Ennead Afterlife: Dark Side, The Pharaoh's Alerted

It had been a long day of ruling and the Pharaoh was looking forward to just spending some time with her brother and friends and playing some games as she headed for her chambers, then, in the evening, as she had been doing for the last couple of years, she could check in on her friends in the living world before bed. Not that she was too worried about them. While Imoto still had the occasional magical issue pop up, her friends had been mostly safe since she had moved on and Yugi had temporarily retired from the competitive Dueling circuit. The only one she was particularly worried about was Kaiba and even that was more because she did not like his odds of maintaining his sanity when he realised she could not be summoned back if he completed the Puzzle again, then because she was afraid someone was going to kill him.

“Sister.” The Pharaoh grinned as her brother joined her in the corridor, “You up for Senet tonight? I'm going to beat you this time.”

“You haven't beaten me ye...” The Pharaoh's gloating was cut off by a sudden feeling of power being ripped out of her, causing a cry of pain as she stumbled and fell to her knees as a bolt of blue energy raced away from her and out of the nearest window.

“Sister!” Atem knelt next to her, looking worried, supporting her. “What just happened?”

“I...I'm not sure...” Her reply did not reassure him but it was honest as she tried to assess what had just happened. “I...I think someone just summoned Obelisk...”

“What?! But only you can do that!” Atem yelped, his face pale.

“Me or Imoto...” She agreed, pushing herself onto her feet. “And possibly one other...I need my mirror.”

“Let me help.” Her brother insisted on having her lean on him, despite the fact she felt okay bar the sudden loss of one of the God Monsters that rested within her soul. The pair headed straight for her bedchambers and the large, enchanted mirror within. The Pharaoh had begged Anubis for this mirror to the living world and she still owed him for allowing her to have it. It was enchanted so she could see, but not interact with her friends in the world of the living. Normally that was enough, but today, as she pressed her palm against it and called up it's magic worry coursed through her, “Show me the one who has summoned Obelisk the Tormentor.”

Kaiba appeared on it's reflective surface, duelling some guy who was clearly using magic at the Ceremonial Duel site where she had fought her final Duel with her sister. She did not entirely understand what was going on, but she could clearly see that Kaiba had dug up all the Puzzle pieces and it looked like his opponent wanted them. Obelisk returned to her when Kaiba's adversary, a man the CEO called Diva, fled the magical duel in favour of chasing Mokuba, but she was too caught up in what was going on to pay attention to anything except the rather satisfying head butt that Mokuba dealt out to Diva, knocking him away from the Puzzle pieces.

“Sister?” Atem asked her as she sat back, allowing the magic to fade as Kaiba jetted off to wherever he was headed next.

“One second, brother.” She murmured, putting her hand against the glass again, “Show me Mutou Yugi.” She specified, wanting to know that her precious little sister was okay. Atem let out a frustrated huff when Yugi appeared in the mirror but the Pharaoh was relieved to see her doing something as mundane as her homework.

“Your vessel is fine, sister.” Atem spoke without thinking and then backed up quickly when the Pharaoh gave him the darkest glare she had ever aimed his way.

“Imoto is much more than just my vessel, Atem. She is half of me. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for her.” The Pharaoh hissed out, furious, “How many times do I have to remind you of that?”

“She's a mortal commoner.” Atem reminded her. “She's not of our caste.”

“Technically she's a noble merchant and Ra's representative on Earth.” The Pharaoh corrected him, as she got up to leave, “And when she finally joins us here, when it's her time, she will be ruling at my side as my other half, as is her right.” Atem scowled, “What?”

“She's not you.” Atem protested, “I accept your right to rule over us since you were Pharaoh, not me, but she's not Egyptian. She doesn't know our ways and customs. You can't expect our people to accept her.”

“What would it take for you to accept her?” The Pharaoh challenged, planning to deal with this when she got back, sick and tired of the constant jibes from her brother about her little sister. Especially after everything Imoto had gone through to protect the world and help her get to the afterlife.

“What did she do? To earn this level of respect and trust from you?” Atem asked.

“I've told you...”

“Told me, but not shown me. Call it up on the mirror. Let me see for myself.”

“I don't have time for this, Atem.” The Pharaoh scowled at him as she headed for the door, “I need to get to the gates. If someone magical is after the Puzzle, I might be needed.”

“You can't go back. You know that, right?” Atem pointed out as he blocked her path, “So what's the rush? Anubis isn't going to let you break through the gates even if your Puzzle gets completed again.”

The Pharaoh stared at him, trying to work out if he was serious or not. “Brother…I need to go…why won’t you see that?”

“I do, I just…” He hesitated then sighed and ran a hand through his hair, “I just don’t want you to get stuck on that side of the gates again.”

She paused at that, “Atem…”

“I know…I know I can’t stop you…That I shouldn’t stop you but…” Atem pulled her into a hug, “I can’t lose you. Not again.” She felt him trembling and hugged back, hoping to soothe his worried mind, realising that a lot of his bloody-mindedness over Imoto was him being worried about her trying to go back to the world of the living and getting trapped again.

“You won’t lose me.” The Pharaoh promised, “I just can’t leave Imoto to face this alone if there’s anything I can do to help her. Not when this is over my Puzzle.”

“Pendant.” Atem corrected sullenly as he pulled away, trying not to look like he’d been crying.

“Not anymore brother.” She sighed. “It shattered, remember? It’s a Puzzle now.”

Atem did not answer for a moment or two, then he sighed and moved aside. “Go…but I do want to meet this sister of ours one day. If she’s as amazing as you insist she is, I’m going to love her…”

“Oh you will.” She promised, “And Atem?”

“Yes, sister?” He asked, looking a little worried for her.

“Thank you.” She darted for the door, pausing as she slipped out to promise, “I’ll be back soon.”

Digital Distraction: Part 33

Kaiba had to admit he had been suprised. He had expected to arrive at the castle and immediately have someone try and capture him. Instead he had been led to see Edmund Harper, who had been in his office, trying to fix make some last minute preparations for the ‘final round’ of the beta test.

Harper had been honestly shocked when he had presented his data and gotten rather offended that he would dare accuse him of wrecking Kaiba Corp’s systems and stealing their data.

Then he had taken a proper look at the information Kaiba had brought with him and the focus of his anger had changed. Instead of snarling at Kaiba for making false accusations, he had phoned his second in command, the vice president of the company and the one who had gotten him in contact with SharpShade, to see if she knew anything about it.

Harper’s business partner, a Egyptian looking woman in  rather expensive looking white dress and sandals entered the room accompanied by six men in robes whose hoods covered their faces.

“Mina?” Harper demanded, furious, “What’s going on?”

“It’s Menhit, actually Edmund, and I am sorry but...” Kaiba tuned it out. He didn’t really need to pay attention. It was perfectly obvious what was going on. Harper was being deposed by some mad woman with a small army of robed idiots. This was Yugi’s territory, not his.

Something about the two mooks at the back of the small group caught his attention. They seemed to be silently debating something amongst them as their boss continued, the smaller of the two hissing for the taller to be quiet.

“...and yes, I did know about what happened to Kaiba’s company.” Seto tuned back in in time to pay attention to her gloating, “It was my idea to ruin his systems and embed Dimension’s tags in the code.”

“Why?” Harper demanded, confused, even as Kaiba scowled at her, determined to make her pay for daring to almost ruin years of work. If it hadn’t been for those backups...

“Because, Edmund, you’ve been really useful in attracting all these powerful Duellists to the island for us, but you were never going to get Kaiba here by yourself, not when he has others to send for him and he has a company to run.”

She turned to Kaiba, a huge smirk on her features as she continued, “Of course we did consider kidnapping your brother, but we already had one hostage to deal with and quite frankly it was easier to mess with your company’s computers then deal with your security forces.”

That she had even contemplated laying a hand on his brother was unsurprising but unforgivable. He scowled at her, but didn’t say a word, well aware that it was generally better to let the lunatics get their monologue out of their system early so you didn’t have to listen to it later.

“Of course we did expect you to be on the boat with the others, like your little spy.” Kaiba didn’t frown but it was a close thing. “Not that she’s poking her nose into our business any longer. I’m very sorry,” Her tone indicated that she wasn’t sorry at all, “But Miss Ironhide won’t be returning to work any time soon.”

That was it. The smaller of the two mooks that Kaiba had noted earlier ripped her hood off to reveal Ombre was stood there and she looked furious.

“What did you do to Kari?” She demanded as her powers answered her call, flaring up around her in a fire of burning gold and freezing purple.

“Men.” Menhit snarled, gesturing to the other three men. The taller of the two mooks at the back played a card from his hand, summoning the Flame Swordsman who held off one of the goons as Ombre’s magic pinned another. A third took a swing for the traitor, only for him to duck under the blow, his hood falling to reveal Joey, and counter attacked.

Kaiba had no intention of getting grabbed by these morons and knew he would never live it down if the mutt rescued him. He couldn’t access his deck with his DimDisk locked down, just like everyone else’s, but he didn’t need to. He slipped into a offensive stance and within thirty seconds he had taken out one of the mooks.

Between his martial arts, the mutt’s street brawling style and Ombre’s magic it doesn’t take them more than about five minutes to take down the other four goons. Joey let out an irritated snarl as he realised that Menhit had escaped in the brawl.

“I’m going to rip that witch apart when I find her.” Ombre growled, stalking towards the door.

“Ironhide, wait.” Kaiba snapped at her, just as angry about Menhit’s escape as the rest of them.

“You heard her.” Ombre snapped, “They have Kari.”

“Yes and you have no idea where, storming round in a foul mood will just endanger her further. Sit down, shut up and let me think.” Kaiba bit back at her, well aware of how much he owed his captured employee.

“Kaiba...” Ombre opened her mouth, but shockingly it was Joey who blocked her path to the obnoxious CEO.

“Ombre, no. I hate to say this, I really, really do, but he’s right. First they took Yuge, now we know they have Kari and if they have Kari, they’ve got Tristan too.” Joey was obviously trying to control his temper in order to calm her down. “We need a plan.”

“What do you mean ‘they took Yuge’ and ‘they have Kari’?” Harper demanded, “What the hell is going on?”

“You’ve been made redundant.” Kaiba snorted, glancing over at him, “Menhit’s running this operation now. You’re just a pawn she’s discarded.”

“Well she’s going to regret that.” Harper snarled back, furious that he had been played so badly, “This is my island. My system. My rules. I know all of the backdoors.” He smirked at them, “She wants to play dirty, I can play dirtier.”

Ombre paused to consider him for a moment, then nodded. “I want my DimDisk reactivated and I want to know what she’s done to my sister.”

“Easily done.” Harper promised. “Give me twenty minutes in the admin room and I’ll have full control over the island again. If your friends are anywhere on the island, I’ll be able to find them.” He promised.

“Good.”

C.N. April 2014: Digital Distraction Part 27

Joey nodded and pocketed the earring. Kari had commented on the fact Tea had had her ears pierced during the school year, telling the teen that her earrings looked really pretty. Tea had apparently dropped one of them to give her friends a clue as to which way they were heading. He glanced around one last time, making sure there was nothing else he needed to pick up, then gestured for Ombre to follow him and darted up the tunnel.

“Keep up!”

It felt an awful lot like Duelist Kingdom all over again as he started the landing preparations to touch down on DimSoft island.

He wasn’t foolish. He knew that he was walking into a potential trap. The virus that had hit Kaiba Corp’s system hadn’t been very difficult to hack once he had managed to isolate it. It had been simplistic in its design, almost too much so. There was no way, if they hadn’t been trying to lure him in, that the virus should have led him back to its creators as easily as it had.

Still they were threatening his company and that was something he would not allow. He was convinced he knew why. Their VirtualNet system had the potential to overthrow his Duel Disk System, but only if people could be convinced that his tried and tested system couldn’t be trusted. No one would want to spend hundreds of thousands of Yen or worse, English pounds, on virtual tech that would probably break down within a year if Kaiba Corp could provide the same sort of service reliably with not even a fraction of the cost.

But after the Duel Disk System had gone down for three days while they tried desperately to recover or replace the information that had been wiped, people were looking for other options, ‘just in case.’ They had done that to him, to his company, to his staff who had worked themselves to the bone to try and get everything up and running again.

If it hadn’t been for Ironhide and the backups she had made, it would have taken them much longer, but she had saved them weeks, even months of work by copying everything she had had access to into her backup system. Or rather a backup system he hadn’t even known existed until this point.

He planned on looking into that once he had dealt with Dimension, or rather with SharpShade, who he rather more suspected were the driving force behind the break in, the virus and his horrendous stock prices. The fact that it was a ‘N.O.A.’ security system made him wonder if his half brother, the Gozabora Kaiba’s true son, had survived the decimation of his virtual world somehow.

According to Ironhide it stood for Networked Office Armour security system and had been a part of the system before she had joined the company, but he had asked around. Ironhide was the only department head, temporary or otherwise, who used it. He wasn’t sorry she did, but he needed to know more about it, in case something like this happened again. He couldn’t really afford the three days it had taken to get into it after the breech, nor could he risk trust a system that could have been created by an adopted sibling who had once tried to kill him.

Still for now it had saved his company and allowed him to get everything settled enough to let him come here to deal with the threat personally.

At least this time his brother wasn’t in danger. Just before he had left the grounds of the mansion, he had made sure his brother was securely in the panic room. Mokuba had objected, worried for his brother’s safety and about the amount of work he had to do at Kaiba Corp. Kaiba had managed to talk him round by helping him get set up so he could work right where he was without any trouble.

It was one load off of his mind as the helicopter touched down and a group of suited men gathered to meet him. Despite having no intention of actually testing their game, he had Ironhide playing and reporting to him for that, he was pleased to see one of the men had what amounted to a Duel Disk without the projectors and half the processing power. He wanted to reverse engineer it later and find out exactly how much of their programming was actually his programming.

“Mr Kaiba.” One of the men smiled at him as he slipped on the DimDisk and inserted his deck, “Welcome to the island. I’m afraid you’re a bit behind the others. They all started about an hour ago.”

“I was expecting Harper.” Kaiba responded, not bothering with the pleasantries. “Where is he?”

“I’m afraid Mr Harper is busy at the moment, he was expecting you a couple of hours ago and now the game has started he has details to take care of.” The man informed him, “However if you head for the castle, he will be formally addressing everyone this evening.”

“The castle?” Kaiba questioned, looking at the fortress on the mount in the centre of the island. It looked like some stereotypical evil fortress from some generic fantasy game, just as every evil fortress in a Dimension Software game had. It was reassuring actually. That on some level he was dealing with the same level of inability to design that he had seen from Dimension the entire time. It told him that it was SharpShade who was the problem and if he could deal with them, Dimension would go back to being the hopeless incompetents he was used to dealing with.

“That’s right.” The mook nodded, “If you head there now, Mr Harper will probably be ready to see you by the time you get there.”

Kaiba nodded. If he had had his way he would have landed in the castle courtyard or as close as damnit, but the forest surrounding the castle was too thick and if he had tried that landing in the tiny central courtyard he would have crashed. Still it wasn’t that far to the castle and unlike the last one he had infiltrated he would be able to walk in the front door. He stalked off, heading towards the castle and looking forward to dealing with the issues and going back to his job.

“I hope you enjoy your game, Mr Kaiba.”

C.N. April 2014: Digital Distraction Part 12

“You should be at the shop with the others, planning.” Kari grumbled as she worked, still trying to re-code the last few files on the system, glad for the N.O.A. virtual security network that she had backed up most of her department’s files onto. It had taken a couple of days to get back into it and the virtual avatar for the system had been making snide comments about the head of the company (which was probably why the other Department Heads hadn’t used it) but it had saved her months and months of work and allowed them to bring the system back up just this morning.

“I’m not leaving you unattended.” Ombre disagreed from her place on the sofa bed Kari had had installed behind the office door, where she was playing on an old handheld console to keep herself occupied. “And even if I would, Kaiba’s made it clear that I’m supposed to be your bodyguard. He’s paying me, remember? He seems to be worried about your safety.”

“He only loves me because I saved his hide.” Kari smirked slightly as she finished her program and compiled it, hoping to run it and check that it worked. “Without the N.O.A. backups, we would have lost everything and they were my idea. He wasn’t even aware it was in his system until I showed him. I do wonder why I couldn’t get the avatar working around him though.”

“Art of public demonstration, remember?” Ombre asked, “It’ll go right every time until you try and show someone. You go on about it often enough when you and Hermione are talking about school and presentations. You even prepare for it when you’re dealing with your boss.”

“Point.” Kari allowed, frowning slightly as the program refused to compile. “Damn it, where am I missing something?” She grumbled, turning her gaze back to the screen, “Are we all packed for tonight?”

Ombre nodded, then remembered that her hikari wasn’t really paying attention to her and spoke up, “Yes. I didn’t think Kaiba would let you go after all of this.”

“I think it’s just so he has an inside eye on what his competitors are up to.” Kari shrugged, still scowling at the screen, “If this VirtualNet thing works like they say it does, then Kaiba Corp could be in huge trouble and considering the hit we just took...”

Ombre sighed. Kari was right. The company was in huge trouble because they had had to shut down the worldwide duelling network for a couple of days. Stock prices had dropped, investors bailed and now with the rumours of a virtual system that didn’t rely on holographic projectors that were carried around by the Duellist using them, they were in even more trouble.

Not that she cared. The only difference it made to her was in how hard it meant her hikari was pushing herself. Kari was ridiculously loyal to the company, and the Kaiba brothers who ran it, and she was pretty certain she had had more sleep than her lighter self over the last three days.

She came around to look at the code on screen and frowned. She didn’t understand most of what Kari called ‘C++’ but she did remember enough of what she had read in the books Kari still had from her courses, to know something rather important.

“You do realise that code is gobbledygook, right?” Ombre asked, causing Kari to glare at her. “No, seriously. I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

“You can’t read code.” Kari pointed out, “So...”

“Kari.” Ombre’s sharp tone made her pull up short, “Stop, rub your eyes and look properly. You’re so ‘code blind’ you’re writing yourself in circles.”

Kari paused, took a deep breath and did as Ombre had suggested. Once she had she flinched. “Oh...oh wow. No wonder it wouldn’t compile.”

“I think it might be time for you to go home and sleep.” Ombre suggested, trying to pull Kari away from the computer.

“I don’t need sleep. I just need more coffee.” Kari tried.

“I...” Ombre let out an exasperated noise and threw her hands up, “That’s it. If you don’t leave with me, willingly, I’m going to get Kaiba to send you home.”

“I’m fine.” Kari objected, “I just...” She trailed off when Ombre glowered at her, “Haven’t slept in about thirty-something hours...”

“Then go home.” Kari started at the sound of a male voice in her doorway. She looked over to find Seto Kaiba was stood in the doorway to her office and didn’t look amused. “Sleep is an inefficient waste of time, but working on a lack of sleep is even worse because it forces you to redo work. Give me the files you’re working on then go home. I don’t expect to see you until after the DimSoft beta.”

“But sir...” Kari tried.

“Home. Ironhide. Now.” Kaiba growled at her.

“Yes, sir.” Kari sighed, copying her program onto a disc and passing it to her boss on the way out, feeling a bit dejected.

“Ironhide...” She paused halfway down the corridor at the sound of Kaiba’s call, “Good work.”

There was a moment where Kari didn’t know how to respond, then she smiled back over her shoulder, “Thank you, Kaiba-Sacho.”