I mean I'm here rewatching the series at minimal volume, eating Ben and Jerrys and wondering if I keep writing scenes out of order and posting them with minimal context for validation, if I might end up with a finished fic. Anyway, have another scene, in which Bakura and Odion wake up during the Virtual World arc and make terrible choices:
Bakura woke up to the sound of arguing.
This was, in and of itself, not unusual. Domestic Bliss was something that had deserted his life long ago, between his father's spiral into insanity, his current precarious living situation, and the evil bastard that seemed to be parasitizing his brain.
This was a new sort of argument though.
"How could you let this happen he's your BROTHER-" She snarled.
"I feel like I did pretty good for the fact that he's LITERALLY DEMONICALLY POSSESSED AND GOT MUTILATED BY HIS OWN FATHER" He roared back. "It's not like any of us have a magical bit of jewelry that let's us see the future, OH WAIT."
There was a loud crash and the sound of breaking glass.
Bakura contemplated rolling back over and letting whatever his neighbors were arguing about be, but then he remembered he wasn't at the shitty weekly rental, and that he quite probably accidentally survived a shadow game the previous night. Quietly, he rolled onto the floor,and army crawled to the door. Out of stealth, definitely. And not because he was pretty sure one of his knees was broken.
He very carefully opened the door and peered into the hallway to see... Marik? No, no, he was Marik's older brother, who had been acting as a decoy for him. And some strange woman. Ishizu Ishtar, sister of Marik, head of Egyptian antiquities, wielder of the Millennium Necklace.
He wasn't going to question how he knew that. The Parasite had definitely been out and about last night, and worse for the wear from it. He hadn't bothered to hide his memories and was, for once, blissfully silent. Which might go a long way towards explaining why he felt like he had been hit by a truck. Possibly Literally. The parasite had never quite gotten the hang of automobiles.
They had stopped the fight with whatever broke this time, looking more disappointed than bloodthirsty.
"I'm sorry." they managed to say at the same time, before she half-heartedly punched him in the chest before leaning in for a hug. He wrapped an arm around her.
"We can argue later," Ishizu muttered, turning and walking up the stairs to the plaza. "Right now, we need to find Marik or the Pharoh before he gets killed!"
"Or worse." Odion muttered, turning his head and glaring down the hallway in Bakura's direction, causing him to freeze like the taxidermy Koala his father insited upon keeping on the mantle.
Like the Koala, it drew more attention than anyone really wanted.
"Oh. Hello." Odion's face softened, and he crouched slightly, approaching Bakura in the manner one might a frightened cat. "I'm glad you're still with us- ah... Marik never told me your name. You, uh, are still with us, right?" he asked when Bakura failed to get up or respond to him.
He stepped closer, and the pale youth began to shuffle backwards in a distressing fashion, like a malfunctioning horror movie prop. "HEY WOAH WHAT-" he shouted, running down the hall and managing to block the door when Bakura attempted to close it with is foot as much as his face.
"Now lishen to me vewy carfuwy-" he grunted, face smooshed in the door frame. It relaxed a fraction of an inch when Bakura turned to look up at him. "-You got the shit knocked out of you and I got hit by lighting but we're lucky. One of the girls is only breathing."
"Oh Gods." Bakura groaned.
"The Gods have abandoned us." Odion corrected him. "Currently, the blimp seems to have been hijacked and parked in some sort of Supercomputer Submersible, and both my demonically-possessed brother and all the other duelists are missing." he explained, leaning a bit more in the doorway to peer at Bakura, who had looked bad before, but upon closer inspection, was looking increasingly worse. "Also, good morning, would you like some breakfast? You look awful."
Bakura stared blankly up at him before his last remaining brain cell activated and on autopilot the words "Yes I'd love a cup of tea." fell out of his mouth.
"That's the spirit." Odion attempted to reassure him, reaching in the door to pat his head, then grab him by the collar to drag him to his feet. Bakura responded by shrieking in a manner normally reserved for particularly cursed artifacts. "MY KNEEEEEEEEE!!"
"SHIT FUCK! AH- Here, here, I'll just- DON'T CLAW MY FACE WHAT ARE YOU, A CAT? There, see? Let's go find Ishizu," He sighed, carrying Bakura out of the room on his hip.
"Why is there yell- ODION HE ALMOST DIED GO PUT HIM BACK." Ishizu fussed, fingers twitching like she wanted to strangle him.
"He wants tea, and I'm really hoping knows something about computers." Odion huffed, carrying Bakura up the stairs to the plaza, where an upturned table, scattered breakfast foods and a Samovar lodged halfway through the shatter-resistant glass of the blimp windows. So that's what woke him up.
"Please, help yourself to any toast not currently on the floor and I'll figure out tea." He set Bakura down at the table and smiled pleasantly, before casually walking over and extracting the samovar from the window with one hand and vanishing into the kitchen.
"I'm so sorry, Odion's not one to take a bad situation lying down. Are you alright?" Ishizu asked stiing beside Bakura and gently patting his shoulder.
"I think I got hit by a truck." he coughed.
"It was an Egyptian God card, Actually." She winced.
"Ah. That would tend to explain the lack of license plate indentation." he nodded. "If it's a consolation, it's got less of a wallop than a Ford F-150."
"Concerning!" She said, attempting to sound positive as Odion returned with the Samovar and a block of cured meat.
"The good news is, we are not in Hell yet." Odion said, sitting down, pulling a distressingly large knife out of his belt and cutting slices off it. "The bad news is I think we're in some kind of giant submarine supercomputer, which might actually be worse. I'm not eager to tangle with whatever is posessing my brother, but if the Pharoh is killed by whatever this is, we're all doomed, so I propose a Rescue Mission. Which is going to consit of you and me and a pair of crutches because the staff is hiding from me in the cockpit."
"You don't think it has anything to do with you throwing the samovar halfway though a window?" Ishizu asked. "And you don't plan on taking me along with you?"
"Ishizu, I'm in no position to do anything, but if something happened to both of you, I wouldn't cope. Please, will you stay Miss Valentine and see if there's anything that can be done for her..." he asked, offering her a plate of cured meat and fruit.
"You aren't, but I'll do it. Good to see you have something like a conscience left." She glared, but accepted it from him anyways.
"You'll know how to find him better than I do." She sighed, and handed him a teacup.
Odion put two sugar cubes in the cup in a display of trust that slightly bewildered Bakura. She could have put anything in the bottom of the cup! He looked over at her, and the way her eyes shined with tears and the spoon rattled with fury when she set it down a little too hard. Nah. She wasn't a poisoner. If she was going to kill her brother, it'd be with her bare hands. He scooched his seat just a bit further from her and closer to the criminal mastermind, who was seeming much less lethal by comparison. Odion patted his shoulder companionably again and pushed the sugar jar toward him.
"Now, please tell me you know something about computers. Ishizu and I are both moderately proficient at Windows 97 but that's it."
"I er, well, I did build a linux box for school, but that's just basic computer assembly and programming-" Bakura started, looking out the window at something that looked like H. R. Grieger had fucked the Borg Queen and the resulting offspring had eaten the pentagon. "-Hm. But those look like hydrothermal cooling tubes, so this system is using ocean water to cool the processors, and at that volume- either this is a rendering machine, or it's the size of central park."
"I saw when we were being hijacked, it's much smaller than that. It looked like a cargo carrier ship with a pair of... ray, you, kow the fish?
ray-shaped wings, with big circular things like fans in the middle of them. About three cargo ships in total. Or at least, that's what was on the surface. the blimp went down about five stories into the hangar before it landed." Ishizu offered.
"Hm. Custom machine, huge budget. Did you see anything else? what shape is it, any logos, antennae?"
"I didn't panic at first because it had a Kaibacorp logo on it, so I thought this was the locaton for the finals, then the turret guns popped out of the walls." She shrugged. "I also thought I head a child's voice. Not Kaiba's borther, but about that age? I'm not sure, it was in the cockpit and I was still waking up.
Bakura blinked a few times. "...The current Kaibacorp logo, or an older one? It used to be a military contractor before Seto took over, so maybe this is a leftover piece of equipment?"
"Older, definitely." She nodded. "It had geodesic scramblers on top, like on US battleships and aircraft carriers too. It certainly looks like military equipment." She nodded.
"Does it sound familair?" Odion asked.
"Well, this time last year, Seto got tricked into getting trapped in some kind of virtual reality game by the former CEOs of his company, and Yugi and Joey had to rescue him from it." Bakura nodded. "I'm not certain, but CEOs aren't the most creative lot and this could be some kind of souped-up second attempt at a coup."
"How do you get 'stuck' in a VR game? Wouldn't you just... take the helmet off?" Asked Odion.
"No, this is some kind of deep-dive-seperate-you-from-your-body VR. Gave me the creeps just hearing about it." Bakura shook his head, before pouring himself another cup of tea.
"Really!" Ishizu huffed. "That boy has a hell of a lot of nerve saying magic isn't real when he's walking around with a computer that can seperate body and soul and imprison it like a millenium item!"
Odion snorted a laugh. "Maybe next time tell him you're wearing an Ancient Egyptian Apple iNecklace. It's dumb enough to work." He pushed a bowl of strawberries at Bakura. "Alright, supposing this is an enormous VR computer and they've all been menaced into joining a game, how do we find them?"
"If it's a VR machine that's cooled with water, those two round things in the wings are probably pumps to keep it circulating- they won't be in the central processing, it's too hot and you want to keep it dust-free so they'd want as few people in there as possible. But they'd be fairly close, because the cabling would be a nightmare. If it weren't for the guns, I think we could find it if we were to walk out and look for the fiberoptic cabling. It looks like a big yellow hose."
Odion got up, walked over to the window , and stuck his head out the hole the samoar had been in. "Is it an OSHA-Yellow rubber-coated hose about eight inches thick that says 'DO NOT CUT' every five feet?"
"Yes!" Said bakura, sartled.
"Cool, I can see it in the hall on the other side of the Hangar door." Said Odion. "Really convienient, like some higher power wants us to find it and get on with the story already."
"Perhaps the Gods have not abandoned us?" Ishizu asked.
"Nah, the gods are way more compotent than this thing, and wouldn't put in an obvious self-depricating lampshade joke like this." He said, shaking his head. "Eat something marshmallow, I'll go get everything prepped for the expidition."
***EXTREMELY COOL BUT ALSO VERY SILLY D&D-STYLE DUNGEON CRAWL FOLLOWS, I'LL WRITE IT LATER I PROMISE***
Scene: Inside the control room of the Mobile fortress, attempting to uplink a laptop into the extremely dated supercomputer. Things are paused because both computers have to update thier software.
"You are..." Bakura paused, attempting to figure out how to say this delicately. "...really good at this?"
"Thanks." Odion muttered, still glaring out the door, waiting for incoming robots.
"Like, really, really good at this." Bakura tried again as he watched the code compling on the laptop, building their door into the game.
"I did grow up in a catacomb." he laughed.
"Yeah, but that's different than being able to theory-of-mind your way through the structural and economic priorities of a war profiteer to figure out where he hid the access terminals in his underwater supercomputer." Bakura said. "And very different than knowing how to check for lasers, or what a pit trap looks like, or pre-programmed patrol routes look like."
Odion looked over his shoulder at Bakura, considering him.
"Alright. Don't tell my sister but when Marik and I were first out on our own, we were flat broke. As in, I went about naked for a week when I couldn't afford new pants after mine fell apart." He explained, still watching the door.
"And you needed capital to survive, let alone start up your own criminal empire." Bakura nodded along, watching the little hourglass spin on the laptop screen.
"And well, there's all that gold in the caves above the valley of the Kings, and the dead sure aren't using it..."
"No!" Bakura gasped, delighted. "A tomb-raider!"
"It was the Saite Dynasty those guys were practically Persians!" He said, waving his hand dismissively. "But those have been looted for centuries and there isn't much left, but you can tell from the scuff marks and the graffiti on the walls which museums and private estates the gold ended up in, and that's where the real money is."
Bakura clapped, ecstatic. "Oh! Please tell me it was you who took the sarcophagus- Inner sarcophagus, they always said it was one of the ramses but it was definitely a late-kingdom piece, it's got bloody latin inscriptions-er, sorry, from the the Browningshire estate?, I despise Lavinna."
"...You sound like you knew them personally." Odion squinted.
"Ryu is my mother's maiden name, I'm a native of the evil empire, I'm afraid." Bakura grinned sheepishly.
Odion turned, cocking his head at Bakura and peering at him as though seeing him for the first time again. "...You mentioned something about an unstable living situation before." he said. It wasn't a question. The man was uncannily sharp.
"Er, yes. By-the-Week rental. When Father went mad I had to go to the other side of the planet to escape him. Shame, almost. I stand to inherit almost as much as Kaiba owns right now if I had any intention of going back, but they're all wretched people and you would have been justified in robbing them if you didn't even need the money."
"Would you be interested in returning to England someday if it were to engage in a bit more Entirely-Justified Larceny?" Odion asked, grinning. He looked rather intriguing like this, gleaming yellow eyes and interrogative twist of his back, not unlike a great cat.
"...I might be persuaded. I'm not sure how much there is to take in the countryside, between the late 80's austerity and the collapse of the farming economy, most of the great houses have fallen apart. If there's anything worth looting, it's all in the basement of the British Musem. It's definitely the more profitable stuff- I'm pretty sure you could sell half the artifacts directly to their respective governments instead of having to find a fence."
There was a pause. Odion continued to watch him like a cat who'd found the cream. Of course. If there was someone with the manpower, connections and historical knowledge to be able to pull this off, it would be him, he just needed someone with more localized knowledge, or a suitable 'face' to attend drinks parties and find good leads...
"Tell me Pinky," he grinned, teeth sharp but voice in a low nasally groan. "Are you pondering what I'm pondering?"
"I think so Brain," Bakura replied in an atrocious cockney accent. "But burlap chaffes me so..."
They both burst out into loud, snorting laughter.
"Alright, if we live through this, we're going to rob The British Museum."
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