Archive of Our Own

It’d been maybe an hour since they’d gotten off the train.

It’d been maybe fifteen minutes since Yilan had mumbled a quiet warning into Johanna’s ear. It’d been maybe fourteen-and-a-half minutes since Johanna had peeked over her shoulder with all the practice of a wary content creator and met eyes with the... angel-punk kid.

It’d been an hour, and the local Familymart had already been turned into a panic room. That was great and all—convenient location, cheap snacks, cashiers who face down god on a daily basis—but having your demons follow you in kind of defeated the purpose.

The demon in question was examining a holographic packet. He was studying it intently.

I’m being intimidated by the real-life equivalent of a gacha whale, Johanna thought, but said, “They just keep getting shorter and shorter, don’t they?”

Yilan eyed the kid with the look of someone ready to walk out of the store with somebody else’s teeth in her hand. “He’s been following us,” she said suspiciously.

Johanna had to concede that was true. Normally, she’d be all for more drastic measures, such as employing the use of items that rhyme with chair. (Chair rhymed with chair, didn’t it?)

However. The kid was wobbling over the five-foot line like doing so had broken several limbs. Everything about his heavy-handed eyeliner and misplaced belts screamed punk, but his cheeks gave the impression that were exceptionally squishable.

There was a time and a place for chairs. This was not it. “Are we sure he isn’t just... lost?” Johanna suggested.

“Maybe if he hadn’t gotten off at the same station at the exact same time. How far do you think he’d go if I pitched him?”

“He’s tiny and he’s buying trading cards. You’d send him twenty meters and we’d both feel bad.”

“If he lost the belts and the chains, maybe twenty. With that hair? Twenty-five.”

“I think we’re focusing on the wrong thing,” said Johanna. She busied herself with a satchel of energy jelly as the kid pocketed his change. “You think with that look, he’d get away with mugging us in some alley? The police would go, what did he look like, and anybody who has eyes would say, a thousand spiders died in his hair and I want to give him my lunch.”

Yilan’s frown turned contemplative. It was reassuring to travel with someone who could think up ten different ways of sending you to the hospital and enact them with frightening accuracy.

“Let’s wait and see what he does,” Johanna suggested. “If he wants to talk, we can talk. It’ll make for interesting footage, at least.”

“So you say,” Yilan grumbled. Her expression as she unpacked her camera was a few steps shy from murderous.

Johanna, content in being the more approachable stranger, swiped a few more energy jellies into her basket and moved toward the cashier determinedly, all while the kid shuffled through his packet and gave the occasional glance upward.

He was smiling. Not the creepy, evil, body-hiding kind of smile. It was cheeky. It said, you’re trying so hard I might just give you a sticker.

Johanna was familiar with it. That was the exact look Yilan levelled at anyone who challenged her to games involving frame-perfect inputs and extensive game knowledge.

“Just this, please,” Johanna told the cashier. The cashier gave a muted smile and pretended to care when she went on, “You wouldn't believe how hot it is out there. It certainly makes filming a lot harder!”

The kid shifted his gaze over to Yilan’s bags. Yilan mercifully did not immediately throw hands.

“And I heard something about this town being ‘haunted’,” Johanna said, adding an exaggerated pair of air quotes as to not destroy her reputation too early. “Ghosts and demons or the like. To which I say: in this weather? Goodness, they must be determined! I’d be crawling back into my grave until September at the very least!”

The cashier, who was presumably imagining his happy place and receiving audio input of white noise, said, “Oh yes, it’s very warm.”

“It certainly is,” Johanna agreed. She slipped her change into the opposite pocket as her wallet. “Say, if you’re interested in ghost documentaries at all, you should give our channel a try. Funky Ghouls on Youtube. New videos every week, docuseries updates every month.”

“Uh-huh,” said the cashier. “Have a nice day.”

Yilan trailed after Johanna and out of the shop, leaving the cashier to the mercy of whatever the rest of the day had to offer. The kid watched them through the glass doors, gave another cheeky smile to himself, and followed after them.

So that was great. Studded-metal babycheeks could be a thousand things, but scared of overenthusiastic content creators he was not. Which was kind of a shame, because waving your own banner—especially if that banner had ghosts and a large subscribe button—was a surefire way to get any reasonable person off your back, if only to preserve their own dignity.

Yilan swung her camera up. Fiddled around a bit. Settled her lips into a grimace that was only a little more irritated than normal.

“Right,” said Johanna. She turned and upgraded from making eye contact to holding it. “Is there something we can help you with?”

The kid’s grin inched upward. There was the suggestion of sheepishness, although it was hard to tell past the eyeliner. “Ah—I guess that speech was for me?”

“It’s for anybody who’ll listen,” said Johanna. “Tossing in a shill here and there only hurts your own dignity, which is why it’s easier to live with none. So? What do you want?”

The kid stared for a second. Then he tilted his head, which was doubly as disconcerting given his entire hairstyle went with him. “You make ghost documentaries,” he said.

And there’s something about your eyes that seriously freaks me out, Johanna didn’t say. Instead, she said, “Among other videos.”

“Hm. So you have a lot of experience with ghosts, I guess.”

Even to a normal stranger, Johanna wouldn’t have come out with her typical spiel of maybe having a history of paranormal run-ins and Yilan’s impressive portfolio of maybe what could be considered exorcisms.

This kid’s shadow was pointing a full ninety degrees away from every other shadow. It was probably some kind of sign from above.

“Not really,” Johanna said, in a tone she hoped was casual. “Most of the time our videos turn into travel guides with spooky, royalty-free music.”

“But they’re good travel guides,” Yilan added.

“Yes, well, drone footage makes everything look more professional,” said Johanna.

“Hm,” the kid repeated.

He lapsed into silence again. His expression changed at least three different times, all in the spectrum of amusement-confusion-wariness, like he was presenting his thoughts to a board of advisors.

A board of mental advisors. Throat-cutting eyeliner, studded metal heels, a tye-dye porcupine for hair, and a proclivity for unsettling dramatic pauses. And the soul-piercing eyes, and also the physics-defying shadows.

Good footage, Johanna told herself, and took a breath. “Are you here for the ghosts as well?” she asked.

The kid brightened. It was like watching the sun rise. “I am!” he said cheerily, which was... not the answer Johanna had expected nor wanted to hear.

Johanna squinted past the illuminating grin and the squishy cheeks. “Oh, cool,” she said, sounding to herself just as wary as she felt. “I guess we’re partners in crime! For now.”

“I’ll only be here for as long as it takes to find the game master,” the kid said. “I don’t suppose you’ll be here for long, either?”

“We’ll be here a week max,” Johanna answered.

Yilan’s gaze briefly flickered to hers, and they shared the same thought for a moment, which was what the fuck kind of game master are you looking for, followed by a trail of question marks the human voice had difficulty reproducing. Either the kid didn’t notice or, more likely, he couldn’t care less about what anybody thought about his eyeliner, his belts, his card-collecting hobby, or his evil shadow.

Common sense didn’t click the same way for this kid as it did the rest of the world. That was fine! It was manageable, even! It took some kind of freak to ward off a content creator. As off-putting as the kid was, all he had to threaten anyone with was a pocket of trading cards and five feet of sunshine-and-demons, plus whatever those chains and belts weighed.

Yilan could chuck him up and over the Ayagami station sign. With that pleasant thought in mind, Johanna stuck out a hand.

“Ghost hunters of a feather flock together,” she said firmly. “And you’re already in our video, so you might as well stick around.”

The kid took Johanna’s hand. He smiled, and the entire street went up in gold. “I suppose I will, then. I’m Yugi.”

Johanna felt the name was vaguely familiar, but her attention was mostly captured by the way his shadow stretched like a glob of black putty, adding a few significant inches to his tiny shadow.

Carefully, as if she had her hand stuck in a particularly rusty bear trap, Johanna retracted both her hand and her gaze.

Yugi smiled. That particular curl of his lightly tinted lips said, this is going to be interesting without giving a clear definition of interesting. His shadow smiled too, which was a detail Johanna could’ve lived without noticing.

This was a mistake. The kind of mistake that played nice and sweet and pretended it wasn’t going to knife you until you realized your back was against a wall because you had put it there yourself.

But it would make for good content.

“Welp,” Yilan said, taking a hammer to the tense silence, “this episode is going to be interesting.”

 

---

 

The town of Ayagami had undergone two major changes in the past fifty years.

The first was back in the seventies, when the train station burnt down. Something or another about outdated wiring and a whole lot of wood made for a spectacular bonfire of suspect origins. Either way, the entire station caught fire. And then everything next to the station caught fire. And then everything next to that caught fire, and by dinnertime an awful lot of people were sneezing ashes and wondering if it was their relatives that came out.

The station had been rebuilt quickly. The town followed, albeit with a significant delay. For two months, any trains that passed through Ayagami Station would be treated to the wonderful view of a pristine station armed to the teeth with the newest vending machines, and a little ways beyond that, a town that was tripping over charcoal. And dead relatives. A little redundant, really.

All in all, not a bad place for ghost stories to spawn. Also, as they say in the business: Yikes.

The second event to hit the town happened in the nineties. Compared to the, er, fireworks that came with the first, the second was tame by comparison.

A monument went up, and around it, a park. All of it was erected in the most convenient empty space available, which was a graveyard. Specifically, a graveyard that hosted the pre-made ashes of a whole lot of people who were very dead, and presumably very angry.

The rumours circulated online followed a simple script: I was out in the park alone when I heard someone screaming mercy. I was taking a late night stroll and saw a lady on fire. It always smells like burning, especially on hot summer days.

Now that was all good fun, but the timeline had a few kinks, and here was one: between the park’s inception and the influx of spooky reposts online was a solid twenty years of... absolutely nothing.

No ghosts, no ghost fire, no ghosts on fire. Obviously something had happened fairly recently.

Had the ghosts gotten really pissed off all of a sudden, and all at once? Had someone gone in with a Ouija board and jabbed a sensitive spot? Was reality breaking off at the hinges?

All very reasonable questions! Johanna had a lot of reasonable questions to ask. She just hoped whatever she ended up interviewing had the proper vocal chords to answer.

Anyhow, Season Two so far had featured the normal variety of morbid subjects: murders, asylums, prisons, and other locations of general misery. A rural Japanese town full of angry, on-fire ghosts made for a nice palette cleanser.

Also, the aerial shots of the hills were quite nice. If this whole adventure turned out to be a bust, then it could be easily salvaged into a travel guide. Check out your nearest Japanese town! It might be haunted, but the curry shop across from the grocery store has the best lamb curry you’ll ever try!

Said curry shop was their current conference room. The owner seemed quietly entertained, partly by the insane topic of discussion, partly by Yugi’s... well, Yugi’s everything.

“So we can assume that the park is our hotspot,” Johanna explained, tracing a finger along the map and up the trail to the graveyard. “It’s unusual, since most ghosts tend to stick around where they died, or where they experienced extreme emotional turmoil. Then again, it’s also strange that they’d be so angry because the town decided to set up a memorial. For them. So I think we’re probably dealing with a bigger, more recent issue here.”

“But this monument is right beside their graves,” Yugi pointed out.

“Right beside their graves,” Johanna agreed. She tapped the map twice. “But also for them. If that was really the issue, don’t you think our ghostly pals are being a bit ungrateful?”

“Guess big stone slabs next to your own smaller stone slab lowers land value,” Yilan said, through a mouthful of curry.

Yugi gave them a look that he had adopted in the few hours they’d known each other: one part amusement, two parts tired acceptance. “If somebody erected a monument in your name thirty years after you died and put it right next to your house, wouldn’t you be a little annoyed having what’s essentially the physical manifestation of your lost potential right outside your window?”

Yilan wrinkled her nose. “If it’s been thirty years and you’re peeved that people are being nice to you for a change, maybe you should reevaluate your life. Or death.”

The camera captured Johanna and Yilan’s simultaneous grins as well as Yugi's single-brow scepticism: in focus and in frame, which meant Yugi was going to be on the receiving end of a lot of edits involving unnecessary zoom-ins and elevator music.

The guy—how was he twenty-two? Was his height inversely proportional to his age?—anyway, he was surprisingly good with cameras and seemed to always know where to stand and look for the shot to not look like garbage, which was a lot more Johanna could say for most of their impromptu interviewees. He had excellent camera sense, always knew which side was his good side, and had a knack for immediately noticing when he was being stared at. Which must have been pretty exhausting, considering his outfit of choice.

Yilan made a noise into her spoon. She flicked quickly through her phone, eyes narrowing in preparation to eviscerate a reply. “Ninecloud dropped out,” she said, annoyed.

Ah, right. Worlds. “They choked?”

“They were up two and went 0-3.”

“Ah. So... one hell of a hairball.”

Yugi looked between them. “Ninecloud?”

“Competitive League,” Yilan said, and refused to elaborate.

Johanna gave Yugi a placating smile. “Competitive online gaming,” she explained. “The World Championship is on right now, and Ninecloud—an American team—kind of... dropped the ball.”

The words competitive and game seemed to kick Yugi’s brain into high gear. His eyes narrowed slightly. The smile he adopted gave the impression that its owner was deciding which limb to gnaw off first.

“You like games?” he asked.

Yilan raised her head. She paused in the middle of crafting a tastefully scathing reply. The quiet challenge in Yugi’s question pressed every button in her brain, and she said, “Maybe. Depends on the game.”

“You play League, then? Any others?”

“Sure. Not as much, though. I also mod for a few speedrun servers.”

Now Yilan’s face was taking on attributes of Yugi’s. Her stare stepped up from scathing to burn-your-shadow-on-the-wall, effectively making it so you could hack at the tension with an axe and walk away with cheap firestarter.

They were... bonding, in a weird, competitive, feral way, but they were bonding! That was good! Take away the throat-ripping vibes, and it was practically a normal conversation!

Johanna shifted away a few small but significant inches. She counted to five in her head, and with the restaurant still standing and not a smoldering ruin, she cleared her throat. “What games do you play?” she asked Yugi, practically beaming.

Yugi blinked one. And then twice. Then his smile returned with double the intensity and none of the edge. Any passersby walking by the window were presumably blinded. “Oh, I’ll play practically anything,” he said cheerily. “I just enjoy the back-and-forth of a good match, you know? But I do have a heavy hand in the Duel Monsters community.”

“That’s where I recognize you from,” Yilan said suddenly, research-fervour sharpness drawing out her lips. She tapped furiously away, waited for the results, and let out a quiet breath.

Johanna also held her breath, mostly for the sake of the moment. She peered over Yilan’s phone.

“Yugi Mutou, titled ‘King of Games’, First Place Winner of Duelist Kingdom, Battle City, Battle City V2, see more, list continues,” Johanna read aloud. There was a noticeable lag between her mouth and her brain.

Yugi sat patiently. After a few moments, Johanna’s brain realized if it had been brought all the way to Japan, it probably had work to do.

She looked up slowly.

“Huh,” said Johanna, as soon as her higher cognitive functions began operating normally. “What’s a guy like you doing out here, looking for ghosts?”

“And he’s got a match in a week,” Yilan added. “It’s against KaibaCorp’s newest AI, plus all their updated AR tech.” Her renewed suspicion was that of an individual who would face god and be unimpressed. “Curious that you’d make a random detour for a tiny town out in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s not as big of a deal as you think it is,” Yugi said casually. He pushed around a single cherry tomato with his spoon. “Seto likes tugging me all over the world to do this, do that, do both this and that at once in two separate places... I could use a vacation every now and then. Right?”

Ah, yes. The eponymous Seto Kaiba. The dragon-loving, filthy-rich CEO with a vision of the future so ludicrous that it might just be crazy enough to work. Whom Yugi was familiar enough with to be smiling fondly as he batted his garnishes around.

There was a sign in there, but Johanna was too scared to dig for it.

“Sometimes it’s good to get away from expectations and all that,” Yugi said. “It’s nice to take a break from being yourself. You know?”

His smile flattened, turned contemplative. He studied the tomato like it was something a whole lot more important than a fruit, like a memory that had gone sour, or something just as painfully nostalgic.

Johanna cleared her throat. “Well,” she said brightly, “I don’t know about all that! But ghost-hunting tends to distract you from most everything else, given half the time you’re changing batteries and the other you’re trying not to die.”

Suddenly, Yugi was all attention. “Oh? And do you happen to almost die a lot on your trips?”

“There was that one time in Barcelona,” Yilan offered.

Johanna nodded sadly. “And then in Madrid as well.”

“And the year after, in Rome. Why are Romans so rude?”

“At least most of their ominous notes are correctly spelled. Do you remember when we were in London? On our... second day of filming, I think?”

“When some asshole came at us with a knife?” Yilan said. “Yeah, I think I remember that.”

“Somebody attacked you with a knife?” Yugi asked politely.

“More something than someone,” said Johanna. “He was half-transparent and spoke a dialect that’s been out of use for well over a century. No worries, though—Yilan took care of him!”

After a brief moment of silent inquiry, Yugi glanced over to Yilan.

Yilan held his gaze. She chewed methodically. Swallowed. “My family has a few fangxiangshi up in the tree,” she said, deadpan. “Exorcism’s kind of a thing you just pick up.”

“Exorcism!” Yugi repeated, with a sort of joy that normal people found difficult to direct at ghosts. “I know a few exorcists! They’re all wonderful people, with their talismans and their fortune telling and penchant for collateral damage. I don’t know many Chinese exorcists, though.” He leaned forward, as innocent as a child, or as innocent as a shadow-demon child could be. “Do you really fly on swords?”

Yilan snorted. “Nobody’s dumb enough to lug a sword around in public nowadays. That’s asking to get arrested. If you’re that desperate to get somewhere in a hurry, a pair of butter knives from over the counter works just fine.” She paused to reconsider her words. “Assuming you’re flying residential. High-rise buildings and near-sighted exorcists don’t go well together.”

“Would’ve never guessed,” Johanna muttered.

“And you?” Yugi asked, swinging the entirety of his head to face Johanna. “Do you have any neat tricks up your sleeve?”

Johanna froze. This was the part where she’d make up a joke about being cursed as a child and having the occasional paranormal visitor in the early hours of the morning. This was also the part where she’d cite a lighthearted anecdote, like how she discovered her prowess in bar fights because said nightly visitors had taught her how best to break a chair over someone’s head.

And if that someone didn’t have a head, then hitting it really hard with a sharp implement usually worked. That was the beauty of corporeal things: most of them tended to keel over when you stabbed them.

“Well,” Johanna began hesitantly, “every four generations in my family, someone comes down with the Sight.”

“The Sight,” Yugi repeated. He did that a lot, didn’t he? Almost as if putting it on his tongue and out his mouth made it tangible.

Trying not to squirm, Johanna went on, “The usual case of seeing things that might be there, might not be there, might be here and there but also over there, but nobody over there can say yay or nay so most of the time you’re left taping salt blocks into your window frames.”

“And you can’t mix it up with sugar,” Yilan said severely. “Not unless you want to play flyswatter with a bunch of fey.”

“I didn’t realize,” said Yugi. He leaned forward, and an idea presented itself on his face. “How incredible! If you don’t mind my asking, how much can you see?”

“Most European things,” said Johanna. “Fey like to spook you when you’re taking a shower. Japanese things mostly keep to themselves, unless you forget your umbrella in a closet for a decade and it comes out with eyes and arms.”

Johanna paused. Yugi was looking a little over her shoulder with a faint smile, and it’s always worrying to watch someone’s attention be captured by something not necessarily of this mortal plane.

“Anyway, ghosts are pretty universal, what with the lingering regrets and the creepy vibes,” Johanna said, trying very hard not to peer over her shoulder. “Why?”

“Nothing much,” Yugi lied.

Johanna wished Yugi would go to more of an effort to sound convincing. It was the polite thing to do, she reasoned. Then again, Yugi seemed like the sort to continue on his merry, terrifying way, no matter how many people ran in the opposite direction screaming.

It was a certain kind of charm. Charisma, maybe. Madness, probably.

 

---

 

Ayagami was a town that was utterly unassuming. That is to say: it had hot springs, grocery stores that were only a little more overpriced than usual, a few ghosts here and there, and quaint little bakeries.

By unspoken small-town denizen law, ghosts are not to be spoken of. Partly because striking that match was a surefire way to earn the ire of every resident over the age of sixty, but mostly because ghosts get very annoyed very quickly if they catch you gossiping.

Yugi was not the sort of person to care. His common sense aligned with the universe in that it had hinges the right size stuck in all the wrong places.

Johanna felt this was a troublesome detail. But it did make for unique content, and featuring a Duel Monsters champion was an easy way to slap a few links in a few descriptions.

“Traces like these are signs that somebody’s been going to a shadow game spree,” said Yugi, with all the authority of someone who started and ended paranormal fistfights on a daily basis. “It’s really not something you like to see, especially in small towns. It’s... well, it’s as if an overzealous gambler walked into a casino and trashed the place.”

“Not a fan of ‘overzealous’,” said Yilan, from behind the camera.

“Me neither! Fortunately, it should be easy to track down our gambler friend. They don’t tend to be very subtle. I imagine leaving a pair of dice and a rigged deck out in the open would have them crawling out of the bushes.”

Johanna squinted at the alley wall Yugi was pointing at. There was... well, there had to be something there, right? He was making all these gestures and referencing some sort of trace of some sort of evil gaming that apparently made people go mad. Or lose their souls. Or get pitched into hell. It was all a little unclear, really.

“I’m not following why you think we’re tracking a... shadow gamer,” Johanna said, in a desperate bid for normalcy. “Even if—hypothetically, if some evil witch was running around playing rigged games, what does an on-fire ghost care?”

“I imagine the on-fire ghost would be upset to be challenged,” Yugi answered, dreadfully calm, “only to have their eternal soul stolen. Or eaten. It depends on the weather, mostly.”

“So... forced servitude,” Yilan concluded. “In your ghostly afterlife. Great.”

“Indeed,” said Yugi.

Surely Yilan captured, in perfect detail, Yugi’s vague motion against the wall, and the resulting eye of Horus that crawled out through a particularly wide gap.

“Ah,” Johanna said, perhaps an octave higher. “Wow! That’s a neat trick!”

“I learned from the best,” Yugi said brightly. “Now you see. Yes?”

Johanna lifted her eyes again.

A normal person, if equipped with a normal brain, would have probably fainted. It would be a mercy. Either that, or their brain would seep out of their ears, and then their entire psyche would shatter into pretty little flakes of incurable madness.

Nobody present could be considered normal, even under the most generous of conditions, and certainly all of them had been exposed to an amount of cosmic horrors most would consider unhealthy.

Something deep, dark, and very, very evil writhed on the wall. It gave the impression that it had a human form but didn’t care much for maintaining it. Johanna counted four sets of teeth in her mute horror, all of which were gnashing violently, and if her Japanese was up to par—which she hoped it wasn’t—all the mouths were generous with expletives and cared little for who was on the receiving end.

“This,” Yugi said, resting a hand on what may have been a shoulder, “is a ghost that lost a game.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” said Yilan, which was appropriate.

“I know,” Yugi agreed. “He’s got such a ghastly complexion!”

“Does he now,” Johanna muttered.

“Oh, yes. Goro-san tells me he had a very strict skincare regimen up until all his skin burnt off. Isn’t that right?”

The shadows writhed harder. It was distressing to witness. Between the ghost in the wall and the demon outside of it, Johanna’s brain was putting in some serious legwork, and she had the feeling something was going to leap out of the darkness with a large bat and an intent to break kneecaps.

“So,” Johanna tried, “angry ghosts are bad! Yes. Angry ghosts are bad. Evil gamblers are worse, but happen to be corporeal most of the time. So we just—” she made the universal gesture for break a chair over their head and checked for confirmation.

Yugi brightened. “More or less! I’d expect to get thrown in a few games here and there, play for your life a few times.” He shrugged, as if everything he had said was well within the boundaries of sanity. “I’ll admit: it’s a bit annoying. If you can find a suitable chair, I won’t complain.”

“Right,” said Johanna. “A chair. A barstool, maybe. I’m good with barstools.”

“I should’ve brought the golf clubs,” Yilan mumbled. “Everybody knows evil gamblers aren’t scared of knives. They think it’s some type of parlour trick.”

“I just hope they don’t like clowns,” Yugi said contemplatively, and didn’t elaborate.

The whole world had tilted a few degrees over. It wasn’t something you noticed until you went in with a protractor, or got hit with a Yugi.

At least Goro-san was upset. Johanna wished she the ability to unhinge that hard. Life was difficult when you had the cognitive functions to think it through.

 

---

 

The hotel was on fire.

A few tiles from the roof came down through what was once the ceiling, all of which was burning, which consequently caught everything else on fire. Part of the street-facing wall caved inward, which was all very good, since Johanna was sat on her bed against the opposite wall.

She watched as smoke rolled against her feet, slow and thick, and also not real.

Johanna wasn’t an exciting person. She was an accounting major. She ran a Youtube channel in her free time. She was considering adding fanny packs to their merch line, if only to get in on the trend. She travelled with a DIY flyswatter that consisted of the hilt of a toy sword, a plastic fan, several warding talismans of Chinese origin, and a whole lot of duct tape.

Johanna reached under her pillow. She pulled out the flyswatter and waited.

Waking up to find your room burning was, in most cases, high up on the list of unfortunate things to experience. Fortunately, Johanna had a litany of worse anecdotes involving things with eyes and teeth and sometimes a very raspy voice grabbing at her feet. Sometimes those things would be on fire, if they were feeling fancy.

Fire—fake fire, in this case—was normal by comparison. The only worrying part was which fancy-feeling monstrosity had decided to fake a fire, and if it had plans to eat anybody tonight.

“Hello?” Johanna called out. “Can I help you with something?”

For a moment, there was silence. Then something responded: “Maybe.”

The voice was raspy, but didn’t carry the same threat of buzzsaw teeth that more fancy visitors sometimes did. “Great,” said Johanna, relieved. “Do you mind telling me, and maybe turning off the fire?”

“Can’t do anything about the fire,” said a figure, clambering through the window. They didn’t sound very sorry. A little smug, a lot annoyed, and generally horrifying. “Could go for a quick game, though.”

Johanna stared. In the back of her mind, Yugi’s smile lit up like a motion sensor, and something clicked into place. “Do you have any sort of interest in gambling?” she asked carefully.

“Not really,” said the figure. “But a bet’s a bet, no matter how you scam your way out of it.”

Then they sat themselves down at the work desk. A haze of shadow filtered out any discernible features, which was unfortunate, because an easy way to tell how terrified one should be was by the number of eyes and sets of teeth something had. An even easier method was to see if they were smiling.

“That doesn’t sound very fair to me,” Johanna said, scanning for teeth. “You’ve got rules, regulations, courtesy, all that jazz. It’s not very nice to decide they stop existing once you start losing.”

“It isn’t,” the figure admitted, “but your opinions don’t matter much once you're dead.”

Johanna had to concede this was true. She tightened her grip on the flyswatter.

Big, Rude, and Ashen sounded like the kind of person who had a chronic and incurable case of the frownies. In the odd case they smiled, it was probably after something was bleeding or dead. The chair squealed in distress as they made themselves as comfortable as a burnt corpse could, but at the very least, they were less on fire than one would expect.

That was good. That was workable. It meant the chair was still intact, and if Johanna needed to, she could introduce her guest to the wonders of paranormal bar fights.

“Alright,” Johanna said. “I’m the host of Funky Ghouls. Who’re you?”

“An employee at the clothing store a few blocks over,” said the figure. It paused. “You’re pretty cautious with your name, huh?”

“You learn a few things from spending your summers in Scotland,” Johanna said.

“Not going to elaborate?”

“Don’t feel the need to. Besides, recent events have made me care a little more about who knows my name.”

“The tiny boy,” the figure said, lilting upward into a sneer. “The one who goes around calling himself the King of Games. Half of what he’s worth is bravado! The other half is maybe luck, but probably hair!”

Johanna determinedly did not comment. “He’s sketchy and probably a demon, but I’ve met some demons who didn’t want to kill me before.” Here she left a meaningful pause, then went on: “Unlike some people.”

The figure snorted. “Please. I don’t want to kill you. It might happen as a side effect, but that’s none of my business.”

Alright, Johanna thought. Clearly our morals are finding trouble aligning. That’s fine! I understand! Peeved ghosts don’t have to worry about dying twice. But, well, it’s fun to put them in their place anyway.

“Huh,” Johanna said. “No use wasting time, then. Shall we?”

The figure loomed forward. “You’ll play?”

“Sure. As long as I get to pick the game.”

It was incredible how shadow-ghost-monstrosities made it so obvious they were smiling without faces. “Alright,” said the figure. “I’m down for a... heavier wager. Put your life on the table, and I’ll do the same.”

A normal person would escape out the window. A slightly more unhinged person would knock on Yugi’s door, three rooms down, and introduce him to tonight’s visitor.

But Johanna had experience. She had fast hands. She had the pride of every summer school student under her feet.

She set the swatter on the table, then went rummaging in her backpack. The figure watched intently when she came back with a deck of playing cards.

“Ever play Spit?” Johanna asked.

 

---

 

Spit, also referred to as Slam or Speed, is a game of the shedding family of card games for two players.

The goal of the game is to get rid of all your cards as quickly as possible. The players do not take turns; physical speed and alertness are required to play faster than your opponent. On each round, by being first to play all your cards, you can reduce the number of cards you have in the next round. By winning several rounds, you can eventually get rid of all your cards, thereby winning the game.

Spit is usually played on a table.

A table is typically utilized alongside chairs.

 

---

 

“You’re certain you outlined the rules properly?”

“For the last time, yes,” said Johanna. “Of course I did! Every single nuance! And the deck I used was perfectly legit! Do you seriously think I’m the type of person to cheat at something like Spit?”

Yugi’s expression was that of a skeptic, which was not appreciated. “And you made perfectly clear the part where you’re allowed to brain your opponent with a chair?”

“It’s in the name,” Yilan insisted.

“It’s called Spit,” said Yugi.

“Yeah.”

There was a moment of uncomprehending silence.

Johanna broke it down as gently as she could, seeing how it was barely dawn and Yugi gave off the impression that he wanted to smash in a window badly.

“It’s called Spit,” she said, “and you’re supposed to slap the pile that has fewer cards. But sometimes you don’t feel like competing in that particular sport. Say, for example, when your opponent has hands the size of your torso and could slap your head off your neck if he sneezed wrong.”

“So you took a chair and smashed it over his head instead?” Yugi asked.

“He looked like he was about to sneeze,” Johanna said defensively. “Do you want to know what the contents of my skull look like?”

“Depending on how many chairs you break this week, maybe,” said Yugi. He took a second to consider a terrible thought. “You don’t have a sort of... chair-homing ability, do you?”

“What? No!” Johanna said, baffled. “I have to go out of my way to find a chair if I want to bash someone with it.”

“The swatter works just fine, anyway,” Yilan added. When Yugi turned his unimpressed gaze to her, she bared her teeth in a feral grin. It was, by all definitions, disturbing. “You don’t get magical vermin in Japan? How lucky! Grab the swatter by the wrong end and you’re lucky if you wake up in your own body.”

Johanna presented the swatter to the room by holding it up triumphantly. Yugi’s expression rapidly cooled from disappointed to unnerved.

“Did you make that yourself?” he demanded. “Or—nevermind. How did you make that?” Nothing Yugi did was really inconspicuous—for someone barely five feet, he had the presence of a giant and also of a hardcore punk—but the careful step he took away from Johanna was almost subtle.

That was neat, because it implied many horrible things about the swatter. With renewed sense, Johanna lowered her arm. “It’s just some dollar store toys and duct tape. Also a few sealing talismans.”

“A few?” Yugi repeated incredulously. “If you slapped a ghost with that, they would explode.”

Yilan beamed. “Isn’t it neat?” she said cheerily. “All they teach you at Saturday school is how to banish, how to seal, how to mix pigment, all that garbage. Turns out if you flip the script upside down and swap out the ink, spirits sometimes explode on contact!”

“But not usually,” Johanna hurried to say. “Only sometimes!”

“I would explode if you hit me with that,” Yugi said, with some offense.

Both Johanna and Yilan took a second to process the implications. Yugi had a way with words in that he didn’t need to use them at all to come off as an eldritch being, and when he did try them out, sane people would leap out the nearest window.

“Are you a spirit?” Yilan asked.

“No, but I’ve got enough stuck on me that I don’t want to risk it,” said Yugi. He gave the swatter one last nervous look. “Do you mind putting that away?”

“Er—sure.” Johanna slipped the swatter into her backpack, shimmying it in as best she could. The handle stuck out very noticeably, but Johanna was very determined not to notice it. “Anyway, about this ‘shadow game’ you mentioned...”

 

---

 

Yugi considered himself a normal person.

Normal people aren’t that interesting, right? Right. He wasn’t particularly interesting. Oh, he had fun stories, the typical pick of saving the world and travelling through time, but anyone could do that. It was just a matter of being unlucky enough, and possibly getting yourself possessed by an ancient Egyptian ghost.

And how hard was that, really? It was easier to manage by accident than on purpose, which is never a good thought to think.

I hope they don’t like clowns, thought Yugi, in the privacy of his own room. I really hope they don’t like clowns.

Johanna seemed like a nice person. Yilan seemed like... well, Yilan seemed like the type of person to trust you as far as she could throw you, which was usually very far, and thus unfortunate because her trust-to-throw-distance ratio was anything but one-to-one.

That flyswatter, though. God. It took a diseased mind to come up with that sort of device.

Yugi shivered. It was a good thing Johanna was in possession of the swatter. It very likely saved his life. Playing hopscotch over shadow games left a very distinct feel on a person, and the direction Yugi’s life liked to travel had him bleeding weird vibes. Approaching a swatter-armed Yilan the way Yugi had would have resulted in a lot more bleeding, a lot more literally.

It was nice to get away from life and into chaos, though. Life had rules. God, life had rules. So many of them, and it made for a terrible experience unless you knew how to play around them. But flat-out rule-breaking was a no-go unless you were in a hurry to have your soul condemned to a deep, dark, and worryingly damp place.

Life was like laser tag, except worse because there was no pizza party afterward. A game of laser tag, with heads running around in every direction and into walls, shooting wildly at anything that moved. They told you not to run and not to whack others over the head, but they never made it a rule to swear by. They told you to wear running shoes.

Yugi was very good at laser tag. It was one of his many talents. That folder of talents, of which there was only one, was aptly named games.

He was also very bad at life. Somewhere between laser tag and adult life was a hurdle that he had stumbled over. The rest of the world was running forward with reckless abandon, and he was still putting his teeth back into place.

But Yugi made the best of it. He tried to learn. He really did! It just wasn’t a great feeling when you realized the moral of the story was the world will keep turning even in your grief and one day you’ll have to catch up.

Stumbling blindly through life was scary. Yugi desperately missed being scared with someone.

There was a knock at his door. “Yugi?” said Johanna’s voice. “Are you ready to go?”

Yugi stared at the door. Then he stared at his hands.

There was something very strange going on in this town. One could make an argument that it was evil, dark, and mysterious. One could make a very convincing argument not to get involved and hurry on to wherever Seto's next marketing campaign was.

All my life I’ve wanted friends, Yugi thought, but I’ve never had much practice making them myself.

“Yugi?” Johanna’s voice was wary. Yugi could sense the flyswatter through the door. “Are you good?”

“I’m just perfect,” said Yugi. He grabbed his jacket and settled his emotions. When he opened the door, Johanna blinked once in surprise, and by the second time she had slipped on a neutral expression.

“Alright,” said Johanna. “You down for a walk in the park?”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“Yilan’s already there, so yeah, I’d say so.” There was a careful pause. “Unless you’re not feeling it?”

“Oh no, I could use an early morning walk,” said Yugi. “Stretch the limbs, refresh the mind, spy a few ghosts. Right?”

“Right,” Johanna agreed.

Whatever had been on Yugi’s face was probably worth being embarrassed about. Johanna bulldozed over this fact by insisting that the weather was so incredibly intense, a whole ten degrees more than she was used to back in Canada, over there we have four whole seasons and two of them take up the entire year, and did you have breakfast yet?

Johanna and Yilan were strange and potentially lethal. But they had good intentions, which was a lot more than Yugi could say for some of his early friendships.

As an added bonus, because Yugi had been good this year, neither of them cared about his career. It was oddly cathartic.

“I think I could go for a coffee,” he finally said.

Johanna’s smile was perfectly and purposely ignorant.

 

---

 

It was tragically difficult to find benches outside convenience stores in Japan. Ayagami, however, continued in its endeavour to reject normality by installing peeling, sun-faded benches outside the local Familymart.

Either the anomaly had carved out a significant portion of reason and physics out of the world, or Yugi had a knack for generating liminal spaces whenever his mind drifted, because reality had called in for a lunch break and locked the doors behind it.

Johanna sat quietly and picked at the peeling paint. The action made her more certain of where her body began and ended.

So banished souls waddle off to hell when their heads break a chair, she thought to herself. That was an interesting fact. It was a fact she could’ve lived her life without knowing, but an interesting one nonetheless.

Yugi chewed monotonously through his sandwich. He was staring at the ground like melancholic reflection was a medical diagnosis, which, uh—which it probably was, actually. Bad simile. Either way, it was clear that something about convenience store ham and cheese had ejected his mind into a neighbouring dimension.

Who was Johanna to judge, anyway? Life was one of those things you had to take care of before it took care of you. If you didn’t want your mistakes bleeding over all your nice sheets, you had to go in with a magic eraser and terminate with extreme prejudice.

Sometimes you had to fight for a chair without even knowing why, and if you were lucky, the backdrop would be one of musical chairs instead of a violent bar fight.

Yugi seemed like the kind of person who magnetically attracted blunt objects to the head, both literally and metaphorically. It was always better for that particular quirk to be literal, Johanna thought. The hands gripping the chair tended to belong to a body that, if stabbed, quickly fled to the emergency room. How was someone supposed to fight against a metaphorical chair? Life was so unfair sometimes.

“So! Shadow games,” Johanna began, determinedly chipper.

Yugi blinked his way back to reality. “Shadow games,” he said happily. “They’re a bit of a conundrum, aren’t they? I’m really glad that neither of you dissolved into tears or came at me with a knife when I broke the news to you.”

“Does that happen often?”

“Often enough for me to stand at the opposite end of a room while I’m giving my lecture. Was there something you didn’t understand?”

“Not particularly.” Johanna gripped her existential dread by the nape and held tight. “Well... now that you mention it, there was a little something that was bothering me.”

“And what was that?”

“I mean, after you gave that rundown, I couldn’t help but be curious,” said Johanna. “Yilan’s family goes on yearly exorcism road trips, and she’s never had to infinite combo somebody into the, um—“

“The shadow realm?” Yugi suggested.

“The shadow realm. And I’m not trying to discredit you!” Johanna added hurriedly. “You, uh… you have a very charismatic aura about you, what with the whole—” Here she made a gesture that was probably less illustrative that she thought, but it was the effort that counted, and Johanna put in a lot of effort into not dying. “The whole eye of Horus thing, and also your shadow. Which is still pointing the wrong direction, by the way.”

Yugi’s shadow mirrored his smile: wide and feral and deeply disturbing. “Oh, have we reached that point in our relationship? That’s great! I was wondering when we were going to stop ignoring it.”

“Sometimes you have to rush through matters,” said Johanna.

“Mm, that’s true,” Yugi said pleasantly. He peered down at his shadow. His shadow peered back. He notably did not answer the question.

It was kind of the powers that be to toss in a punk Peter Pan with the rest of the on-fire, vengeful spirits. A rural town doesn’t do so well while hosting a supernatural house party (gladiator-style duel to the death), but it sure gets a lot more colourful.

On any other day, Johanna would get her daily workout by repeatedly bringing down her stainless steel water bottle on the nearest demonic entity. Fortunately, if Yugi was a demon, he was very bad at being bad.

“I’m going to guess that you’ve had a fair share of horror stories involving shadow games,” Johanna said, figuring that statement was safe enough.

“Oh, so many,” Yugi said. “I was a very troubled senior high student. Bullies enjoyed my company. I was very sad not to reciprocate their feelings.”

Johanna winced. Hope was a cruel thing. “That’s... rough.”

“Very much so!” Yugi went on, entirely unbothered. “But it was handled, don’t worry. I made friends, and thank goodness for them, because I shiver to think what would have become of everything if the powers of friendship and basic human decency had eluded me.”

Putting two and two together was an art of subtlety. Johanna’s face betrayed nothing, which also betrayed everything. “Do I want to know what happened to your bullies?”

“I still don’t know what happened to some of them,” said Yugi.

“Moving on then!” Johanna declared, with cheer thumping at the gates of reason. “You said shadow games demand collateral. I don’t claim to be an expert on vengeful ghosts with a penchant for gambling, but isn’t it a bit odd for my very real, very tangible life to weigh the same as a very dead, very terminal life?”

“Despite what one might assume, ghosts have a lot to lose.” Yugi’s eyes went foggy again, and it was the sort of fog that swallowed up your high beams and bounced them back at you. “The prospect of an afterlife isn’t as comforting as it seems while you’re alive. The more time you spend in the world of the living, the less you want to be evicted to the world of the dead. It’s all a matter of preference, really. But those preferences can be powerful.”

Johanna decided not to ask if Yugi had any personal experiences with evicting ghosts. “I see,” was all she could muster.

The two of them sat in contemplative, nervous silence. In the manner of someone waiting for the other shoe to drop, Johanna stared resolutely at the ground and away from any shadows. Yugi returned to methodically chewing his sandwich.

“I see you’ve started a stint of existential dread,” said Yilan’s voice, in its trademarked irritated lilt, “and you didn’t even invite me.”

“It was an unplanned session,” Yugi said, in good and very fake spirits.

He gave Yilan one of his weird smiles, which she returned with mild skepticism and a small scowl. Ah, that was good—it meant she was slowly moving from all-out hostility to grudging acceptance. Johanna relaxed, content in the lowering probability of a supernatural fistfight, and settled for passively nodding as Yilan sat down beside Johanna and began recounting her walk.

“So while you two were chatting it up over breakfast,” Yilan said, giving Yugi’s sandwich a sharp look, “I scouted out the park. The lighting shouldn’t be too hard to work around, but I hope you have waterproof mascara.”

“Always,” said Yugi, to nobody’s surprise.

“As for the ghosts—” Yilan’s face did the thing it liked to do when it was met with a problem not easily solved by exploding talismans. “Well, I sure felt someone try to set me on fire, but they stopped when I threatened to string them up with their own intestines.”

“Most people would, no?”

“Yeah, but these are ghosts,” Yilan insisted. “Angry, on-fire ghosts forced into gamer servitude. Where’s the anger? The resentment? The whole ‘I’ve been fermenting in my own misery for the past n years and watching everyone live their lives to the fullest while I spiritually rot is making me super duper pissed’ spiel?” In that sentence was a lot more emotional availability than Yilan typically allowed. To compensate, she went on, “Besides, the last ghoul I tried that line on reacted by going after my face with knife hands and a whole lot of attitude.”

An emotion somewhere between surprise and disturbed acceptance manifested itself on Yugi’s face. “Did that ghoul explode?”

“You learn quickly,” Yilan said, satisfied.

“Oh, it was just a guess,” Yugi lied. “In any case, are you alright? I imagine being set on fire isn’t a pleasant experience.”

“I said they tried,” Yilan said irritably. “I never said they succeeded. Either they’re terrified or they're furious, but I’d wager to say they’re both. We already know why they’re angry, even though it’s a stupid reason, because ghosts operate off a version of common sense several psychotic breakdowns removed from ours. As for why they’re scared—”

“The gambler,” Yugi put in.

The look Yilan gave him was positively scathing. “Sure,” she allowed, the same way she would let an imp holler for a while before twisting its head off. “But the thing about ghosts is they just love to talk. Talk, talk, talk, oh boy, they ever shut up.”

Yugi listened with a serene expression. Johanna, on the other hand, leaned forward in case that somebody’s teeth introduced themselves to someone else’s neck.

“You know what they all said?” Yilan went on. “It was hard to catch over the screaming and general nonsense, but all of them had a lot to say about the King of Games.”

Half bravado and half luck-slash-hair, Johanna thought.

Yilan thankfully remained seated, expelling her energy through sharp gestures instead. “And they were scared witless! Not that they had any wits to begin with, but you should’ve seen how scared they were of being ‘privately escorted to hell by means of the most humiliating punishment the devil could dream up, except ten times worse, because it’ll be thematically appropriate’. What the fuck is that about?”

Laughing was not the most sensible reaction, so Yugi proceeded to do it. “Was that really what they said?” he asked, through bright, shiny teeth. “Word for word, exactly that?”

Yilan considered him for a moment, possibly to determine how much he would talk as a ghost. Then she said: “I think I might punch you.”

“No punching,” Johanna said firmly. “No talismans, no glowing golden sigils, no supernaturally-backed brawls. No,” she repeated, when Yilan reached for her back pocket. “We can discuss this like civilized people who believe in the goodness of the human heart as well as the deep, horrifying darkness underneath it.”

“He’s either a demon or a monster who needs to be exorcised immediately,” Yilan said pointedly.

“That’s not true,” Yugi said, with some offense. “As I was saying to Johanna, I went through a very strange series of events in senior high. I would go so far as to say they changed me irrevocably as a person and forced me to work through problems I’m not entirely grateful for, but happy to have experienced if only as a byproduct of happier times.”

Yilan’s hostility died a sudden death. She eased into an impromptu ceasefire by studying Yugi with healthy concern disguised as deep irritation.

“What went on with you?” Yilan asked. Before Yugi could fire off another vague story, she snapped, “Stop trying to mystify your way out of this. Did some... amicable genie slap your life into place? Three wishes and poof, just like that?”

Yugi froze. His sandwich also died a sudden death by way of Sudden Statement Causing Incredible Alarm.

There was a whole lot of surface area for fire, and not a lot of space for batting it out. Johanna slowly shifted away from Yugi, prepared for the worst even though she had no concept of what the worst could be.

“That,” Yugi finally said, “was an incredible guess.”

“It was actually a genie?”

“No. Not quite. I’d say ghost would be a more accurate term, although there were some strong genie elements in there.”

Somewhere in the strange space that was this conversation, a bridge had been laid out between present and past, then promptly set on fire. The problem was that Yugi was stuck on the opposite shore, and he was waving at them cheerily as the metaphor smoldered.

“Can I offer my unprofessional opinion?” Johanna said delicately.

Yugi sighed, presumably because it was a question he received often. “Be my guest.”

“Well, I think it’s fine to grieve,” Johanna went on. She kept a close eye on Yugi’s shadow. “Not to say I’m an expert on the topic or anything, but... I mean, nobody moves through life completely alone. Right? Even if you’re hiding in the furthest corner of the room, someone’s bound to ask you what’s going on eventually.” Here Johanna spread her hands placating. “The whole world moves at once, altogether. You can burn a bridge, and sometimes you really should burn that bridge, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t rebuild that bridge, especially when you think it might be a good idea, but the people on the other side of the river are going a bit too hard for you to swallow, so you check further downstream and over there you find people who aren’t all gung-ho about making their dreams come true and living the best of their bestest lives but are just waiting for their ice cubes to freeze and their tea to steep over a good book or two, and sometimes it’s that sort of reprieve you need, the kind that distracts you but doesn’t let you give up on crossing altogether because this planet is weird and life is even weirder.”

Johanna took a deep, vaguely screeching breath. The mania drained out of her hands first, and she slapped her knees gamely.

“So!” Johanna declared. “Bridges! Almost as good as chairs. Nice to meet you, Yugi. I’m Johanna.”

With the tone of someone familiar with Johanna’s Occasional Outbursts, Yilan said, with deep satisfaction, “Nice.”

Yugi’s melancholy had been forcibly replaced with surprise, and he demonstrated this abrupt change by squinting at Johanna. “Hello?” he said, uncertain. “It’s... nice to meet you? And if you could remind me again why we’re introducing ourselves, I’d appreciate it.”

“It’s safe to say that our first impressions of one another were abysmal,” said Johanna. “I’m not saying we lied to each other, but we definitely played hopscotch across landmines, and that’s not regulation. So: I’m Johanna! Nice to meet you. I was born with the Sight and sometimes I fistfight fey.”

Delicately, with noticeable wariness, Yugi shook Johanna’s outstretched hand. “Nice to meet you,” he said. “Can I ask when you started filming?”

Johanna turned to Yilan, who held her camera high and proud.

“We have an outtakes segment specifically for Johanna’s Occasional Outbursts,” Yilan said primly. “I felt one coming.”

“Oh,” said Yugi.

“And,” Yilan continued, sticking a hand out as well, “I’m Yilan, exorcist by impulse. I’m stubborn by nature and suspicious by trade. Doesn’t mean I don’t like you; just means I’m trying to figure you out.”

Yugi accepted her hand. He did so slowly, as if expecting to be disemboweled. “It’s nice to meet you too,” he decided.

There was a moment of expectant silence.

And then Yugi sighed. His entire form—which wasn’t a lot, really—deflated like a sad balloon. “Oh, very well. I’m Yugi. I was... possessed by an ancient Egyptian spirit for two years, won several titles in body but not in mind, grew to consider him my most precious person, and personally escorted him to the afterlife.”

Johanna blinked. Then she blinked again, for good measure.

That was the sort of thing that seriously wrecked your emotions, yes? Loving a ghost was always a dangerous thing to do because the very act ensured its impermanence, no?

“I think that explains a lot,” Johanna said, feeling oddly numb, “but I’m not sure what I think right now. I think I ought to be surprised.”

Meanwhile, Yilan’s face bunched up around her nose. “Man,” she said. “That sucks.”

“God,” Yugi said. He buried his face in the hand free of ham and cheese, silently but efficiently reshelving the many emotions that Johanna and Yilan had hurled off the shelves. “You two have a talent for prying me open.”

“It’s not just you, don’t worry,” Yilan assured him. “It was bound to happen eventually. It’s the magic of the show.”

Johanna was tempted to say: no, for once, it probably isn’t the magic of the show. It’s probably the magic of the town, or the evil gambler inside the town, or the many angry gamer ghosts also inside the town.

She kept her thoughts to herself to preserve the sanctity of the moment. “Well, we’ve loitered long enough,” she said, swiping peeled paint off her skirt as she stood. “How about we take a walk? Tango with a few ghosts, maybe?”

Nothing Yugi did was subtle. As such, Johanna, Yilan, and the camera all caught his sigh of relief as he tossed the remains of his sandwich in the bin and pulled up his game face.

This was the Yilan Effect in play: sometimes you worried that your friends could split your head open if you moved too suddenly, and that was when you knew them. Imagine how those same friends appeared to their enemies.

“Tangoing with ghosts sounds pretty good right about now,” Yugi said. His smile was small, sly, and very, very sharp. “A bit of normality is nice every once in a while.”

 

---

 

Yilan was the sort of person to approach most problems with a large hammer and a lot of spite.

She knew it, Johanna knew it, their subscribers knew it, and anyone who earned her ire really knew it. Oftentimes they felt it too, but those situations were rare. People came equipped with ancient animal instinct; it was the little voice in your head that told you to run when someone approached you with a blunt object and a blank smile.

That little voice was Yilan’s friend. It kept people away from her. All she needed to tell it was something along the lines of I will brutalize you so that every mirror to suffer your reflection will instantly shatter, and the little bodies in which the little voices resided would turn on their heels and leave without a word.

Johanna was one of the strange people to have been born without a little voice. She supplemented by using her own voice, which was effective up until something came at her swinging and there was a chair in reach.

Up until now, Yilan had been content to accept Johanna as a horrifying anomaly. An accounting major with the Sight and a penchant for turning preternatural guests into splatters on a wall? Now that was worth investigating.

The Yinhe Song clan had a tendency to take in strays. Yilan was... slightly ashamed to have fallen into the same hole. It was instinct! Johanna had seemed like such an innocent, naive thing! Besides, she was interesting, tolerated Yilan’s hobbies with extreme patience, and was willing to throw down with ghosts.

So Yilan had given Johanna a few talismans. For protection, obviously. The best way to protect yourself was to make sure anything that wanted you dead was in too many pieces to go ahead with that plan.

But then Johanna had come back with the flyswatter. Oh god, the flyswatter.

Obviously it was a monstrosity and needed its own exclusion zone, but at the same time... well, it made spirits explode. Violently. Like fireworks, but with more screaming.

The more potent the tools, the more terrifying their wielders. This held true for every aspect of life. Johanna had yet to recognize this, and perhaps it was for the better, because she took pride in being the normal one.

Normal was in the eye of the beholder. If Johanna was as weird as humans could get, then the world probably wouldn’t blow itself apart.

But then Yugi had marched off the train, introduced himself in the most suspicious way possible, and sheepishly presented the metaphorical burns that going in too hard, too fast with a metaphorical magical eraser had gotten him.

And what the hell was Yilan supposed to do with that?

Yugi was a... walking, talking, magnet for evil things. He leaked creepy vibes. Standing next to him was the equivalent of being pitched into a haunted house with the added disadvantage that you couldn’t burn the whole place to the ground.

And that wasn’t it! That was nowhere near it. Someone as menacing as Yugi was bound to drop shadows out their ears every time they went over a speed bump, right?

Yugi didn’t. And he wouldn’t. Because it was obvious he wasn’t any sort of progenitor of evil things, or caller of dark monstrosities.

He carried himself with all the dignity of a malevolent warlock, but his face gave it away. It took a while to decipher—those belts and chains swayed the mind toward a higher-end strand of death metal—but easy acceptance and passive terror were signs of a person who was very, very unlucky.

So far the evidence aligned as follows: Yugi had gone through a rough patch in high school. Then he got himself possessed. Presumably his bullies disappeared during this time, he made some friends, gave his heart a few too many rounds in a particularly rough washing machine, and now he was here.

In Ayagami, hunting for ghosts, while a very successful career waited for him several hundred kilometers away.

So he had been taught by a ghost how to trip face-first into shadow games, all while possessing the skill to end them.

King of Games, indeed.

“While screaming isn’t particularly supernatural,” Johanna went on to the camera, “ghostly apparitions burning alive isn’t too uncommon of an occurrence, reportedly.”

“I hear it’s become part of local life,” Yugi said, gesturing vaguely at the park around them. “Which is interesting, because it says a lot about what local life is like. Then again, Ayagami is a small town, so perhaps I’m extrapolating too much from big-city life.”

Johanna offered him a sideways grin. “A few too many run-ins with people toppling backwards out of a bar have swayed your opinion, has it?”

“Oh, it’s not the people falling out of a bar that concern me,” said Yugi. “It’s the ones tossing them bodily through the window that I keep an eye out for. I feel like I would make for a very good projectile.”

He was right. And if anyone knew it, Yilan did. Not only because she herself could toss Yugi well over the Ayagami Station sign, but also because one tended to become very aware of height discrepancies when manning the camera.

“So we’ve established that somebody’s been going around riling up these already very riled-up ghosts, which makes our job difficult, but should result in some excellent footage,” Johanna told the camera. The side of her mouth that had been dragging crept steadily upward. “Still not ideal for us, of course. We condemn violence and believe it to be entirely unnecessary in our quest for the truth.”

“Unless a ghost comes at us with a flaming club,” Yilan put in.

“A fair point,” Johanna agreed. “We would be very sad if a ghost tried to assault us with an on-fire implement. In which case you have to ask yourself, ‘Are my morals so firm that I’m willing to bleed brains out of my nose to stand by them?’ Oftentimes you’ll decide the answer is no, either because your survival instinct has hijacked the wheel, or because standing up after getting hit really hard over the head is an easy way to communicate that you want to get hit again. This is a very normal reaction! As it turns out, you can only lose your life twice, but the first is always fatal.”

“At least there’s some flex room,” Yugi said sunnily.

“But if you need that flex room, it means you probably died horribly, so let’s all try to keep our entrails where they belong,” said Johanna. She turned to the camera again, directing an authoritative gesture toward their future audience. “Everything we’re doing is dangerous, so if you’re watching this at home and suspect that your residence might be haunted, please contact an exorcist.”

“And if someone challenges you to a game in a dark alley, running will net you the highest likelihood of survival.”

Johanna and Yugi nodded in the manner of licensed professionals offering unto the world their professional advice. Half their viewers thought it was satire, and the other half needed to pay close attention to the disclaimers at the beginning of their videos.

The banter went on for a little longer, with town lore and urban myths sprinkled in occasionally. Yilan had to give it to Yugi: he had presence. His very existence meant that somebody was looking at him, and they were always looking intently.

He also countered Johanna’s somewhat unhinged camera personality with ease, which, considering his long history of apparently lethal duels, hinted at what sort of people he considered his rivals.

“And that’s a wrap,” Johanna finally said, gently dabbing at her forehead with a handkerchief. She sighed a long, damp sigh. “Can we grab lunch? I’d love a blast of AC to the face right now.”

“That would be nice,” Yugi said, visibly less sticky. Some kind of sorcery kept him dry and cool even in a navy blue dress shirt and tight black pants, and it was a kind of sorcery Yilan wanted to learn badly.

But it could wait. Japanese summers were brutal. “The curry shop has AC,” said Yilan.

The curry shop owner seemed elated to host them again. Their presence was probably the most exciting thing to happen to Ayagami since the ghosts went haywire, which was hardly an upgrade, but at least none of them went around threatening to kill people with a stack of Uno cards.

Shadow games. Ugh. So convoluted and roundabout. Where were the good old days of ghouls hacking people to death? The aftermath was a bit rough to swallow for newbies, sure, but it was all about character development! A bit of blood made for a will and a stomach of steel. A good tutor would pat you on the back and hand you a half-decent mop, and that was all you really needed in life.

It was traditional, dishonest work, and only required the presence of an exorcist, a detective, and a coroner, two of which you paid under the table. Everything went sideways when you opened the door to a weekend convention pass and a pair of clown shoes.

If some card-counting ghost managed to get Yilan, how was she supposed to face her ancestors? She’d shuffle in quietly and they’d all gather around and say, oh, Yilan, you had a good run, didn’t you? What was your greatest achievement? An... exploding flyswatter? A Youtube channel? And you say that you died over a game of Gong Zhu? My god, Yilan, if I had a cow I would cast your dishonour over it and it would immediately shrivel up and die.

It was a truly terrible thought.

“You’re playing Gong Zhu with me later,” Yilan demanded, pointing her spoon in the general direction of her travelling companions.

Yugi blinked. He was halfway to a smile, so he kicked up the creep and made it a full one. “That’s the Chinese variant of Hearts, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s like Hearts, but with point values.”

“Now that I can work with.”

“Don’t toot your own horn too fast, resident champion and sitter-in-throne-of-games,” Johanna warned. She pointed her spoon back at Yilan with narrowed eyes. “To know how to play Gong Zhu is to be raised in a Chinese family whose sole purpose in life is to destroy your faith in top-decking. It’s practically hazing.”

“It’s not my fault your family was all genteel and hand-holdy,” Yilan said. “Well, Yugi? Feel like bashing your head against a wall for a bit?”

“Oh, yes! Though I’m not certain that it’ll be my head against the wall.”

“And,” Johanna interjected, “you need four players. I’ll do us all a favour and play since I have no pride and accept fate as it comes. So who’s the last chair?”

Yilan gave Johanna a blank stare. It was a blank stare that was full of words, most of them forming what one could call bad ideas, but creating content was nothing if not a cesspool of bad ideas.

Johanna’s expression soured until it finally broke. She threw up her hands. “Fine! Fine. I’ll go... I’ll go find a practice ghost or something, I don’t know.”

Unsurprisingly, Yugi pushed himself off the counter and waddled after her. “I’ll supervise,” he said, which in theory was reassuring, but in practice meant that two chaos magnets were going on a late night stroll. In a haunted town full of evil, on-fire ghosts. With an evil gambler wizard peeping on the show.

Yeah. They'd be fine.

Yilan gave a little shrug with her hands. “You do you. Good luck.”

Yugi gave her a cheerful wave, whereas Johanna opted for directing a hard glare at the world and pulling out her flyswatter. Briefly, for a tiny, fleeting moment, Yilan wondered what sort of horrors Yugi’s death duels and Johanna’s chair magnetism could cause. It was like parking a coal truck next to a house fire, yes? Or striking a match in a vat of natural gas? But that was the sort of thought that couldn’t be thoughted if you wanted to maintain some semblance of faith in humanity, or in the fabric of reality.

Best leave devils to do what devils do best. That was what Yilan was here for: going in afterward with a mop, a lot of bleach, and a sturdy bucket in case anything twitched.

 

---

 

“You know, ever since meeting you, I feel like I’ve been attracting a lot more trouble than usual,” Johanna mused aloud.

“That tends to happen around me,” Yugi said apologetically. “I’m really sorry about all this. I’ve come to accept that the universe has crosshairs trained on me especially.”

He lifted his hand to bat some... giant shadow bug... out of the air. Or at least it seemed like a bug. The high-pitched screaming made Johanna a little unsure, but she had heard stranger things scream before. No matter the shape, form, or nervous system, most things reacted to blunt force trauma by method of extreme distress.

The bug reacted accordingly and exploded violently on contact with Yugi’s palm, which was also swarming with shadows.

Johanna ducked on instinct. The action turned out to be a wise one, given little bits of squealing flesh rocketed in every direction. All of them missed Yugi.

A splotch of miscellaneous black gunk nestled itself against Johanna’s skirt. She performed a controlled panic-dance to dislodge it. “Well, I don’t know about all that!” she said. “But I do know that the universe is always out for people who see more than they should, because then you start to see the cracks, and god only knows what happens if you go in with a chisel.”

“Tell me about it,” Yugi muttered to himself, in the tone of someone who is always armed with a chisel.

“And, ah, not to go off-topic, but how much longer are we supposed to have bugs rammed in our faces for?”

“I believe we should be done. Well, that’s what I’d say if I’d been manually hurling flesh-eating shadow bugs at impervious targets for an hour. Yamamoto-san appears to lack both the experience and the humility to concede, though I applaud his stamina.” Yugi turned his tremendously feral smile toward an unseen spectator. “Did you hear that, Yamamoto-san? I can clap for you, if you’d like.”

Something screeched back in rage. The sound might have been produced by a human, or something with human vocal chords, but it had a certain quality that suggested the easiest way to make it stop screaming was to remove it from existence.

Johanna tightened her grip on the flyswatter.

Yugi, a man of his word, began clapping. His face betrayed nothing. “Well done, Yamamoto-san, very well done,” he said. “I must commend your vocabulary as well. It’s not every day you meet someone with such a vast arsenal of insults.”

“Though if he calls me a ‘pasty flour-faced tar-blooded witch’ again I might remove the organ that supplies those insults,” said Johanna.

“Yes, and that would be very tragic. I know a few college students and back-alley bars that would love to get their hands on furnishings before you.” Here Yugi cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “What do you say, Yamamoto-san?”

“Stay still so I can kill you,” something terrible and primal howled.

“Engineers have such poor communication skills,” said Yugi. “Oh well. Johanna, if you could take a few steps back...?”

Curious Johanna might have been, but stupid she was not. Hurriedly, with great care to avoid any squishy puddles on the ground, Johanna retreated a good five meters.

“A little further back,” Yugi suggested, and turned his glowing eyes at something unseen.

Glowing eyes were always a bad sign, Johanna decided. It didn’t matter if they lit up like glow sticks or stuck the sun inside your retinas. The fact of the matter was that something always had to be behind the glow, be it post-spell inflammation or a creative curse or bits of ancient Egyptian spirit that wouldn’t come out in the wash. Glowing eyes meant something was there and didn’t care if you knew it or not.

Yugi was the least subtle person Johanna had ever met. He had a kind of authority about him, likely from the many absurdities he had to explain to hyperventilating bystanders. Something told Johanna he hadn’t been born with it—the way he stood and smiled and spoke was comfortable, but in a way leather pants are comfortable after a couple weeks of violent swearing and tugging.

In that brain was a hamster wheel and that hamster was a marathon champion. The hamster might have also had rabies, but Johanna was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

Something out in the haze of shadows made a quiet but wet splat. The noise was one of those noises—the kind which doesn’t get any better with context, but at least saves you the trauma of suddenly stumbling over whatever had happened. And the suggestion was that something had happened. Johanna felt safe in betting that something might have been fatal twice over.

Johanna’s face went through an elaborate series of emotions, disgust being at the forefront. “Please tell me we’re done.”

“We should be,” said Yugi. He blinked his eyes rapidly, as if attempting to dislodge a stray hair. His eyes dimmed substantially. Perhaps he blinked too rapidly, too furiously, but with hair like his, you could never really know. “Now, I don’t mean to come off as overly threatening or suspicious, but are you showing any symptoms of a really bad sunburn?”

“No?” Johanna said. She patted herself down once her hands stopped shaking. “No, I’m alright. Don’t give me that look! I’ve got dreary moorland-denizen blood in my veins. I know what a sunburn feels like, okay?”

“If you say so,” Yugi said.

“You are so rude sometimes,” Johanna said. She rounded on him accusingly when he tried to sidestep away. “And don’t even think about trying that trick with Yilan around! The last guy who claimed to see the face of god—I don’t know how much he was seeing by the end since the police report said he’d been—anyway, don’t flash your high beams at Yilan, okay? She has a wicked roundhouse. If your neck’s made of fragile stuff, it’ll come right off.”

Yugi’s face was carefully calm, but the way his eyes were moving implied that he was envisioning his neck popping off like a champagne cork, and that the image made him ill at ease. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

 

---

 

Gong Zhu is a Chinese four-player trick-taking card game, and is the Chinese version of the game Hearts. It differs from the standard Hearts game by assigning point values to cards. The objective is to score positive points and avoid penalty points.

All players start with 0 points. The goal is to not be the first to go past -1000 points, thereby losing the game. The loser(s) become the pig, as Gong Zhu means “chase the pig” in Chinese. All points accumulate until any player(s) have lost, for which the game ends and all points will be reset to 0.

One could say that an all-out, card-based, four-player game with point values was a surefire way to earn the ire of every player very quickly.

But then you would have to say that to Seto Kaiba, and the only person who could pay you enough to say that to his face was, coincidentally, Seto Kaiba.

 

---

 

“How are you so good at this fucking game?”

“You know, I get asked that a lot,” Yugi said pleasantly. He watched Yilan shuffle the cards with a smile that would’ve fit better on someone meant to put a noose around your neck.

Yilan glared back, fire in her eyes and especially in her mind. She let loose a long chain of very bad words before cutting the deck with a lot more force than strictly necessary. It was likely she was imagining cutting something else, like a throat. “King of Games my ass. You and your fucking... omnipotence and godlike luck. I bet you took every stats class in high school, you—crime against nature.”

“I did take stats in senior high, yes,” Yugi said. “That was a very good guess! You’re really good at guessing, Yilan. Has anyone ever told you that?”

Johanna watched with morbid fascination as Yilan took a deep breath. It wasn’t the sort of calming, internal-mantra-reciting breath. It was a very physical, very preparatory breath that informed the body that somebody was going to be unconscious on the floor shortly.

Reflexively, Johanna wrenched the cards from Yilan’s hands and put herself between the mauler and the maulee.

Yugi looked up at where Johanna was now seated on the table. “Is this the part where you tell me to shut up?”

“If you keep pretending like half your prowess isn’t in bravado I might deck you myself,” Johanna told him.

“That’s fair,” said Yugi. And wasn’t that neat? Yugi knew exactly how his competences were distributed, which by all accounts should’ve made him an arrogant bastard. But no: he was fiercely humble under all those belts and shadows.

The shit-talking was something special, though. It was like being complimented and slapped across the face at once. The brain simply stopped working in the face of Yugi’s cheerful banter.

“That was a challenge,” Yilan said, visibly manic. She rose out of her chair like an avenging angel puppeteered by the hand of god. “That was a challenge, right? Johanna, you heard that. Wasn’t that a challenge?”

“I think we should all be good and go to bed,” Johanna said firmly.

Yamamoto-san raised a hand. He’d recovered some of his colour over the course of the night, which was to say he was pale, gaunt, and literally ashen, but at least now he was in one piece. “Can I go now?” he asked miserably.

In her heart Johanna felt a little pity. Half of what had been missing from his body had been flyswatter-inflicted, and by extension, blown to bits. She wasn’t sure how to feel, and while she was pondering over whether or not to apologize to a homicidal ghost, Yugi made a firm but dismissive gesture.

“You can go,” he told Yamamoto-san. There was a pause, and then he added: “No more games. No more bugs. Or else Yilan here might have to come after you, which I can guarantee is terrifying regardless of whether you’re alive or dead. Do you understand?”

“Yeah,” Yamamoto-san said, no less miserable than he’d been since they dragged him back to their hotel. “No games, no bugs, no... freaky exorcist girls.”

In a rather comical poof, Yamamoto-san disappeared. His despairing frown didn’t actually linger where he sat, but the tension in the room made the idea a lot more substantial.

“Anyway!” Johanna said loudly. “What a game! What a game. You got enough practice, right, Yilan?”

“Practice losing, yeah,” Yilan said venomously.

“People tend to get in a lot of practice losing when they play against me,” Yugi said, which was unhelpful. He smiled sunnily. “Did you at least pick up a few... mm, subtleties, shall we call them?”

For the first time tonight, Yilan shelved the possibility of a rage-induced apoplexy for a frustrated ejection of breath. One might call it a sigh if not for its resemblance to sounds an angry tiger would make. “Twisting the rules into dead knots, yeah,” she said. “Simple rules means a lot more room to go in both a crowbar and brain the other guy with semantics, or whatever.”

“With semantics, yes,” said Yugi. “Not with an actual crowbar. Right?”

Yilan rolled her eyes.

Likely aware that this particular line of inquiry was in vain, Yugi turned his attention to Johanna instead. “Will she hit someone with a crowbar?”

“Yugi, you’re nine kinds of insane and I think all of them are hilarious,” said Johanna, “but the proper question to ask should be: are you brave enough to get between whatever’s being hit and the crowbar?”

The answer wasn’t as much a yes-no as it was a personality quiz. In a continuous effort to defy the baby-cheeks he was born with, Yugi tilted his head, thought for, how do you say, way too long, and finally said, “No.”

“You can’t reason with people like him, Johanna,” said Yilan. “Sometimes you walk in with your team ready to drag people out of the blast zone, but when you find the guy he’s rigged to the teeth with molotovs and a homemade flamethrower. Which is dumb, because you can’t fight an explosion with more explosions.”

Yugi’s expression turned critical. “Actually—”

“There will be no more explosions unless absolutely necessary,” Johanna said firmly. Fully aware of the differing standards of necessary present in the room, she continued, “All which occur must pass my judgement first, seeing how you’ve forgotten that the person who has to feature in all the exploding shots is me.”

That shut Yugi and Yilan up. They were both unhinged to a significant degree, but at least they’d accidentally fed enough civilians to their respective evils not to jump with joy at the prospect of more.

Naturally, the conversation steered itself toward the occult, as things tend to do between practicing exorcists.

“The eye is more of a hereditary thing, I think?” Yugi said, hands cupped around the very shiny and very magic eye on his forehead. It gave his cheeks a natural contour while also making him look insane. The things people did for beauty were wondrous. “The spirit I mentioned earlier—um, my soul-roommate—he had a knack for ancient Egyptian rituals, being an ancient Egyptian himself. I used to think all the hocus-pocus came from him, but apparently it’s just muscle memory.”

“It’s always muscle memory,” said Yilan. “Half of everything is just practice. Just look at Aunty Wei! Everyone thought her talismans were ‘barbaric’ and ‘lacked elegance’, but she could draw them twice as fast as everybody else and all hers ended in something coming apart in more pieces than it started with.”

“Aunty Wei?”

“One of my tutors back home. She could twist your head off with one hand and she might be immortal. Can you change what colour your eye glows?”

Yugi could, in fact, change the colour his eye glowed. This was a pleasant surprise to both him and Yilan despite its total lack of practical application. Life was about the little things, sometimes.