was expecting to have to get used to people calling him by a different name, but the name on the computer was his. Aniki Adams, staring right back at him defiantly, as if to say that even in a different world, his name would still be just as weird.
Holding back another sigh, Aniki went to see if any friends or family contacted the previous owner of his body overnight, only to see that he didn’t have anyone who he was in frequent contact with. Just suppliers for different cards and packs. Seeing that as more than just a bit odd, Aniki quickly searched up his name, and found that he now had no close relatives to speak of. Sure, he had a cousin halfway across the world, but the previous owner of his body never spoke with him, and Aniki wasn’t keen on reaching out.
As it turns out, the guy whose body he now had lived alone in his card shop because he didn’t have any family at all. His parents were dead from some kind of accident a year or so ago, and he never had any siblings. It wasn’t hard to think that the card shop was a family business, there were too many rooms for it to have been a one-man show, and once his folks were dead, the guy pretty much just shut himself in the store.
While a sad story and Aniki’s heart went out to the guy, this was a pretty good situation to be in for Aniki. While he was certainly poor, he did have some money, and he had a pretty decent way of making more with a whole card shop at his disposal. The guy’s lack of a social life was a boon since Aniki didn’t have to bother trying to act like someone he wasn’t. In other words, he was pretty much free to go about and do what he wanted… which at this point, meant figuring out what it is he wanted.
Aniki leaned back in his chair and puzzled over that for a while. What did he want? To go home? Maybe, but… that was something he could figure out later. So what did he want now? What was he going to do now that he was in the world of Zexal? After a minute of getting frustrated over not having a particular plan, Aniki decided that gathering the numbers he’d accidentally spread would probably be a good start, and it’d be something to do that he could focus on easily if nothing else.
With that figured out, Aniki went to his new room and almost reached for his deck… before realizing that almost none of those cards were supposed to exist yet, and that would immediately make anyone watching his duels suspicious. Plus, Aniki thought, there was also the possibility of duel spirits. While they never came back in any of the other Yu-Gi-Oh anime, Aniki was pretty sure there was something like that in Zexal. Probably.
Opening up his binders, Aniki thought for a few moments as to what to make. He was pretty sure that the power level would be pretty low, it was in all the other animes, so he didn’t want to throw something really strong in and stomp all over everyone. He was in an anime world where people dueled to solve problems. Winning everything instantly would be no fun, and if he had his way, Aniki was gonna have some fun.
With that thought, he got a small smile as he flipped through his binders, settling on an old, fun little card with a little XYZ support to make it a bit more “Zexal-themed”.
Oh yeah. This would be fun.