Manacle of Ra
Chapter 2 - Game
By: Emerald Star
Seto smiled wearily as the new executive left the office. It was the end of the week, and with the board now filled, Seto could go home for the weekend. Pressing a button on his intercom, he told his secretary to have a limo waiting for him outside in five minutes.
Exiting the building, Seto walked over and got into the limosine, leaning back into the seat in exhaustion. As the lights from the street lamps created a slow strobe effect in the car, Seto smiled sleepily as he thought of what Sunday had to bring. He had made an invitation to Yugi for another one-on-one match between the two without any stakes, just a little friendly match.
He chuckled as he thought of the boy. He knew Yami would be suspicious, thinking Seto had something up his sleeve. Truth was, Seto was just itching for a chance to get work out of his mind and see the two. Although now that he thought about it, maybe he should change his deck to surprise the teenagers. After all their duels together, the three knew which cards were in each other’s decks. Besides, he didn’t want to disappoint Yami, did he?
When the car stopped, he nodded his thanks to the driver and walked into the mansion. Checking on Mokuba, a soft smile tugged at his lips at the manner in which his brother was sprawled out on the bed. Walking over and pulling the kicked off cover back over his brother’s sleeping form, he bent down and gave the boy’s forehead a small kiss before moving on to his own room. Shedding his clothes and pulling on a pair of pajama pants, he crawled into bed and was asleep seconds after his head hit the pillow.
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A twelve-year-old Seto bit his lip as he realized that no matter how much he shook, the old High Mage wasn’t going to wake up. Suppressing the tears he wanted to shed for his old mentor, Seto went to inform the others of the old man’s passing.
By the end of the day, Seto retreated to his room. Finally letting the tears fall and stroking the head of one of the dragons that was crooning softly in his ear, he looked dully upon the sennen rod, the token of office of the High Mage that had been given to him.
His dragons gave their support as he cried himself to sleep.
*---*---*---*---*
Seto winced as the light from the windows hit his eyelids. Cracking them open, he debated about getting out of the warm bed he was in. Hell, why not? Sleeping in for once would be such a nice change...
Figuring he deserved a break, he rolled so that his back faced the windows, curled up and went back to sleep.
*---*---*---*---*
Seto bit his lip as he drew his hand through his hair again. It had been two days since he had been given the office of High Mage. As the herald nodded him forward, he took one last deep breath to steady his nerves as he walked through the gold gilded doors into the receiving room of the pharaoh-
And caught his breath as his eyes widened to take in the resplendent surroundings. [Damn, if this was created to intimidate, it sure as hell does its job!]
"If you’re done with the sight seeing, could we get on with this? I have to meet with the village elder from Kitsun in less than two hours."
Seto blinked as his attention was brought to rest on a boy with crimson eyes and spiked multi colored hair sitting on a throne in front of him, his chin in the palm of his hand as he leaned on the arm of the throne, staring at Seto in a bored manner.
Fervently wishing that he had my dragons with him, Seto walked forward and kneeled in front of his pharaoh. "How may I be of service to you, sire?"
"Tell me, mage, are you good at games?"
"Games?" Seto asked in bewilderment.
"Surely you’ve heard of the Games of Darkness, as you are the High Mage."
Seto bit his lip and nodded.
"We’re going to play one. If I win, you die."
Seto blinked. "Why such a harsh consequence?"
The pharaoh hesitated. "Because I want you to play it with all you've got. If the penalty wasn’t high, most people would let me win just because of what I am," he said a little sadly.
Seto sighed. Well, what had he expected? He was a kid, just like himself. "Why don’t we just play a game with no stakes, hmm? I’m bored with these official duties too."
He brightened up at that. "Great! We can play that game that I got from those foreign diplomats that I haven’t played yet! You can call me Yami, what's your name?"
"Seto," Seto replied with a smile as he summoned a servant to bring the game.
*---*---*---*---*
"Checkmate!" Yami cried as he moved his bishop two spots on the right diagonal. Seto raised his eyebrows in surprise, as he hadn’t seen that coming. Well, that put them at a score of two to one, Yami winning.
It was then that they were interrupted by one of Yami's many advisors, being told that the village elder was here. Seto took his leave after arranging for another appointment with Yami later in the week, to play some more games.
The rest of the week was boring, basically healing a few broken bones and calling on some water spirits to put out a fire that had started in the east quadrant of the city.
It was the day to go see Yami again. Seto wanted him to meet his dragons, so he told them to be quite and had the mother and daughter perch on his shoulders and the father curled up in his hair again as he cast an invisibility spell on them. The dragons’ had been a secret between Seto and his mentor, but he really wanted to share their existence with someone now that he had passed on.
The look on Yami's face when Seto dropped the spell was priceless. After he introduced Yami to Jisante, Kiinori, and their daughter Riori, Yami gave him a puzzled look.
"But I thought you didn’t play the Games of Darkness."
Seto shrugged, "I don’t play them. The old High Mage took me to the shadow realm and made me create a duel monster as a test to see if I should be his successor."
Yami looked at Seto for a moment, stroking Riori’s head (the two seemed to have hit it off), then walked up to his throne and picked something up off of a table by it’s side. He came back to Seto and showed the thing to Seto. "When you came back from the shadow realm, did you find anything like this in your room?"
It was a card with a picture of a silver wolf with two numbers below it and a small box with written information next to the numbers on the right side and the words ‘Silver Fang’ across the top. "Yeah, but the pictures were blank, and the words on top were ‘Blue-Eyes White-Dragon’."
Yami smiled at him. "I thought so. These are summoning cards for the monsters used in the shadow realm. Usually you couldn’t summon the monsters into the real world, but your magic must be allowing them," Yami gestured to all three of Seto's dragons, and they sweat-dropped as they noticed that Jisante and Kiinori were necking behind a fruit bowl. "Uh, like I was saying, allows them to stay out of the cards here in the real world."
Seto took his eyes away from the two adults with a slight blush running across his face. [Do they do that in my room when I am doing my duties?] "So, if I wanted to, I could play those games?"
Yami tilted his head in an endearing way. "If you had a deck, yes. But the rules of the game are really complicated."
Seto smiled at him. "I like complicated things. Could you teach me?"
With Yami's consent, they met twice a week from then on, playing games and escaping from duties that were thrust upon both of them at too young of an age. Sometimes they would talk about events in the kingdom and Seto would give Yami a few ideas and concerns from a commoner’s view point, but they basically stayed to playing games. Eventually Seto got good enough at it that he would win now and then, but it took him a few months.
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ES: Yay! There it is, Chapter 2! You’ll notice this chapter is way longer than the others, but that’s because I work best when I make things up out of thin air, and basically, that’s what I’m doing in these dream sequences.
Chapter 1-Dream
Chapter 3-Rebirth
