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From the very start of your youth, you're what the world likes to call a “trouble magnet”. Bullies flock to you like birds to bread crumbs (fists colliding with a face, knees into stomachs, and your pockets brutally emptied), strangers take advantage of your naivety (another verbal barrage from the teacher over your slipping grades today, another week's worth of your allowance gone tomorrow), your own blunders put yourself into danger more times than you can count (that scenario where the character knocks over a whole line of motorcycles is only supposed to happen in movies, but apparently you're the single exception). And you're the perfect target for all of this misfortune: shy beyond definition, incapable of telling the difference between someone telling you to “man up” and someone antagonizing you for the sake of their own entertainment. It doesn't help that you and your mother room with your “creepy” grandfather in a house sitting on top of his game shop, your father all over the world on business and your mother afraid to raise you, a child who is constantly on the receiving end of a pummeling nearly every other day, alone. It's a lifestyle that long ago set you on the path to loving games more than loving company. It's also likely the lifestyle that set you on the path to having a giant flashing sign above your head inviting anyone and everyone to take out their pent up aggressions on you. Not that you'll ever stop them – after all, you hate violence.[break][break]

If you were to summarize your existence from the time you fled elementary to approximately a third of your way through high school, the best you could think of to do so in a single word would be lonely. In the earliest days of a child's youth, friends are plentiful, found here and there in just about anyone sharing the same age or interests – but when all the little boys and girls grew up, each one of them growing to be a head or so taller than you'll ever be, you started to notice them drifting further and further away. There was, of course, Anzu. Truthfully, you think there will always be Anzu, a girl with a tongue as sharp as her heart is kind. She's stood by your side for almost as long as you remember living in the little building above Sugoroku's beloved game store, and your heart beats wildly at the thought that maybe someday, she'll feel for you the same way you feel for her. That doesn't mean, though, that you've never had your doubts. They rear their ugly heads just about every time you've ever really looked at your reflection standing side-by-side, a “babysitter” and the “child forced upon her” staring back at you. (Neither one of you have very much in common – you don't even tell her about your treasure until you're both sixteen despite being in her company longer than the eight years you've owned it.) The thought that she's only sticking around to cheer for the underdog is as common as it is unpleasant. She's your friends, yes – but she doesn't always feel like your friend. (It's very confusing, sometimes.)[break][break]

You were eight years old when you found it hidden in the darkest, dustiest corner of the storage room, tucked away beneath broken furniture and old board games that had cost more money than they earned. And it had struck you as odd then. From the look and feel of it, it couldn't have been made of anything short of solid gold (or, at the very least, a very impressive imitation), something that would've fetched a hefty price as much with collectors as gamers of old. You can still remember the way the Eye of Horus stared at you, unblinking, from the shadows, glinting with what little hallway light managed to filter in past your silhouette. (Staring, you'd foolishly thought, not at you, but straight into your soul.) Grandpa's face tightened at the sight of it in your hands when you rescued it from that dirty old room, a look you childishly mistook for pride, and even through his pleas to return it to where it had come from – “That puzzle's just too hard for you, Yugi. Put it back where you found it.” – you decided to make it your future memento of him. These things, these little insignificant fragments of your life (dice, bed sheets, the scattered pieces of a puzzle found in the ancient tombs of Egypt) all hold meaning to you, each one attached with memories of the uses they've had and the loved ones who brought them to you, but this, you think, the Millenium Puzzle – you'll like especially well.[break][break]

Time passes. The solution eludes you ever still, but still, the Puzzle sits dutifully on the corner of your desk, waiting patiently for the day when your mind can overcome what no one else has over the span of three thousand years.[break][break]

Waiting for the day that Ushio arrives.[break][break]

It's a day that starts as any other: The entirety of your class floods out of the room with the bell, intent on the courts outside, the bathrooms to gossip, the hallways to wander; and you, afraid to be the causation for your team's loss in basketball, sit alone in the classroom with your bag full of games, your sparkling, golden puzzle box, and the antagonizing grit of Jonouchi's ever voluminous voice. There's always something you've done wrong on any particular day in the blond's eyes (“What's with your hair? Ever heard of a hairbrush?”; “C'mon, knock it off with the pessimistic crap already!”; “Grow a pair for once and fight me, Yugi!”), so it comes as little surprise to you when your greatest treasure is suddenly out of your hands and into a game of hot potato between he and his teammate, Honda. “Sheesh! Only a girl would care about a box!” he tells you, bouncing it from the palm of his hand without even catching your eye. “Watching you makes me sick.[break][break]

“I'm gonna teach you how to be a man!”[break][break]

Salvation comes in the form of Anzu's timely arrival, biting words stronger than any of the punches Jonouchi asks you to throw at him and enough to run the two troublemakers (but not without a peek at the box's prized contents) out of the room. You've never told her, or anyone, really, about the Puzzle before, too caught up in your own embarrassment over your affection for a “girlish box” and the wish you made on it years ago, but you suppose that showing it off to her now is the least you can do to repay her for saving your hide from another verbal barrage. You're not mad, though, is what strikes you as funny; when it comes to Jonouchi, you almost never are. Anzu tells you that you need to stand up for yourself time and time again – but isn't that exactly what he's telling you, as well? Truthfully, you could do without him snatching your games, but he did, in the end, give it back, and he's never once subjected you to a blow that so many other before him have. It's because of this that you don't understand her frustration with them, with your lack of action. That you don't understand why the monster of a hall monitor, a beast that the staff and student body call Ushio under terrified breaths, pulls you aside to promise you protection from the “bullies” that have been “harassing” you. When you turn him down, you think that will be the end of it. You should have known from the dark glint in his eye that things are never quite that easy.[break][break]

Come the next morning, you don't see Jonouchi at all in class, nor does a quick scan of the classroom and hallways show any sign of Honda lurking around the corner to poke fun at you in his place. It's an inconsistency that's easily overlooked in the face of math problems too complicated for your less-than-miraculous brain to solve and the prospect of playing a new game your grandfather loaned you from the shop just that morning over your break, as well as one that's completely slipped your mind come noon. A yawn tears itself from the back of your throat as the same old stream of students abandon you to your empty classroom and your solitary games, a night of trying and failing once more to make progress on your supposedly “cursed” Puzzle robbing you of some much needed sleep – but the routine breaks itself when the familiar face of a man with eyebrows much too large for a high school student comes poking his head around the door asking for your company. Breaks further when he leads you outside to see the beaten and bloodied forms of two missing students leaning helplessly against the wall and against each other. “I told you, Yugi! I'm your bodyguard!” Ushio says with a plastic smile, a party mask that fails to properly veil the swarm of twisted emotions swirling just beneath it. Your own face has contorted into shock and horror; how could he do such a thing? “I decided to teach these bullies a lesson! One that they'll never forget!” You bend over them, foolishly searching for signs of life (of course they're alive, you're not classmates with a murderer), and the words that tumble from your most loyal antagonizer's mouth drive straight through your heart – because he thinks that you asked for this to happen. He thinks this is your fault.[break][break]

When Ushio moves to resume where he'd left off, you're quicker to standing between them than he is to putting his foot in a gut – because he doesn't understand, none of them understand, you don't wish this on anyone, and you especially don't wish this upon your friends. They were just teaching me how to be a man... Instead, you take the beating in their place. You can take it, you think, memory calling on countless pummelings that have come before. But they've never been quite like this before. A punch from a lanky teen with a bark worse than his bite doesn't compare to the blows that strike so hard, they leave your lungs without air, doesn't compare to the strikes that have you seeing stars and tasting copper on the tip of your tongue. He beats you and beats you and beats you until you're lying there on the concrete, unmoving, unthinking – and he leaves letting you know that he's charging you two hundred thousand yen for his services, a fee he'll make sure to get whether or not he has to use his knife to coax it out of you. It's impossible, you think, to collect that much money in one night. Impossible, you think again, for you to collect that much money at all. Ushio is going to carve into you like a jack-o-lantern, and there isn't a single thing in the world you can do to stop him.[break][break]

So you work on the Puzzle instead.[break][break]

It's a silly thing to do, and the moment you notice your fingers absentmindedly working away at the bizarre artifact, you tell yourself as much. In the periphery of your vision, you see all one thousand six hundred some yen you've managed to scrape up from your savings, and if you need to be working on something, it's finding the remaining one hundred ninety-nine yen you'll need to very well save your life, but the feeling of gold pieces beneath your fingertips is oddly soothing, the sound of the pieces finally, finally clicking into their designated places chasing off your worries. (You aren't so much solving the Millennium Puzzle, you don't realize, as the Millennium Puzzle is solving itself.) Another piece goes in. And another. You think of your wish, eight years old and festering, a desire that you've held in your little treasure box and refused to let go of. Twist the three-legged piece here and add the plus-shaped one there – another perfect fit. You treasure Anzu's company, but at the end of the day, you wonder if you'll only ever be a burden to her. You can see the shape: a pyramid, an upside pyramid! What you want more than anything – three more pieces, you're doing it, it's been eight years and you're finally doing it – more than anything in the world, really – just one more, the one with the Eye of Horus gazing at you as always on it, and it's done – is to finally have just one –[break][break]

It's gone.[break][break]

The final piece is gone.[break][break]

(All you've ever really wanted was someone to rely on, someone who could rely just as much on you. All you've ever really wanted was a real friend. And now that hope, too, is gone.)[break][break]

Your grandfather walks into the room to find you, a wet, sobbing mess, and the Millennium Puzzle, solved to near completion despite his constant “reminders” that it was a thing beyond your mortal understanding. His congratulations turn your heart sour, bitter words that stir up something foreign and dark in the pits of your soul. A voice in the back of your mind is whispering horrible, terrible things in the periphery of your understanding, an alien negativity taking root where you've never felt anything but sadness, and your tongue burns when you tell him that no, no matter how close you may have gotten, you'll never be able to solve it after all. But he smiles at you, that same old smile, comforting and warm, and he tells you as he presses something cold and metal into your hands: “You should have more faith!” The missing puzzle piece.[break][break]

The faint sound of echoed laughter rings softly in your ears – quiet enough you can almost convince yourself that you'd heard nothing at all – as Grandpa slips out of your room and the final piece of the Puzzle slips into it's place. And then you feel it: hatred, burning hatred, brighter and hotter than the sun in the sky, an inferno that laps at your heart and swallows you whole, and Ushio must pay the pri-[break][break]

You black out.[break][break]

SOME LIKE TO THINK HOPE IS LOST

You must have been terribly tired, you think come morning, to have fallen asleep so suddenly at your desk. Bizarre, too, that you hadn't noticed yourself growing tired until it was already too late. The lethargy stays with you through the morning, a thick haze that hangs over your mind as you prepare for the school day and walk through those doors (not once noticing the wild-eyed student rolling in filth in courtyard, shouts of “Money, money, all mine, all mine!” shattering what would have been the morning's peaceful air), and it isn't until you're already halfway down the main hallway that you come to a realization. You've done it. It's been eight long years in the making, but you've finally accomplished what the world around you was so certain was impossible. It hangs around your neck on an unfamiliar rope, ancient gold shimmering beneath the fluorescent lighting of the school's interior: the Millenium Puzzle in its completed form. The knowledge alone is enough to distract you from the whispering of students about Ushio's strange behavior out front, as well as the predicament you'd found yourself in the previous night. (The one you've, unknowingly, already solved.) It isn't until Jonouchi calls your name from his spot leaned up against the wall that last night's pummeling comes to mind, but even that is mostly forgotten in favor of trying to wrap your mind around the fact that he's gone three whole sentences without complaining about this or that or whatever it may be that you've done this time. In fact, he asks you if you're okay, despite looking worse for wear himself – and then he asks you if you'd like to see the treasure that he, himself, has started keeping.

“It's something you can show, but can't see.” You recognize the words as being similar to ones you've spoken yourself, 'something you can see, but have never seen before' being a reference to your Puzzle and its incompleteness, but you'd be lying if you said you could discern any real meaning from what he's saying to you now. Your confusion must show on your face, though, because it's not long before he tosses you a lifeline. “Give up? C'mon – it's friendship! Thanks for showing me that we're friends.”[break][break]

Jonouchi Katsuya smiles at you in a way that you've never seen before: close lipped as opposed to the feral grins you've seen time and time again, eyes softer than the fur of a well groomed kitten. He's said a lot of things to you, few of them kind, but you know deep in your heart that he means this. It rings in his words, echoes in the way he seems to grow flustered as they play back in his own mind, and when he takes off in an embarrassed rush toward his next class, the sting of tears in the corner of your eyes is unmistakable. They aren't painful, though, or sad or bitter or anything that they usually are. They're happy. You're happy. Happier than you were when your grandpa handed you that final piece, happier than you were when you woke from your dreamy haze to find a Puzzle hanging from around your neck, happier than you can ever remember being in that exact moment. You made a wish eight years ago in that dusty old storage room, whispered in secret to yourself and kept shut away with the contents of your puzzle box – [break][break]

And today, you know with certainty, that wish has most definitely come true.[break][break]

SEE ME STAND ALONE

Change meets you after years of living in a cycle of isolation, violence, and monotony, and you welcome it, both positive and negative, with open arms. It's long overdue, after all. Jonouchi's occasional pesterings become daily morning greetings and well received company over what used to be lonely lunch breaks. Together, you share stories – you bring him games he's never heard of, and he slips you videos that would make your mother blush when no one's looking. He's as aggressive and loud as you've always known him to be, but you've never been scared of him before, and his presence only has you beaming now. This is, you keep telling yourself in awe, exactly what you've been asking for since childhood. But the blond brings with him more change than just the injection of his goofballish ways into your life; they're things you don't notice at first, eclipsed as they are in the joy of having someone around who always has your back, but as time passes, your attention finally catches on. For one thing, Jonouchi isn't the only one who deigns to poke his head into your personal bubble between classes – Anzu leaves to play sports less than usual, sticking around in the classroom more and more to berate your friend for his crudeness and participate in whatever game it is that you've brought from home today. Nothing has changed between the two of you, you can't help but think, but all the same, you see more of her after the incident with Ushio than you have since you were inseparable in elementary. Just two weeks ago, you would have been hard pressed to utter a single breath of complaint about your oldest and your newest friends taking new found interests in you, and even now, you try to look solely at the positives, numerous as they are. Pretend that there are only positives, however, all you like, but it doesn't change the fact that the three of you aren't exactly a merry trio of tranquility. A mutual friend does not erase years of a sexist and pride-driven feud, and even if they're both all smiles and laughs around you, you're not so much of an idiot as to not realize the dirty looks they shoot each other when your back is turned. Worse than that, however, is that with your hot blooded friend comes Hiroto Honda as well. You learn very quickly through his hard stares and harder words that your act of selflessness only won one ruffian over on that infamous day.[break][break]

Where change finds you next, however, is in the occasional reemergence of the blackouts. When the first had struck, a freshly completed puzzle in hand and fear racing laps around your mind, you'd easily written it off as a result of a lack of sleep and an increase in anxiety and left it in the back of your thoughts to whither away. Unnecessary. Left behind where it could no longer affect you. Time, though, moved – and a single blackout became many, striking you in times of emotional distress and leaving you waking up in confusion and wonder. A film director gets away with beating Jonouchi to a pulp by threatening to humiliate him with the media; you black out with your friend in your arms, and you never hear of him again. Sozoji abuses both your's and your poor classmate Hanasaki's timid natures and takes his aggression out on the latter; you black out over Hanasaki's bruised and bloody face, and he never subjects another student to his horrendous singing again. Kokurano wraps the school around his “psychic” finger with a string of lies; you black out just before you are burried under a mountain of books, and he's being treated for chloroform poisoning at the hospital the next day. Upperclassmen steal your festival spot – black out – and their leader sets a bomb off on himself. A store owner sells and steals back a pair of shoes from your friend – black out – and ends up hospitalized over a scorpion sting come night. Your classmate Kaiba makes off with your grandfather's Blue Eyes White Dragon trading card, and – surprise, surprise, your consciousness leaves you when he strikes you in the head with his briefcase. Never mind the fact that he never shows up to school again. You're finally making your peace with Honda by helping to confess to the girl of his dreams when your witch of a teacher tries to intervene, and when the world falls dark around you just at the most pivotal moment, you think in your last seconds of control -[break][break]

(“Let's, you and I, play a little game. That is, if you've got any guts.”)[break][break]

Maybe you're suffering quite the severe case of narcolepsy.[break][break]

I CAN'T DO WHAT OTHER'S MAY WANT

Eccentricity is no stranger to you. It comes with living in the city, really, as well as living under the same roof as an old man who dabbles in his fair share of it. Your hair, in fact, natural as it may be, tends to label you as rather eccentric, yourself. For all of the bizarre hair styles and personalities you've run across on the street, in the arcade, and at the game shop, however, you've never met anyone quite as odd as the crying man at the mummy exhibit, clothed in cloudy white robes and toting a set of scales that look as though they'd fit right in with the other Egyptian artifacts at the day's premier exhibit. The whole gang is here – Jonouchi, Anzu, you, and your grandfather – roped in because of Sugoroku's connections and your own interest in ancient Egypt (you'd be a liar, though, if you said it stemmed from anything but the mysterious puzzle that usually hangs from your own neck, currently hanging from a display rack at the request of of a pot bellied man who made the exhibit and the archeological dig that lead it possible), but you're the only one who seems to see him, and his image only haunts you as you all make move to part ways. Grief of a mummy channeled into the living and drawing out tears; you've heard some pretty strange stuff, but nothing quite that strange.[break][break]

Things only take a turn for the more odd when you see him again some five or so hours later. What you have is an excuse: The Millennium Puzzle was only meant to hang on display for a day, and you'd waited until well after closing hours to make your way back in and claim what was your's from the imposing Mr. Kanekura. What he, the Egyptian man, no longer shedding tears from the dead has is exactly what you've come to retrieve: the very same Millennium Puzzle. You're so surprised to see it in his possession that you don't even think to wonder what he was doing here after hours, himself, and he doesn't even allow you time to let the thought occur to you before he's staring, blank eyed, out into space. How long does he stand like that, your Puzzle in hand and his eyes locked on the polished floor? You call and you call, but he doesn't answer – until he does, maybe five minutes later, shocked to awareness and blinking against the fluorescent lighting. He mutters out something about owing you some debt (unnecessary; it's not like you did anything other than try to shake him to the waking world), and then he utters words that pierce you to your core: “It was the other you.” Laughter bubbles in your throat, first genuine and then confused, but the words resonate in your head like an echo in a long, dark chamber. The other you. As if there were anyone else up there than yourself; as if! You part ways thinking him crazier than ever, but all the while something stirs uncomfortably in the pit of your stomach. Vaguely, you think of nights where you've blacked out in sadness (anger), only to wake up somewhere else, confused (sated). But it doesn't matter. You have your puzzle, the one whose only purpose was to grant the wish you most wanted to make, and all is right in your own personal world.[break][break]

(“Let's play a game.”)[break][break]

Mr. Kanekura died that afternoon.[break][break]

It takes you and your grandfather by a surprise when you find out what's happened, one that strikes you both into silence... and one that has your thoughts miserably back tracking to that second time you crossed paths with the mysterious man who called himself “Shadi”. The last time you had seen the dead man was when you'd handed over your puzzle in the first place, which meant that sometime between then and the time a fatal heart attack struck him, Shadi had been one of the last people, if not the last person to see him. He had to have been; the Puzzle couldn't have just fallen into his hands. You think of what the others must be saying about this now. Anzu always feels the hurt of others as if it were her own – it's what drew you to her in the first place – and Jonouchi – well, Jonouchi was probably going on about that Pharaoh's Curse he'd been panicking about at the exhibit. For a teenager who could sent grown men to their knees with a single punch, he really was quite the “'fraidy cat” when it came to the superstitious. And Kanekura... Kanekura wasn't exactly the healthiest individual, so, loathe as he was to admit, it didn't come as much of a surprise that he went the way he did, even if the rest of the world prattled on and on about divine retribution and the deaths of all those who worked on prior excavations. Either way, your grandfather announces that he's going to meet his friend, Yoshimori, the one who lead that dig and the one you met just the day prior. The death of a friend, or at least an acquaintance, is never easy to shoulder alone, and with the media's ever “helpful” attention, the poor archeologist shouldn't be left alone. So you volunteer to go with, even if you don't know kindly Mr. Yoshimori that well, and so, too, do your friends. It doesn't seem to matter that you've only just met; the man seems like he'd take all the company he can get.[break][break]

Only when you get there, things aren't what you'd expected of them. You've only known him a day, certainly, but even you recognize that something isn't entirely right. It makes itself known in the way he laughs over the death of his partner, eyes as lifeless as the man he so carelessly speaks of, and your party's only just started to inquire as to what the matter is when he moves – directly for Jonouchi's throat.[break][break]

It's a death grip that Yoshimori (or his body, at least, out of the control of the sweet professor that usually inhabited it) uses to try to choke your best friend with, and it's one that not a single one of your can stop. Your fingers are like feathers against a brick wall, a useless force that can try and try to stop the inevitable, but never succeed. The thought that this might be it, the end of Jonouchi Katsuya when you see him – Shadi – lurking in the shadows, eyes trained not on the attempted murder happening right before his eyes, but rather on you. It chills you to your bone, miraculously more than the sight of clenched fingers around a vulnerable throat. Does no one else see him? How on Earth had they missed the man in white watching them from the very start?[break][break]

Anzu, mightier than anyone you've ever met despite appearances, takes a globe of the planet in her hands and does what neither you nor your grandpa would have in you: breaks it over the zombie's head and sends him flying across the room. She grimaces at the sight of teeth flying out at the contact, but it's a small price to pay for the air that floods the taller teen's lungs, and for fifteen tense seconds of silence, you all gather your bearings. Panting as he may be, Jonouchi's still alive, and while she's fretting over the supposedly unconscious body she's sent crumpling to the floor, Anzu's unhurt as well. Unconscious might not be the ideal state of being, you think, but it's better than being animate and with the intent to kill; not that you can focus too much on that in favor of the Egyptian's presence in the corner of the room. This whole thing reeks of something straight out of a movie – like suggestion, or... or mind control. You've played games until your thumbs ached, but never in real life have you seen experienced something so unnatural. Brainwashing? You'd have thought it impossible before. Now, having witnessed it first hand, you're not so sure. (The globe smashing was a temporary escape. The controlled gets to his feet, unshaken, and knocks your grandfather out with a single uppercut. This is how you know for certain that this is not the man you'd met at the museum.)[break][break]

Valiant Jonouchi, ever brave and selfless, leads the unthinking body out into the halls and away from where the rest of you try and fail to gather your wits. Normally, you'd give chase – this isn't his fight alone, and you won't stand to see him get himself killed for your sake – but once again, you find your attention grabbed away from the zombie in the room by the elephant in the room. You'd only looked away for a minute, just a minute to make sure your grandpa wasn't dead, and when you look back to face ho can only be the culprit of this heinous crime, you see that he's taken another mind prisoner. A hand rests on your longest crush's shoulder, and brown eyes once so full of passion and life stare at you emptily from across the room. It's her body, but she's not there. Shadi has taken Anzu, too.[break][break]

“Let your blood boil with anger,” he tells you with words that shake your gentle spirit to its core. “Let your body shake with sorrow. Call him forth.”[break][break]

It's the same as he's been telling you this whole time, words spoken that were only heard by your own ears. Whoever this stranger is, he's asking for someone who doesn't exist, some fictional “other you” that he's deluded himself into thinking he can draw out by choking and brainwashing your friends. You are you – the only Yugi Mutou in the world, you know it. (And yet your blood boils, your body shakes, and darkness closes in already on the corners of your vision. You are not alone in your mind.) “Listen well, little Yugi.” Foreign anger licks at your tongue, and you hold back the urge to bite that you are listening, that you've been listening, that he can't do this to the people you love - “Let this be the final trigger. If I were to order this girl to die...[break][break]

“She would die.”[break][break]

SO FOR NOW, WAVE GOODBYE

You don't recall what it was you were doing when you wake. The last thing you can recall was meeting up with your two closest friends on your way to meet with that archeologist you'd been the other day and continuing on your way there without a hitch. There's been a lot on your mind since then – enough that it's pulled you from your reality and into a world of thought – but now that you've been woken from your self-induced stupor, you can't seem to recall what, exactly, that was. It pales in comparison to the worry your friends must be feeling over you; the only reason you'd been pulled from your stupor at all was because they stopped to see if you were okay. Everything's fine, of course. Whatever it was that was bothering you is gone now. (They fret, anyway, concerned by something you won't remember. Concerned by the other you.) Idly, you wonder what became of that crying man you'd met at the exhibit and the punishment he'd promised to deal out, the “other you” he'd spoken of meeting.[break][break]

Whoever he was, you doubt you'll see him again.[break][break]

HEAR THIS SONG OF COURAGE LONG INTO THE NIGHT

It's business as usual in the days that follow: cruel teachers, bad grades, and games up to your eyeballs. You raise a Tomogachi from life to death at the same time that a school bully goes around deleting the data off of other's, the younger brother of Kaiba Seto you never knew existed comes at you with his gang of knife-wielding elementary schoolers, and Hanasaki plays hero (complete in his full-body Zombire suit) against a couple of spray-painting thugs that take things just a step too far if only for the pursuit of money. Domino City never changes. It's always been a melting pot of those who simply wish to live out their days and those who would choose to use those people to make a bit of extra cash. Anzu gets another job, Jonouchi beats up of a mugger, Honda babysits his cousin. And you – you don't know what you're doing. Not anymore. Your days are spent in a half blur, your memory unreliable, your schedule in tatters. Where have you been? What have you been doing? It's impossible to tell. All your left with is spray paint on your fingers and the smell of burnt cloth (burnt flesh) clinging stubbornly to your school uniform. Sometimes, you wonder if that man at the museum knew what he was talking about; if it weren't a matter of lost memory or sudden narcolepsy, but rather bodily possession by someone with your face, but not your mind. It's so quixotic to think about, too unreal to imagine being the truth – but then again, this is Domino City. Maybe, you think, watched by the unblinking stare of your Millennium Puzzle, if there were one place in the world where that could happen, it would be right here. In this city. In this very bedroom.[break][break]

What would Jonouchi, Honda, and Anzu think of you then?[break][break]

(At night, you dream of that same restaurant as always – the one where she used to work, dolled up in that pretty waitress uniform of her's. Maybe you're there alone, or maybe there are others with you, all crowded into the freshly built booths of the esteemed Burger World. It doesn't matter; everything comes into place when he walks through the door, pistol in hand, curses on his tongue. You don't hear the words, but you see how they bring the frightened people to their knees. No, no, you can't hear them because you're too focused on the gun pressed to her head and the hand over her mouth, and you're scared, so, so scared when he calls out to you out of everyone in the trembling crowd on the floor, demands that you fetch him what he's come for -[break][break]

(Until you're not scared anymore. Maybe you never were. You seat yourself across from him and, madly, impossibly, you challenge him to a game. It's almost like there isn't a weapon pointed at your heart – but then again, you seem to acknowledge that whoever loses is going to die, so you must see it's there. How casually you speak of it. It's almost like you've stared death in its face a thousand times before. In times like these, you think that maybe, just maybe, you really have.[break][break]

(“All I need to kill you,” you say so smugly, grin pulled loose, eyes like knives, “is my thumb.” And you're right. You always are. It's only a matter of seconds before the building goes up in flame and the convict screams his last words – gun forgotten, skin eaten away by fire and smoke – but it doesn't faze you in the slightest. You're used to the acrid smell of death; the scent of a kidnapper's chlorine; the sounds of a man gone insane. Your Puzzle, your prison was a door to something primal, something dark –[break][break]

(– and the door to darkness has been opened wide.)

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