Yu-Gi-Oh! Fan Fiction ❯ The Dragoness ❯ Pixilated ( Chapter 9 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

“I can't believe we've been delayed again!” cursed Kaiba at Customs as he stood in line. Several women were chatting very quickly in English and pointing at him, but he failed to pick up their words. English gives me a God damned headache, he thought with a grumble.

The green haired imposter was explaining amicably to the officers the reason why they were taking such and such a flight, et cetera, as often came up in an airport, no matter what the location or the size. She spoke breezy, Chicago-accented English, just as he had expected her to do. I'll admit it, this woman is good. Not only taking the name of a dead girl. Not only changing her hair color. But changing accents to sound like a native Chicagoan? That's pure genius. I wonder how long it took her to get the accent down right.

Finally he heard his name in English. “Seto Kaiba,” explained Lilly, pointing to his tall figure.

“Oh, oh,” giggled a couple of the vacationing American girls, whipping out their cameras. “Hello, hello Seto!” they chirped. He grunted “Hello,” back in English.

“Can't disappoint the fans, now can you Kaiba?” asked Lilly, who had come up behind him, switching languages without difficulty. Then she did something rather unusual. Lifting up her ring finger for the cameras to see, she wrapped her arms around his waist. Then she announced to the girls, “You know my husband?” They turned away, disappointed.

“Ah, Americans,” sighed Lilly. “I'm slowly forgetting that I am one.”

“You're a fool.”

“I know.”

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Kaiba Tower

The honeymoon had been cut short by Kaiba's sudden fit of unexplainable moodiness. Lilly sat in her private office, a floor below Kaiba's, chewing a broken fingernail off. “I'll never understand him. Never in several million years. But now that I have a permanent home in Japan, I can worry more about retrieving what the Hunters took from me,” she said to the air, talking like there was someone right next to her.

The brunette secretary peeked her head in the doorway. “Is it alright if I take lunch, Mrs. Kaiba?”

Lilly scowled. “Don't call me Mrs. Kaiba. At work, I'm still Ms. Kikas, and I always will be.”

The secretary scampered back out. She met up with Serenity Wheeler, the pink haired secretary of Seto Kaiba. “Is she in a mood, Mil?” asked Wheeler in a bored tone.

“I guess she is. She wasn't earlier, but something must have set her off. Kaiba the same way?”

“Yeah,” said Serenity, filing her fingernail with an emery board. “But he's always like that.”

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Oh a street corner in Domino, a tall, darkly tanned man with a scar on his face picked up a newspaper. He opened it nonchalantly, like he had no place to be. On the inside was a picture of Seto and Lilly Kaiba on the page with the caption “Marriage brings about merger for Kikas, Kaiba.”

“So the Dragoness survived her punishment. Amazing. We'll just have to pay another visit to her…”

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YOU'VE GOT MAIL screamed the man in the computer. “Oops,” said Kikas, turning down the volume on the speakers. “Funny, I don't use AOL anymore. I wonder why someone would send an email to my old account…” she trailed off as she opened the email.

Two picture attachments. No text. She double clicked on the first one. It was a hazy red image that she couldn't quite make out. Shrugging, she clicked on the second one.

And screamed.

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Kaiba Corp had the day off, except the secretaries and the security guards, it being Sunday. So Kaiba, the only one active in the building and only one floor up, heard the scream. Taking the stairs rather than the elevator (for once), he kicked open her office door.

“Lilly?” he said, finding her slumped over her desk in a dead faint. He happened to look at the screen. There were words, written in blood, that took up the whole image.

Kaiba gasped, remembering where he had seen them.

Flashback

The wall seemed to be dripping the same blood that pooled on the concrete. On closer examination, he discovered that they were words, though written in a language that he didn't understand. He touched them, a grotesque impulse, and the blood smeared and collected in his palm.

Horrified with touching it, he tried to wipe it off him. It seemed to spread, beginning to cover his hand and run down his arm. Frightened, he rubbed it down his trench coat. It left violent streaks.

End Flashback

What did they mean? It certainly wasn't in any language he had ever seen or read. I'll have to ask her, he decided reluctantly. He didn't trust this stranger, whom he couldn't help of but thinking of as his partner… and more recently, his lover…

Her face was white. What could it be that could send her into such a shock? He wondered. To answer his doubts, she stirred in the chair and moaned. Or, it seemed like a moan. Slowly the sound took shape into frantic little words repeated over and over again in her subconscious.

“Sic semper tyrannus, sic simper tyrannus. Sic simper tyrannus Ryca.”

“Thus always to tyrants?” he translated, familiar with the quote through his studies of latin.

“It's a death sentence,” she told him, coming to completely at the sound of his voice. “Sic simper tyrannus Ryca. Thus always to tyrants, Ryca.”

“Ryca?”

“Figure it out yourself!” she bellowed, tearing out of the room, as far away from the image that she could get. “You're already dissecting my life!”

How the hell did she know about that? On a hunch, he typed in the name “Ryca” into a search engine. Two results:

Arabic Names and their Meanings

Title Unknown: Error

Clicking on the first, he got this answer-

Ryca: Unusual Egyptian. Meaning: One from above.

Well, that's useful, he thought irately. What the hell am I going to do with that?

He hit the second. It was a blurry image. He zoomed in and typed a few keys.

C/enhance

The result was startling. There were two people in the pixilated image- one had spiky sandy hair and wore jeans; the other was a girl with green hair. Both couldn't be older than fifteen…

Is that… Malik Ishtar? With Lilly? Ishtar- and the Rare Hunters. Can't be a coincidence. Perhaps I should pay a visit to Malik. I wonder if he still lives in Domino…