C.N. April 2014: Digital Distraction Part 29

“Hey!” Tea protested as she was shoved into a stone cell hard enough to stumble, preventing her from trying to bolt out before the heavy metal door slammed shut.

“Shut up.” The hooded mook who was locking her cell door growled, his companion limping slightly where she had driven her rather heavy boot into his foot.

“Why should I?” Tea demanded, glaring at him through the small barred window in the huge metal door.

“Because if you want to get out of here, you’ll shut up and do what you’re told.” The hooded creep informed her. “After all, the only people who know you’re here are our men. Your friend’s been drugged so heavily, if he wakes up in time for the ritual he’ll be lucky.”

Tea winced, having been pulled away from Yami, who they had taken to another part of the castle. They needed him. They had only survived the last few hundred ‘End of the World’ scenarios because the Pharaoh had been there to save the day. If Yami wasn’t going to wake up in time, she were in a lot of trouble and so was everyone on the island.

The mook seemed pleased at that reaction and he and his companion stalked off, leaving Tea alone in the dungeons.

She hadn’t expected to get thrown in the dungeon when she had been dragged out of the secret tunnels. She didn’t know what she had expected, but being separated from Yami and dragged down to the lower dungeon level hadn’t been on her list.

She had hoped to at least pass Yugi when she had realised where she was being taken but she hadn’t seen any sign of him which really worried her. She didn’t know if her friends had already managed to get him out or whether he was being held in a different part of the castle, and she was worried that, now they had Yami, they had had gotten rid of Yugi.

Yami would never forgive himself if he survived this and Yugi didn’t.

Tea didn’t bother pacing the cell, instead barging the door just once before spending the first ten minutes trying to get her arm through the bars on the door to allow her to either pick the lock or work out some other way of escaping.

When that didn’t work, she moved away from the door for a little bit to work out another way of opening the door.

She had no intention of being the damsel in distress again. She was sick of it. She had been planning on taking self defence lessons for that exact reason. Annoyingly they had been due to start next week.

Still she wasn’t as helpless as the bad guys thought she was. They hadn’t bothered to check her bag, believing her to be less of a threat then the King of Games. That meant she still had everything that she had packed ‘just in case.’ Including the set of lock picks she had been practising with ever since Marik had kidnapped her. She just had to, somehow, manage to reach the lock on the other side of the door.

She would have picked the lock from her side, except she didn’t appear to have a keyhole she could use to do so.

“I have to have something in here I can use.” Tea grouched as she went through her backpack, “I packed everything bar the kitchen si...ah ha!” She grinned as she pulled a small spool of crafting wire from her bag. “Let’s see if this works...”

Clanverse: Dimensional Difficuties: Part 1

BETWEEN PHILOSOPHER'S STONE AND CHAMBER OF SECRETS

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

He’d specifically waited until nightfall to slip in through the open window of the upstairs flat above the Kame Game Shop and it took his eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light inside.  It wasn’t hard to spot his target though, not when the spiky haired teenager was sprawled on the sofa, fast asleep and illuminated by the television, safe in the supposed knowledge that he was perfectly safe in his own home.

He silently stalked over to the teen, frowning slightly at the sight of the Millennium Puzzle hanging around the target’s neck considering that it belonged to the teen he’d seen leave the game shop a couple of hours ago, surrounded by his friends, but didn’t think much of it, after all, if the King of Games had chosen to surrender his deck to his sibling, then it was possible that he had left the Puzzle in the care of his sibling temporarily too.

He reached for the catch of the chain carefully, but the moment his fingers brushed the metal the teenager started awake and attempted to bolt away, only prevented from doing so because he seized the kid’s hair and pulled him to the ground, wincing slightly at the loss of surprise and the pained cry the kid had loosed as his head slammed into the table, stunning the teen long enough for him to pin the brat to the ground.

The teen expelled a lot of air in a pained cry as his assailant drove a knee into his stomach and before he could take any back in one hand was at his throat and pushing down hard as the man straddled the teen, pinning him down while the other hand took out a piece of the Puzzle and tossed it aside before pulling a vial from a pouch at his belt and uncorking it, sneering at the teen as he did so.

The brat’s mouth shut quickly though it didn’t help as the hand at his throat shifted so that it was pinching his nostrils shut. Without any way to take in air, it didn’t take long for the teen to open his mouth to gasp for breath and the contents of the vial were poured in before the brat could do anything.

The kid tried to spit the liquid out, but he was too slow as the hand pinching his nose shifted to cover his mouth too and the other pushed up on his jaw, preventing him from opening his mouth.

“Swallow it, brat.” The man sniggered as the kid tried to fight his own body’s instincts to swallow so he could breathe and pull his attacker’s hands away, “You’ll get air afterwards...”

The brat wouldn’t stop fighting, struggling against his captor even as his body betrayed him and swallowed the liquid. The man’s hands moved away from the teen’s face, an amused look on his features at the thought that the kid had thought a five foot one teen who was built like a stick insect could have possibly hoped to move the weight of the six foot three, heavily set man.

The man felt the teen go limp under him and watched as the teen’s eyes began to roll back in his head. The drug was working... He started to pick himself up. The kid was no threat now...

Then something unexpected happened.

In an incredibly fast motion that took him by surprise, the brat seized something that had rolled under the table when he had fallen, something long and golden and...

He didn’t quite catch what the kid whispered when he pointed the wand at him, but it loosed a blast of air that forced him off of the teenager and slammed him into a wall.

Immediately the teenager rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled to his feet, staggering towards the Puzzle piece, but before he could reach it a second attacker’s voice spoke and the kid’s wand went flying into the hands of the second person.

Then the first was on the teen, having knocked aside the table in his rush to get to the teen and slamming the brat’s head against the wall hard, stunning the teen long enough to be able to lift the chain over his head and toss the rest of the Puzzle aside, the impact with the ground causing it to lose even more pieces.

Before the kid could pull himself together the second attacker spoke again and the brat’s world went dark as the spell hit his face and his eyes dulled from a bright amethyst to a pale lilac.

This, if anything, caused the teen to struggle harder, and he would have escaped the first assailant’s grip entirely, except for the fact that the man’s hands shifted, seizing the kid’s throat and squeezing tightly.

“L...Let... me... go...” The teen gasped as he struggled, grabbing both of the man’s wrists and trying to pull his hands away so he could breathe again, only for the man’s grip to tighten on his neck to the point where only a strange whistling sound could escape the teen’s throat.

The second attacker pulled the first off of the teen, scolding him for almost killing the bait, but the first had done his job well enough as the brat collapsed to the ground, coughing, trying to take in air, the adrenaline rush fading under the effects of the liquid he’d been force fed. Before too much longer the teen was too weak to escape.

The kid struggled weakly for a moment as his wrists were bound tightly behind his back, then with a final shudder he went completely limp, unconscious.

The two assailants escaped the way they’d come, taking their prisoner with them and leaving behind a note addressed to the King of Games.  

Sixteen's Story: Part 1

I have no idea what I should be writing, but I found this notebook in the corner of my cell and if I don’t do something I’m going to go nuts, so here we go...

My name is Mutou Yugi. This shouldn’t surprise you. The last three people who wrote in here were called Mutou Yugi too. Hopefully I’ll be the last because when Yami comes for me, the Pharaoh won’t stand a chance.

There’s another Mutou Yugi in here with me but he’s sleeping so I don’t want to disturb him. The Pharaoh introduced him as ‘Fifteen’ but he told me his name once our captor had gone. The other Yugi’s been here a lot longer than I have and the Pharaoh’s been draining him of light for far too long.

I suppose I should explain my situation a bit better, though you could probably skip back to the other Yugis’ explanations. ‘Eight’ tells it a lot better than I could but I’ll try.

To make a long story short, I’ve been kidnapped.

I was with Yami, the other half of my soul, getting ready for our trip to the museum to regain his memories, when someone snuck into my Soul Room. He looked like Yami, so at first I didn’t question it. I mean Yami comes and goes from the Soul Rooms all the time, it’s no big deal. I mean it’s not like just anyone can walk into a Soul Room without the Millennium Key, right?

It wasn’t until I tried to start a conversation with him that I realised something was wrong. Something about him seemed off, his aura was wrong and I couldn’t properly sense what he was thinking or feeling. So I made the mistake of getting closer, concern clouding common sense.

The moment I touched him I knew this wasn’t Yami, or at least not my Yami. He was twisted, his heart was sick and he carried Light within him. My Yami didn’t. I was my Yami’s light and he my Dark. We balanced each other out.

He was fast, fast enough that even before I could call for Yami aloud he had cast something that left me reeling. I couldn’t think straight, nor would my body respond to any call I would try and make. I didn’t need to think too hard to call for Yami over the link though. Yami was there in a heartbeat, able to tell something was wrong, just from my desperate plea.

I’m not quite sure what happened between my Yami and the fake one who introduced himself as ‘the Pharaoh.’ I know the Pharaoh challenged my Yami to a Shadow Game, but every time I tried to resist whatever he had done to my mind it just got worse. Before too long it was almost impossible to count to five, yet alone focus on what the pair of them were saying.

In hindsight I played right into the Pharaoh’s hands. With my mind fading fast, Yami was distracted and didn’t catch the trick phrasing to the terms of the Shadow Game. Because of that it didn’t matter that Yami won, the Pharaoh got what he wanted anyway.

He dragged me into the Shadows the moment the game was over. It hurt, a lot, but there was a benefit to it. It snapped whatever was suppressing my mind and spirit as the Shadows tore at it, trying to get at the light underneath. I didn’t get a chance to appreciate it though. Before I could recover properly, we’d shifted again, reappearing in what I thought was the inside of my Puzzle.

At least until the Pharaoh shoved me into a room and slammed the door shut, sealing it behind me and leaving me trapped with another Yugi.

I wish I could say I was calm and level headed about the whole situation, but that would be a lie. I screamed, I shouted, I tried to break the door down, I even tried a few of the tricks that Yami had taught me.

The door didn’t budge. I was well and truly trapped.

It wasn’t until I gave up and slumped against a wall, staring at the door and wishing I could open it with as much ease as I could the doors in my Puzzle, that the other Yugi spoke up.

The other Yugi was oddly dressed and he kind of looked like he was supposed to be a wizard from some fantasy game. That wasn’t what caught my attention the most though. He was tired, I could see that right away, and he looked really ill. However when I worried at him, he just shrugged it off as something I couldn’t help him with and started to explain what was going on. Who the Pharaoh was and why he’d kidnapped me.

We didn’t get far into the other Yugi’s explanation before agony coursed through me as the bond to my Yami was ripped viciously away.

And that was the last thing I knew for a while.