Chapter Text
To say there was nothing, something had to be there to define it.
That was me. Or rather, I couldn’t recognize it as nothing. I wasn’t there either.
Death is like sleep, but you’re not supposed to wake up from it.
Wrong. Everyone wakes up eventually. They just don’t do it as themself.
There was something in the void.
That much is true, yes.
Water swam against the dark, creating an ocean.
In the ocean were clouds of color.
In the colors were a sea of stars.
In the sea of stars were unblinking golden eyes.
In the eyes were–
You’re
Not
Supposed
To
See
That
I woke up drowning.
I couldn't breathe, couldn't breathe couldn't breathe couldn't breathe–
“He's awake!” Someone shouted as my body shook, every muscle in my body seizing as something forced its way up. A sudden force pounded against my back, making me choke on what was coming out. I could do nothing but shake.
The world spun madly. I couldn't stop coughing up water.
“There you go, that's better,” The voice said, and I forced my eyes open despite the stinging pain. I was nearly blinded by neon orange and yellow and rapidly blinked with tears in my eyes until the bright lights solidified into a person kneeling 90 degrees in front of me.
“What,” I rasped before choking on the taste of mud. The man waited patiently for me to stop, black gloves continuing to pat me over. My arms shook when he pressed down firmly, spikes of pain lancing through.
“Doesn’t seem like anything's broken, huh? You're one lucky kid,” He whistled, hauling me upright and looking over his shoulder as I hurled up one last mouthful of water. “Hey, throw me a towel! And a shock blanket!”
Broken? Why would I be broken? What was he talking about? “Fall…?”
He pointed just over my shoulder at something looming over us. Trying to turn my head hurt, so I wobbled around to check.
Brooklyn Bridge. I couldn't tell which side I was closer to. All the lights and sirens made it too much to think.
A fall from that height was tall enough to kill. I knew that much from the fact it was a bridge in the continental US. I felt… horrible, but not dead. Nothing inside hurt, breathing didn’t– it was sore after all the water, but not painful. Something had cushioned my fall besides improbable luck.
A large towel was thrown over my shoulders and scrubbed over my hair fast enough to make me see stars. Some sort of tinfoil thing was tugged over it, but I wasn’t paying attention to that.
I stared down at my arms. They were slimmer and more tan than I somehow expected them to be. My hands were mottled and bruised from the impact, there were calluses in places I knew there shouldn’t be, and I didn’t remember buying any clothes that looked like this. Despite that, looking down at myself, I felt… okay. Alright. As if the person I was looking at really was me.
Something was on my belt. Did I wear belts?
I felt around my right side. A hard rectangular box hung against it, and I glanced down to see a dirty grey deckbox. The top popped open with a wet tchkat, water dripping off of it. I tried to dig the contents out before awkwardly tipping it onto my hand when whatever was inside gave way with a squish, more water coming out with it.
A wad of soaked, unsleeved cards fell out.
You could tell from a glance that all of them were destroyed. They were mushed together and crumbling away at the edges, ink running into an incomprehensible mess. I didn't dare try peeling them apart when my fingers left craters in the paper. Sleeves wouldn’t have saved them, but I could barely wrap my mind around carrying around a deck of unsleeved cards in the first place.
Barely legible on the top of the first card was Herald of Orange Light.
There were no copyright labels in the bottom right. There was no golden sticker in the corner next to it. Bootle– No. They weren’t bootlegs. I didn’t know why I was so sure of that, but they weren’t bootlegs. They were genuine.
They were Duel Monsters cards.
For some reason the thought felt correct, as if the term ‘Yu-Gi-Oh’ was the fictional one. There was a strange surety to it. It even, kind of, made… sense. Something had to have cushioned my fall, and it definitely wasn't a backpack. Magic cards were as good an explanation as any for why I was alive. What else could that dark void be but oblivion?
(Why was I taking this so in stride? The idea of living cards was ridiculous, let alone shadow magic and spirits. Why was I taking it as truth?)
They must have loved Rei Walker. Loved him enough to sacrifice themselves.
The name wasn’t mine. At the same time, it definitely was mine. I had become him… or rather, the person he had been Before patched over his dying self. I was the result, not quite either of them.
“You must’ve loved them,” the man said not unkindly, tugging the blanket further down my shoulders. The Coast Guard patch on his shoulder shone against the sunset.
The cards slowly disintegrated through my fingers. I tried to put them back in the deckbox, but they had long turned into paper mush. They sloughed in half and landed on the ship's deck, crushing the image of a crystal fairy.
And so begins 'you'.
According to the police, I was blown off the bridge when the pedestrian railings broke. A rogue Turbo Duel had raced by, the wind from a series of direct attacks hit old rivets too hard, and off I went along with a few others. Lack of funding meant that as the years went on, repairs had grown sparse, and the steel simply… gave way. I didn't remember any of that, and they didn't look surprised when I told him.
Bureaucracy had been the cause of ‘my’ second death. It was enough to make me want to laugh. I didn’t know why. The person from Before hadn't died from drowning, but from America's second favorite activity right behind gun violence: vehicular manslaughter. In a sense, I had drowned on dry land. Actually, both deaths were caused by very fast automobiles.
… I should never get on a D Wheel.
I didn’t know how many other people got tossed off, but there was only one other person not in high-vis on the ship’s deck when first responders swarmed us at the dock. She’d been shivering with a shock blanket around her, arm bent at an unnatural angle, and was shipped off to the hospital in a different ambulance than me. I tried not to think about what that meant for her and instead focused on the knowledge rattling around my head.
The year was 2050, a full 25 years ahead of when the person Before died, and the world was in the throes of Turbo Duel mania. Unknown was the true reason for the earthquake that claimed nearly a thousand lives in the heart of Neo Domino City, now the Turbo Dueling capital of East Asia. It couldn’t supersede Europe and America’s race tracks with its lack of space, but it could certainly pump out the best D Wheels.
A basic one imported in cost you a brisk $50,000. Even those stupid road towers from Arc-V (what? Oh. I would’ve preferred not to know that) were in development in certain cities, though the US’s horrible infrastructure meant there were two of them in perpetual construction at LA and Manhattan. No one thought they would be finished anytime soon.
I felt both more and less settled as the hours passed. The fever from being drowned wasn’t helping. I could tell which records were from Before and which ones were Rei's, the contrast was too stark, but the devil was in the personal details.
Different experiences, different heritage, different worlds. It was all swimming in my head. For now I chose to ignore the implications of one man’s story creating a universe that let you Pair-A-Dice Smasher gods trapped in cardboard.
Unfortunately one thing that had stayed the same was that I was broke and didn’t know if I could afford to do that.
Rei was a college student scraping by on scholarships and financial aid. The person Before had been much the same, except with siblings and more than one parent. Replacing the phone was an expense I wasn't sure could be made and the loss of his original deck would cost even more than the phone depending on what was in it.
By far the most expensive part of waking up was going to be the bill for the hospital and ambulance, and I dreaded the thought of medical debt.
Hairline fractures along various bones and bruises all over the place, the doctor said, but not bad enough for actual hospitalization if I just took it easy. No liquid in the lungs because I'd coughed it all up somehow, a small miracle, so the only thing I was walking away with was a fever, bruises, and painful bones for the next month or so.
I was pretty sure hairline fractures were supposed to be more serious than that, but maybe the baseline body here was sturdier than the Before. Not by much, but just a little bit. You could only be cratered into walls from the winds of a Duel so many times before your body gave up the ghost.
Either way it didn't matter if fiction had become reality. The idea of paying off an ambulance ride and emergency stay for the rest of my life was enough to make me sick.
“What? We don’t have to pay for it?” I asked an unfamiliar man Rei’s dad, who had crushed me in a hug the second the door flung open.
The father from Before was long dea– Rei had loved him with the force of a thousand suns, and my body automatically reached up to hug him back when he buried me in his shoulder. I could not remember the last time the person Before had been hugged by family.
Black hair in a neat businessman’s cut, a somewhat messy suit, grey eyes that matched the ones I saw when I looked in the metal of the cot. He was warm. I could feel the care he had for ‘me’.
“No,” he said, still holding my hand. “The hospital said there was an anonymous donation. We can go home in an hour.”
So apparently medical money was no longer a concern. But I was still worried. His brow was furrowed and his voice was strained.
The intuition of the person Before spoke for what he didn’t say. Hush money.
I remembered nothing about the D Wheels that knocked Rei into the river, but maybe the other victim did. An incident like this was probably on the news already, I just didn’t know how much because Rei's phone was swept away.
At minimum a debate about the country’s ever crumbling infrastructure would spark. People would get curious about the cause. A few people probably recorded the incident on dashcams as the Turbo Duel raced past, and from there rumors could spread.
Unless someone buried it.
The person Before knew of Illiaster. I did not want to take chances. Inconveniencing the average CEO already carried consequences, adding a global conspiracy to that was not smart. Even if it wasn’t them, me being knocked off the bridge by ‘the winds of the Duel’ could have more to it, and would mean getting whacked by the Arcadia Movement or the sponsors who gave Divine enough money to buy a building. No thanks.
(The God Mars extension villains were a separate issue I could do nothing about. There was no point worrying. I had the suspicion that if I was erased, I would never feel it anyway, it would be straight back to oblivion. Best to keep it out of mind. It wasn’t like they would bother with a random kid from America.)
“Then…” I trailed off awkwardly, not sure how to interact with him. ‘I’ never grew up with this man. I had the knowledge but not the personal experience. “I…”
“How're you feeling, Rei?”
“Bad,” I admitted. He couldn't have known the real reason, but Rei's father took it at face value. Before I could blink I was wrapped in a tight hug again, one palm pressing my head against him.
… He was stronger than he looked.
“You're alright,” He muttered into my hair, trembling a little bit. “You’re fine, Rei. Nothing happened. It’s okay.”
“Nothing happened,” I repeated into his shoulder. To me it was the truth. All I did was wake up on the Coast Guard ship. Factually it wasn’t true, because Rei had very much been forced to take a header off a bridge.
His grip tightened. It still didn’t hurt. “I know.”
Guilt pooled in the bottom of my gut. I let it lie. I didn’t know what else to do but accept this father’s love.
We stayed like that for a pretty long time, long enough for a nurse to check in and tell us we were free to go after handing me an ibuprofen. Rei’s father was very reluctant to let go. One hand remained on my arm, warm and heavy.
“And you're sure he'll be fine?” He asked her while I struggled to swallow the pill dry. The nurse took pity on me and set down the paper cup of ice chips she came in with.
“Yes, after a few days of rest,” She said as I choked down the pill with a half-melted piece of ice. “He has some hairline fractures on his left humerus as well as bruising along his back and other limbs, but nothing permanent…”
I popped another ice chip and carefully didn’t think about how Rei hadn’t been lucky in the first place, considering I was the one sitting here and not him. It didn’t bear thinking right now. It wasn’t like I could change it anyway.
I managed to get through most of the cup by the time they finished talking, the contents of which was a rehash of what I was already told. Rei’s father looked relieved by the news that his son would be okay, if fragile for a month or so while the hairline fractures healed and the psychological shock left his body. I was fine to continue daily life given that I took it easy and didn't put too much pressure on my limbs.
(That memory was never going to leave this body. Dying wasn't easily forgotten.)
“Do you have a method of transportation for him?”
“My car is in the parking lot, I’ll be driving us directly home.”
The nurse checked a notepad I didn’t notice her carrying. “Then you should be free to go, yes.” She gave me a smile you could see on any public service worker’s face, though it seemed more sincere than usual. “Remember, take it easy for a month or so, alright? You got very, and I mean very,” She stressed the word, “lucky with your injuries.”
I nodded, peering at the cup -only 6 or so bits left- and dumping the contents in my mouth. The ice crunched before sticking to my molars, soft enough to be shaped by pressure alone. I threw the cup at the nearby trash can and watched it ricochet in. One drop of water escaped the paper rim and splattered onto the floor.
The nurse crossed the room in three quick strides, closing the door with a soft click.
The warmth on my arm squeezed for a bit before letting go. “Are you ready, Rei?”
I carefully slipped off the cot and tested my balance. Nothing felt off. The paper slippers were incredibly flimsy, but it didn't feel like I would trip on them while walking to the parking lot. “Mmn.”
The hospital room was on the ground floor, but Rei’s clothes had been confiscated since they were soaked through. That included the shoes and socks, leaving me in nothing but the hospital shift and thin slippers that did nothing to protect against the linoleum. I was no longer soaking wet, but I felt like… well, like a walking corpse. Which I was, I guess, even though this body had somehow managed to come back to life.
“Are you cold?”
“No,” I said, body shaking like a twig. Rei’s father shrugged off the bomber jacket he was wearing and draped it over my shoulders, swamping me in the smell of honestly really nice cologne and a faint whiff of some sort of motor oil. Looking through Rei’s records revealed he was an engineer-mechanic, one that worked in the Dueling sector (a sentence that would’ve been very strange to the person Before) to maintain one of the more popular arenas in Queens.
We emerged into a separate parking lot that probably had a lot of levels, though I couldn’t see the rest since we were on the ground level. I had no idea which car was ‘ours’ on account of Rei’s records not being useful (‘blue Toyota car’ was no help when I could see at least 5 of them in front of us), so I followed his father’s lead.
The car turned out to not be a car at all, it was a grey-blue Toyota minivan that beeped open after a few seconds of fumbling for the clicker. I reached for the shotgun door, but Rei’s father frowned at me and pulled a passenger door open instead. Yeah, that made sense.
The inside was cold with stale air, and I tugged the jacket tighter around myself. The seatbelt felt a little too suffocating this way, but the windows rolled down as we started moving, and the breeze made things better. We idled at the entrance for other cars to pass before getting waved through by a security guard.
I looked out the window and watched buildings pass by, the roads widening as we crossed one bridge, then another. Skyscrapers disappeared in favor of projects and apartments, which themselves grew smaller and smaller until they turned into housing stock. After maybe an hour of driving, we passed a park and a few local supermarkets before the minivan started to slow down.
The building Rei’s father parked in front of was large, but the windows weren't the small slots most of the other buildings had. These were large enough to rest my arms on the sills and have space left over, positioned in a way that let me know each room was big and spacious. The inside left even less to the imagination, with a spacious lobby and wide hallways with doors very far apart.
Even a one-bedroom in this building would go for a lot of money. It spoke to the will of Rei's father that he managed to pay off the mortgage on a condo in such a good area. He practically set his child up for success.
Don't think about it don't think about it don't think about it don’t think about it don’t
Plain white walls greeted us when he unlocked the apartment door, bordered by a few bookshelves and a beat up couch facing a coffee table. A larger table in the corner was piled with random books and a tissue box sat on top of them like someone tried to tidy up. I could see gas stoves and a fridge separated from the living room by a small doorway with no door.
“Do you want anything to eat? Soup, maybe?”
“I’m not hungry,” I mumbled as I kicked the hospital slippers off and almost stumbled into the wall trying to put on Rei's house slippers. A hand gently pulled me back while the other confiscated the bomber jacket to hang up.
“Drink some water, at least. Water and a hot bath, how does that sound?”
“I'm sick of water.”
There was a choked wheezing sound like he failed to not laugh. I ignored it and opened the door to the left.
A large window set in the same plain white as the rest of the apartment was the first thing I saw, with a king-sized bed fit next to its wall. A sturdy-looking desk with both a desktop monitor and laptop was next to it, and when I peered my head around the slight entranceway I spotted blue closet doors that probably slid apart. The entire right wall seemed dedicated to drawers and shelves, old school accomplishments displayed proudly next to books and figures.
Rei’s room.
It felt very slightly wrong, like I was two steps to the left of where it was supposed to be. The image of a different, bigger room with two beds and large wooden desks overlapped my vision for a moment before I blinked it away. The building those walls belonged to no longer existed, or maybe never existed in the first place. It wasn’t like construction projects were shared across universes.
I collapsed on the bed and covered my eyes with an arm.
What even was I? I wasn’t the boy or his past life dead two times over. There were simply too many records, and even though ‘my’ memories started from the moment I woke up drowning, my personality was in no way the kind that came from a blank slate.
Too many records vied for my attention, and none of them belonged to ‘me’. The things learned from a collective 40 years crowded my mind, leaving little room for something to develop by itself. In that sense I was a walking ghost.
“This is going to be an issue,” I whispered to no one in particular.
“Rei, at least take a shower! You don't want to catch a cold on top of your fever!”
I stared at nothing in particular for a few minutes before getting up to take that shower. Maybe things would make more sense in the morning.
You know nothing yet.
I woke up staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, which would be the start of a shitty light novel if I didn’t also recognize it.
Right. The bridge. The fall. Waking up in the body of a dead boy.
The bed was very comfortable, and it was with great reluctance I dragged myself out of it. Muscle memory was the only thing that led me to the bathroom. Rei's toothbrush was light green.
He died on a Saturday, which meant at the beginning of tomorrow I had to go to college and also do his part-time job. I didn’t want to, but sleeping had settled me a little bit.
The records were… still records. I didn’t think I could change that no matter how much I wanted to know the emotions behind every year of Rei’s life. The same applied to the person Before. But I didn’t feel like a newborn with a mismatched everything, which had to count for something.
I stared at myself in the mirror. The almond-shaped grey eyes from the hospital cot blinked back, framed by thickset brows and fluffy black hair that seemed to defy gravity. I didn’t know if it had always been there, but a shock of white peeked out the back of my head. Running a hand through it revealed the same texture as the rest of it, if somewhat smoother.
The person Before also had black hair and almond eyes, but that was where the resemblance ended. Grey iris in place of black, cotton-like layers instead of silk that fell straight down… this reflection looked like a tokusatsu secondary ready to contribute nothing except his looks.
“Rei? Food’s ready!”
This was ‘my’ life now, my body. He was my father just as much as he was Rei's… I guess I would be using his name name too. That meant I had responsibilities to fulfill as the one who took his place, like living his life and making sure he thrived.
God, I was a cuckoo, wasn’t I? But I didn’t ask to be created; for the scraps of a dead boy to gain personhood. I didn’t know any way to bring him back, and I was more of the person Before than him in any case. That guy lived a longer life than Rei, and those records had more influence on me as a result. The best I could do was stand in Rei’s shoes and try not to fall over.
… it was a headache trying to keep track of who I was talking about this way, so it was better to call the kid ‘the original’ for now. Suppose that made me the replica. It was easier to bear with that way. “Coming!” I called over my shoulder, turning off the water and patting my face dry.
The large table had been cleared– No, nevermind, I could see the books and tissue box on top of the coffee table. The table was rearranged to make room for a bowl of soup surrounded by three plates of meat and vegetables. One soup, three dishes. It seemed the original’s father was going back to basics to help me recover. I wondered what group of aunties he asked advice from, or more likely was given unsolicited advice from.
The soup was cabbage and pork liver, something the original liked. I had a spoonful and was glad to find I liked it too. I didn't want to rob the original's father of even his son’s favorties. I piled my bowl of rice with wood-ear mushrooms and pork belly.
“What are you planning on today?” Said father asked, putting his chopsticks down to ladle out more soup.
I stuffed another chopstickful of rice in my mouth to give me time to think. “Email college,” I mumbled around the rice, “‘n replace all my stuff.”
“Sounds like a plan.” Th– my father let go of the ladle to check my forehead with the back of his hand. “Your fever still seems a bit high.”
There was a slightly fluffy feeling around the middle of my head, but it wasn't so bad. “I feel fine.”
He hummed a little bit, hand lingering before drawing back. “Still… take an ibuprofen and make sure to rest today, alright? You can take time off school and work if you want to. Just focus on recovery.”
I mumbled assent through my next mouthful of food, unwilling to look him in the eyes. Fortunately I didn’t have to, because fa– no, I didn’t like calling him that either, dad hosed down his entire bowl of rice in about 5 minutes, 1/3rd of the plate of cauliflower and lean beef disappearing along with a frankly concerning amount of soup.
“Stay safe at work!” I called after him, and received a wordless grunt of acknowledgement as he slung a backpack over his shoulder and locked the door.
I took my time eating by comparison. It was impossible to eat all the food, but each of the dishes tasted good. I ate my fill before wrapping the leftovers to put in the fridge and doing the dishes. The bottle of generic ibuprofen stared at me from the counter as I did, and it was with great reluctance that I choked down another pill. 30 minutes later, I was left with nothing more to do except the most tedious part of losing all your belongings: replacing them.
Emailing the college and getting replacements for the contents of my wallet turned out to be more tedious than anything. The bank cards were coming in the mail, I needed to get a new library card, and now the original's professors and workplace knew he got bodied off a bridge. My lack of ID was going to be… a problem, but it wasn't like the original's birth certificate got waterlogged too. Nothing a trip to the DMV (urgh) wouldn’t fix.
The phone was thankfully simpler. The original had a habit of writing things down, a habit that allowed me to fill in a secondhand Industrial Illusions phone I found at the bottom of a drawer.
The only contacts he had were dad, his boss, and a college Whatsapp that I couldn't access on account of the lack of phone number, a lack I couldn’t solve since I wasn’t in charge of the phone plan. That was slightly depressing. I decided to not look at his social media for now despite the passwords for each account being there too.
Replacing the deck wasn’t going to be as easy. It was, however, interesting.
The original wrote down his decklist, and I was… well, there were a few things the person Before had known. One was that this era of gameplay in the Before was called Edison Format. Another was that they were not very good at it.
YuGiOh itself, Duel Monsters, they were plenty okay at it. But they had picked up the game for barely half a year before putting it back down, and that was during the time where Accesscode Talker was god. From there it was years of only Master Duel experience, where Knightmare Unicorn into Accesscode Talker was god.
Effect prompts did not exist in real life.
The person Before hadn’t memorized card activations, not truly. Why would they when there was a handy yellow prompt every time something fulfilled a condition? I knew the broad sweeps of many of them, and specific combo lines for cards that didn’t exist yet, but I didn’t know how to play with cards belonging to a format the person Before never experienced. Those cards were also a fair sight older, meaning the person Before only knew of them offhand. They certainly never played against a majority of them.
I had seen Herald of Orange Light in the original’s deck, and his notebook clarified it as a Fairy deck. It was, even to my inexperienced-experienced eyes, not the best. The person Before could’ve very easily beaten this even with unfamiliar rules and cards.
One Nova Summoner, one Sanctuary in the Sky, the rest filled in by one or two Lightsworn cards and monsters with no effects. There was a single copy of Heavy Storm and some backrows I didn’t recognize from just their names. I had no frame of reference for how expensive the cards were, but his only Extra Deck card was Avenging Knight Parshath. In short, the deck was unusable.
… that was extremely rude, especially when they created saved me. I silently patted the deckbox on the desk in apology even though the cards inside were nothing but a mass of pulp. I didn’t have the heart to clean it out.
The cards were not at fault, they just couldn't compete against mechanically ‘better’ ones. At a certain point gameplay trumped luck. It wasn’t a situation like the Junks where disparate cards had come together; the original had tried, but this deck just wasn’t coherent.
Decks were meant to have themes. For the Before things were in reverse order; the cards existed because of the people that used them. As I booted up my laptop and looked back at the original’s notebook for the password, I thought about what the existence of archetypes meant for card accessibility.
It was impossible to know everything about the Before’s YuGiOh, and the original had only played Duel Monsters in club rooms and on the street. But certain cards were truly exclusive here in a way that didn’t exist in the Before. Blue-Eyes White Dragon remained the sole right of Seto Kaiba, three cards sequestered away wherever an elderly CEO kept his literally priceless deck– yet I had records of playing against copies of them countless times, of winning and losing as its ‘archetype’ gained ever populous ranks.
I wouldn’t delude myself into thinking I could defeat Seto Kaiba, but I had something few others did: knowledge of how to fight against Blue-Eyes. It didn’t translate exactly, but there weren’t that many ways of putting Monster cards on the field. I would have a better fighting chance than a random Duelist.
The problem was that I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on the cards I had in mind.
Most of them were under the umbrellas of ‘didn’t exist yet’ or ‘would never exist’. The alternate summoning methods after Synchro fell under the latter half; there was physically no way XYZ or LINK could come to be. A lot of things depending on an errant LINK-2 somewhere in its combo would not happen. The former had the additional caveat of ‘might never exist’, so it wasn’t something I could depend on. I had to create a deck with what the original had and what I could obtain.
The plastic tub of cards at my feet was a good start. The original never wrote down its contents, so I was going to have to look through them myself. No matter how old they were, I had confidence I could at least fill out my backrow.
While recalling the original’s memories, I also found out why this world had such a startling lack of power creep, at least compared to the Before: because archetypes as I recognized them did not exist.
It had been 60 years since the start of the game known as Duel Monsters. With quarterly releases that was a monstrously large card pool, literally unprecedented here because the only example was Duel Monsters itself. The closest example in the Before was YuGiOh, which had only existed for 27 years. How did it not devolved into the absolute power creep the person Before witnessed and partook in?
Don’t print set lists, and don’t scale the power of new cards.
For 60 years Duel Monsters experienced a truly glacial escalation for the sheer quantity of cards it printed. From the start almost every new set had new cards, with reprints according to some internal company clock I had no knowledge of (or so said Duelpedia, which I was looking at right now. The site looked like something out of the early 2010s). Synchro Monsters were introduced some 20 years ago, and it was said there were not many reprints of each one… for the cards that even got any.
The lack of official set lists meant nobody truly knew outside of Industrial Illusions. At any point some random one-off they printed decades ago or slipped into a reprinted set could come to haunt a tournament and then disappear with its Duelist.
There were ‘archetypes’ but they weren’t mass produced, the amount of copies each card got determined by something known only to Industrial Illusions. You couldn't rip 5 boxes of a set and guarantee 3 copies each of a full deck of cards created to function and complete one another. That wasn’t how Duel Monsters worked. You had to do all of that yourself.
This was the crux of why the original didn’t have a ‘competitive’ deck: he couldn’t. To collect cards for a theme, you needed to manually go digging through 60 years worth of sets, some of which were obscenely expensive, and hope the ones fitting the theme were cohesive enough to work. You couldn't guarantee what was in the box you got, because nobody knew. You didn’t even know if it was physically possible to build a deck with what you wanted, because nobody knew.
If you couldn’t build with one in mind, you got nowhere. If by some stroke of luck you did, you stuck to it like a religion no matter if it was good or bad. If a card didn’t fit, you didn’t use it.
By comparison the deckbuilding philosophy of Before could be summed up in one sentence: ‘the most consistent way to win’. Not cheap, or satisfying, or ‘the way you wanted to’– consistent. If you were consistent you could get results. If you were consistent you would make the top cut. To be consistent you had to know everything to keep it that way, and the best way to do that was to control what was on the board.
As an outsider looking in, I agreed with the fundamental ethos of the Before’s approach. Winning was nice. Wanting to win wasn’t wrong by itself.
But I didn’t like the process. The point of a game was to play, not to… turn it into a question of who could build the biggest gun the fastest while slapping components out of the other person’s hands. While getting your own components slapped out of yours, too. It didn’t seem fun. It wasn’t fun to the person Before, who picked up and put down YuGiOh like a constantly buzzing phone.
The decks made this way also looked really odd. There seemed to usually be one or two central archetypes, but one of them was often just 6 cards or so. Deck themes existed, in the sense that cards created for a Duelist fit inside them, but players never seriously created ones themselves.
It was an ‘anything goes’ philosophy. The original would have absolutely hated it all no matter how good they were at winning.
That sort of deck wasn't feasible to make without a core engine anyways, but I opened several tabs to check what cards still existed.
Almost all the Solemns the person Before knew seemed to be printed but weren't in most decks. ‘Too risky’ was the general consensus. You could spend the card slots on the deck's engine, or on a backrow that could potentially save you in the late game. A negate that took your LP wasn't ‘worth it’ when direct attack monsters could kill you even with their low ATK.
… 4000 LP was a dangerously low number. I'd have to remember that. One use of Judgement would chunk me down to just 2000 LP.
Waboku. I needed a Waboku. I searched the name and recoiled at the price tags. There were easier ways to get this effect, so why was the price so high? Did Seto Kaiba burn every copy of Negate Attack or something?
Emergency Provisions for $0.25, that was… good enough, I supposed. Numinous Healer would be better, but I couldn’t find any copies of that either. There was no way it didn’t exist yet, so maybe it was a supply issue.
I needed to get my hands on Effect Veiler for sure, that was a 3-of. DD Crow was useful but probably not necessary, Droll Lock Bird only if I wanted to narrow down what to build around. It was better to take care of staples first before deciding what the engine would be…
…
“Why am I doing this?”
The words slipped out without meaning to. My hands stopped on the keyboard.
“Why.” I sounded out the sentence again. “Why am I doing this?”
No really, what was the reason for any of this? It was a good question to ask. I lived in the US, and flight costs to Neo Domino City were atrocious. I would never be close enough to that side of the pond to do anything unless I went there on purpose. The pride of the person Before only went so far. Why was I trying to build a ‘viable’ deck? I didn’t have to. The only things I had to care about were myself and my father, neither of which would be affected by my ability as a Duelist. For me it was the same as the people from Before; it was just a game.
Not true, the rationality of Before pointed out. There were various professions that placed Dueling ability at high prestige, and it raised your reputation. I would’ve had to participate sooner or later. On top of that, most criminals were also Duelists, and being able to defend yourself was important.
That was true, but I didn’t have to go this far. I didn’t need to shoot for the stars when I would never meet them. Something like a mediocre pure Sanctuary of the Sky was enough.
That wasn’t true. I was avoiding the question. The original had a deck and it didn’t save him. I was here because his cards couldn’t save him. They loved him, and it mattered, but the original was dead.
“Why I want to be a Duelist.” I rolled back in the chair and stared at the ceiling. “I…”
‘I’ was born drowning. I couldn’t stop thinking of the winding behemoth of abyssal colors from before I woke up. Like a galaxy about to eat me whole. I didn’t know if–
“You’re scared of dying, silly! That’s why!”
I flinched so hard I almost fell off the chair, whirling around to my feet. “Who–”
There was a dolphin floating in the middle of the room.
If it was a normal dolphin I would still be confused, but that thing wasn’t a normal dolphin. It was slightly translucent, like it was 80% opacity, and 3 azure eyes on each side blinked in sync. Purple armor accented with off-beige covered the majority of its body to the point I almost didn't realize the dolphin itself was white. Only the underbelly was visible.
“Wow, you accepted the idea of magic and reincarnation real fast, but little ol’ me is what scares you?” It snickered in a vaguely feminine voice, doing a loop de loop in the air. “Catch you watching horror films stone cold then jumping when a spider shows up on the desk. ‘Heart attack from a mouse’ kinda guy, aren't you?”
I tilted my head. “... why do you talk like that?”
“Huh? Like what?”
I genuinely couldn’t tell if it was playing dumb or actually didn’t know what I was talking about. I sighed and turned back to the box of cards. “Whatever.”
“THAT’S IT?! That’s your reaction?” The dolphin hiccuped with laughter, doing perfect circles in the air. “Ahahahahaaaaa, you’re funny! You’re really funny! You looked so stupid just a second ago and now you’re back to normal!”
The way it talked had shocked my brain into working again, but I wasn’t about to admit that. “You're a Duel Spirit.” It was the only explanation for a semi-transparent animal wearing armor showing up in my room.
“Yep!”
“Why the hell are you here?”
“Tsk tsk tsk, that’s very– very rude of you, Duelist!” It said, still shaking with its earlier laughter. "It's ‘cause you’re a reincarnator, so I feel like hanging around since you already know us!”
I paused before turning back to the dolphin. “No I'm not.”
“Yes you do! You know my name!”
“What? That's not what–” I massaged the sides of my head. “You're a dolphin, but other than that I have no clue what card you are. And what do you mean ‘reincarnator’? I’m not one of those.”
“Wellll, let's focus on the important part first! You definitely know me, I can tell by your eyes.” It ‘swam’ up to me, eyes blinking in what I thought was a pattern before I realized it was trying to see if I would get distracted. “C’mon, wrack that head of yours! You can’t have gotten that much brain damage from waking up again.”
I knew I didn't have any on account of not falling headfirst. The Fairy deck cushioned the rest. “... I'm fairly sure your design is familiar–”
“Fairly sure and being sure are two separate things!”
I was going to punch this thing. “Fine, you're familiar, but I don't think you're a printed card right now, so that means you shouldn't even be here at all.”
The dolphin chittered. “Printed or not doesn't matter, you know? A card doesn't always have a spirit, but spirits don’t always have cards either! Work that brain of yours!”
I scrunched my face. It kept calling me stupid, but I genuinely didn't know why…
Wait. A white dolphin with purple-cream armor. 6 small eyes. The way it swam through the air in circles was similar because the person Before had seen it, just in miniature and behind a computer screen.
“… White Aura Dolphin.”
“Bingo!” It cheered, doing another 360 degree spin-dive.
All my records seemed to point to the fact that Duelists who could see spirits were attracted to each other in some way, like magnets. I didn't have time for Duel Spirit nonsense. “Either help me out or leave me alone. I don't want to be talking to thin air all the time, dad will think the fall really did give me brain damage.”
“Awww, that's sweet of you. But y'know, you don’t really need us!”
I blinked. It seemed awfully certain of what it just said. “What do you mean?”
White Aura Dolphin laughed, swimming around in the air. “You’re not veeeery good, but you’re good enough! You can top this country easy if you opened a box or four and got real lucky!”
I sat back down to press my palms against my eyes. Luck like that wasn't just impossible, it would get me sent to jail for made-up theft charges so some rich kid could put it in their collection. This stupid fish was insane.
“I heard that! And I’m not a fish, y'know?"
“Your entire archetype is Fish.” I paused and raised my head. “You can hear my thoughts?”
“Kinda? Not really?” White Aura Dolphin wobbled in a so-so motion for lack of human hands. “I dunno about material dolphins, but we Duel Spirits get kinda affected by what you think of us. So I can sorta tell what’s in that empty skull of yours.”
Do not punch it. Do not punch it. I couldn't think of a single study where people thought dolphins were psychic. Maybe popular media? The vague impression of a tricolor machine came to mind.
“You're thinking of something really rude, aren't you?”
I frowned. “Why would a robot anime be rude?”
“I don't want my Duelist to be a Charmaxxing gunpla chud!” It wailed performatively, attempting to put the back of a flipper on its head.
“A what?”
“It’s like a figurine collector, but worse! Bobbleheads and Funko Pops got nothing on the plastic cement huffers, but even they’re better than Korean gacha players! And THEY’RE leagues better than a greentexter!”
I needed this thing to shut up before I permanently lost braincells. I debated throwing the original's paperweight Substitoad at its face to see if that would give it marginally more sense before deciding I wanted the frog to live more than I wanted the dolphin to be quiet. “… Are you going to help me deckbuild or do I need to put in earplugs?”
White Aura Dolphin gave me the impression of raised eyebrows. “You don't own those.”
It had me there. “I still need new decks and I can’t concentrate if you’re making fun of me the entire time.”
“Fiiine, fine,” It waved off, swimming through the air to peer at the notebook. “Wow, that’s not very good. A Space Mambo could do better than this.”
I swatted at its forehead half expecting my hand to go through. The dull slap echoed and felt a little bit like slapping a watermelon. A wet, slightly sticky watermelon. “What the hell did I just say? And you’re the one that said I didn't ‘need’ you and your friends. I can’t use a deck with nothing in it.”
White Aura Dolphin drooped. “That doesn't mean you get to leave us ooouuuut…” It darted back when I raised Substitoad. “Alright, I get it! Jeez!”
I couldn’t even remember how White Aura worked, but given the odds of pulling a good Extra Deck, I resigned myself to having to listen to this thing for the foreseeable future. I slouched into the swivel chair. “If you want me to build a deck for your pals, give me their cards.”
White Aura Dolphin perked up. “And me?”
“And you, whatever. I don't know a lot of the Fish archetypes, but from what I remember you guys were mostly paired with the Ghoti–”
●●●●◉◉◉ ◉◉◉●●●●
●●●◉◉ ◉◉●●●
My body locked up.
The golden eyes were back. How could they be back? They lived in the void, not the waking world. I had seen them when I died. If they were here I couldn't be alive.
Maybe they never left.
Maybe it was all nothing but a dream. The elaborate hallucination on the part of a dead kid who didn't want to let go.
●●●●◉◉◉ ◉◉◉●●●●
●●●◉◉ ◉◉●●●
…
- - - - _ _ _ _ _ _ - - - -
- - - _ _ _ _ - - -
The golden eyes disappeared, leaving nothing but my own shadow.
“Never do that again,” White Aura Dolphin said as I tried to remember how existing worked. Its bubble and cheer had disappeared the instant those eyes looked at me. It was shaking. “You can’t be calling for monsters like that, especially not ones like them.”
I took a big breath and let it out as slowly as I could, balling my hands. I still couldn’t move. “I wa– I wasn’t calling for them.”
“You were.” White Aura Dolphin swam to my desk and hid under it. 10 seconds passed. I thought it would leave it at that until its snout poked back out. “If you name something it’s the same as taking responsibility for it. Obviously they'll go looking when someone names AND calls for them.”
To name was to know. That was an old saying, wasn't it? And I had just tried to name a Synchro Monster that lived outside of time and space.
“Ah.” Trying to stand up resulted in my knees giving out. “Noted.”
We stayed like that for a while. My heartrate slowed back down to normal over the course of 5 minutes, though it still felt like the ground had dropped out from under me. I didn't have the will to start sorting after that visceral reminder of what was behind the cards.
I got up to get water. The original's mug was cream white with a Christmas tree on the side, some sort of gift from years past. My palms itched with the urge to spike it into the ground. I scratched at a chip in the paint instead.
5 more minutes passed. I alternated between staring at the wall and staring at the ceiling, carefully thinking of nothing at all.
White Aura Dolphin popped out of the desk hollow and narrowed its eyes at me. “How’d you know its name, anyway? You're a human, you shouldn't know the True Name of something like that. Even I didn't know until you said it.”
Oh. Uh, hmmmm, “I said I wasn't a reincarnator because I'm not the original Rei, but the person he was Before had approximate knowledge of many things.”
White Aura Dolphin really frowned at me this time. “Approximate knowledge doesn’t cover the ghost fish.”
“It's not important.” It kind of was. “It's why I have to build new decks, though.”
For the first time in the 20 or so minutes since I met it, White Aura Dolphin seemed exasperated. “Whatever lets you sleep at night.” It visibly thought about something for a few seconds. “... are they good?”
“Good? The–?” I nearly said the name again and bit my tongue hard enough to taste copper. “Depends,” I mumbled around a sore tongue. “Power creep. Counter cards.”
“And Lady Luck, right,” the dolphin nodded sagely, regaining some of its irreverence. “Synchro?”
“What else would they have?” In-archetype, anyway. If I went my whole life without seeing Baronne de Fleur I'd be happy. “Fusion?”
“Iunno, the way you act I figured you have experience with Polymerization. Am I right?”
Super Polymerization was a card the players Before used every single duel for breaking troublesome boards. If I so much as spoke the name of the card I suspected Yubel would smite me on the spot. “Yes for me, no for the fish. But any version of Poly is too expensive for me to use.” I drained the mug. “Unless we're going for Hero Diva Frogs.”
White Aura Dolphin gave me that look again that said I was the weird one. I chose to ignore it in favor of popping the top of the bulk box to start organizing, the water having bolstered my spirits some.
The amount of cards wouldn't have been unfamiliar to the person Before, but something felt off. Maybe 20 boxes worth were in here, and none of it was organized beyond putting them in neat rows. A lifetime of TCG produced many more cards than this. If it was just a box or two per birthday it made sense, but… no, that didn't matter.
2 copies of Bottomless Trap Hole. That wasn’t the worst. Mask of Weakness, that was a card the person Before wouldn't have seen since the days of lunchroom YuGiOh. Maybe it could go in the Side Deck.
“You are using shit from the Stone Age,” White Aura Dolphin observed as I sorted the box of cards.
“I haven’t got shit but the Stone Age. Give me a break.”
There were more Effect Monsters than I thought there’d be. Part of me had been expecting the Normal Monster bulk of the DM era, but clearly that wasn't the case. Sure there were a lot of them, about 1/4th of the total monster cards, but a good amount were Effect Monsters, and maybe 1/6th of all of them were Tuners. That wasn't bad odds for building a deck.
It took a grueling 4 hours until the box was sorted to my liking. First types, then attributes, then levels; I knew if I half-assed it then it would never be finished. The jury was out for if I would maintain this organization, but it gave me something to do other than spin in my chair. At the end of it all, though, I had to accept a rather grim reckoning.
“You've got to be kidding me,” I asked the piles of cards sitting haphazardly on my desk and bed. “What are the odds of that?”
What Extra Deck monsters had I thought the original had besides the Parshath that was now a wad of pulp? Cloudcastle maybe, to match his Fairy theme. Angel of Zera if that fellow was out yet. I thought there'd be at least one I could work with, even if it was Fusion despite my words to White Aura Dolphin.
But there was nothing. He had absolutely nothing.
Were Synchro Monsters really that rare? Surely not, right? I knew they couldn't be as common as the Before, but this was crossing a line! How did Industrial Illusions expect people to Duel when they couldn't fill out their Extra Deck?!
Was the original just that unlucky? Did he trade or sell them all???
(Was it something worse? Did I have to extract my own pound of flesh from people? It was possible the original blocked those memories out so thoroughly I never inherited the records. The mind was not immutable. That was why I existed.)
“Sooo,” White Aura Dolphin drew out as I clutched my head in despair, “Can I contribute or are you going to bean me with a frog statue?”
It took an embarrassingly long time for me to process that sentence. “What?”
“Hold out your hand.”
Confused, I reached my right hand out and flinched back when it slapped me with an armored flipper. “Ow?!!”
It snickered at me before a stack of cards was retrieved from a seam in its armor (were its flippers magnetic?) and tossed onto my palm. I scrambled to make sure none of them fell. Flipping them over revealed 3 copies each of White Sardine, White Sunfish, White Moray, and White Stingray.
They felt… different from the Monster cards littering my bed and desk. I didn't know how to put a finger on it. There was a presence to them that went beyond paper and ink.
“Now your other hand!”
I frowned at the glint in its eyes and warily extended my left hand, jerking back when it seemed like it would slap me again. Apart from more snickering at how much of a coward I was, a much thinner stack was placed in my hand, remarkably more gentle and careful than before.
These cards had white borders denoting their status as Synchro Monsters: one copy each of White Aura Dolphin itself, White Aura Porpoise, White Aura Monoceros, and White Aura Whale.
If I thought the Whitefish were noticeable, their Extra Deck really drew the eye, the borders almost looking like mother-of-pearl. I could smell saltwater as I tilted them this way and that, watching how the ink shone despite the lack of foil.
(In the back, barely hidden by the whale, was a blank card with a Synchro frame. I knew which one was missing because of the person Before. I didn't dare say its name. I had learned my lesson already.)
“Tadaaaaah~! Now you can't complain about being a broke duelist, Duelist!” White Aura Dolphin posed with in a manner reminiscent of that ‘finger under the nose’ stance you saw in a lot of old cartoons. “The others don’t mind you, but they’re all kind of shy and/or party poopers in the case of Whale, so I’ll be the only one you see around!”
That made me frown. I wanted to ask if that meant all of them had been eavesdropping on us, but there was one thing I felt was more important. Not the broke part, it was a fact of life that TCGs made you live the ice soup diet. As I glanced back down at the contents of my hands, I couldn’t help but note, “This isn't enough for a full deck.”
“No shit, smartypants, we're engine, not filler.” White Aura Dolphin jabbed a flipper at me. “We’ve got more cards than this!”
I stared at the 12 cards in my right hand before raising an eyebrow. The engine wasn't anything special (by the standards of Before it was pretty bad), but I did need one to even get started. I knew the archetype had some support, so, “There's 4 monsters total, where's your backrow?”
“You gotta earn it, duh.” It butted against the small of my back, remarkably gentle for something that was as big as me. “Now get going.”
“Going… where?”
“Out. How else will you get cards?” White Aura Dolphin tilted its head. “You gotta buy, trade, or find ‘em. You can't exactly do that from your bedroom floor, right?”