friendship was a mistake [closed]

[blue_ice]

They all needed a vacation, he'd said. They should take it together, he'd said.

After that little bit of uncharacteristic thoughtfulness on Kaiba's part, he regretted it almost immediately. But the plans were now set in motion, too far along to stop without undoing the progress he'd been making these last few weeks.

That was how he found himself on Hano Beach, dressed in his casual beach wear (with cargos. rip.) and sitting on a large trunk full of Stuff. His smaller Pokémon are nearby, playing in a shallow puddle he'd carefully dug for them and stuck an umbrella over.

There's a table with Anela's famous berry smoothies, also with an umbrella over it, and chairs for the humans to sit and relax. Have fun. Try not to kill each other.

Comments

[gm_of_my_own_soul]

Truly, it was a testament to how fucked up being a prisoner in your own body is.

But maybe it’s different wherever Zahra is from?

Ryou blinks as he is joined and smiled at the person. He’s already been told this is neither Anzu nor Yami, so this is just a new person. It doesn’t bother him at all and he smiles.

“And I am Bakura Ryou. Nice to meet you, Zahra. Lovely day, neh?”

[luckydragonsfoot]

"Aw man not th's again..." Don't worry Ryou, you're not the only one. Katsuya even knows who the kid is and it's still...Hff.

He rubs his head, sighing. "I'm thinkin' shelter set up 's on hold now," he mutters, plopping down on the sand while his pokemon whinny and bleat. "Got any phone games 'r somethin?"

[gm_of_my_own_soul]

Ryou had seen him when the gods were raging and Zahra was crazy. However, he had dismissed it as a hallucination. He hadn’t seen the ring spirit since high school and thought it was just trauma.

But he was here. Eating his chips and staring at him. And that was the voice he heard in his head and nightmares.

Ryou wants to scream but he can’t. He only stares in shock.

“I... you’re here... how?”

Ryou leans back, terrified out of his wits. However, the purple begins to shift towards the sand.

Two tendrils of seaweed shoot out like harpoons and suddenly tries to grab the ring spirit.

[gm_of_my_own_soul]

Ryou doesn’t even know who Noa is. He’s pretty sure he was either unconscious or didn’t exist.

“I think we can survive. It really is nice weather,” Ryou smiles. Ryou pauses before he shakes his head.

“I brought a playing card set and a mahjong set but that’s about it. I don’t have a phone, Acerola said we would get a Rotomdex at some point and that would work?”

[luckydragonsfoot]

"Nyhhhh...yeah a' some point y' should probably... ...Tha's a sooner 'nstead 'f later thing for sure," he decides, laying back on the sand. Anyway heck. "...Y'...bring th' cards?"

[improvking]

Information garnered: yes his double knows him, and is Unhappy about that fact (understandable), but also his presence is in and of itself... bewildering somehow? The Spirit barely has time to process any of that though before suddenly! Seaweed attacks!

"Fuck!" The Ring-Spirit dodges pretty darn gracefully - tombrobber reflexes long outlast the original body apparently - but then he Realizes.

The purple, the seaweed... a pokemon, duh. A pokemon picking a fight with him. And he's totally taking that challenge, because he knows what good decisions are. He snarls at the sand and briefly glowers at his double as well. "Convince ya boy you're not part of the pokemon or you're part of this."

[gm_of_my_own_soul]

“After the holiday,” Ryou smiled as he looked over. He turned for his bag and pulled out the playing cards.

“It’s not duel monsters but it will do. I also brought dice and paper if we wanted to do a quick Monster World Oneshot.”

Nerd.

[gm_of_my_own_soul]

Ryou gasps as the sand begins to peel off of the body under it. From beneath Ryou, a Dhelmise appears.

“Ahab!” Did you really name the Dhelmise after a Moby Dick character, Ryou?

“Ahab, please stop. He’s not hurting me!” Yet.

The Pokémon hisses and floats menacingly. It shoots a shadow ball between Ryou and the spirit. Sure, it purposely made it easy to dodge but the threat is there.

1/2

[improvking]

Hm! Alright then, the (admittedly feeble) protests towards the dhelmise are good enough for the Spirit to decide he's not dealing with some kind of shapeshifter-that-uses-doppelgangers-as-lures pokemon. (...If the pokedex is to be believed, this is a perfectly valid concern.)

The Spirit turns his full attention to the dhelmise, expression shifting into a predatory grin. Sure, he'll take advantages just handed to him... he rolls from this attack, ending in a crouch. "A warning shot~? How nice of you, h-heh heh..."

2/2

[improvking]

The Spirit's posture tenses, clearly about to leap at the pokEMON what is wrong with him - but he never does. Instead, a mimikyu appears (from where? not from a pokeball, she's just, there, now,,) and smacks him with her wooden 'tail', sending him flying. ...Wait was that a full-out attack move,

Damn straight it was. A pretty solid hit too - not enough to KO him, but uh. The Spirit looks a just bit out of it. ...from. over there, where he landed,,

[gm_of_my_own_soul]

Ryou has no idea why the spirit wants to fight a ghost. Did he have a reason to fight? Ahab was responding to the bad vibes, but the spirit?

Ryou is about to throw a warning out when suddenly there’s... a small creature? The man blinks as it sends him comically off and he frowns.

“Uh... thank you?” He offers the Mimikyu.

The Dhelmise gives a chuckle and expresses its own thanks to Mimikyu for getting that ‘unruly hedgehog’ away from its friend.

“I... you’re alive, right?” Ryou yells over. Thanks Ryou.

[improvking]

That huge-score-of-dice gets his attention alright - but then the light glints off Zahra's Puzzle, just enough to distract him from the intended-lure, and... He blinks at the golden pendant, because that thing is really familiar. Important familiar.

He pauses, attention shifting fully. Were they wearing that thing during the Haunter-Storm business? He hadn't been paying attention to details like that, and it'd been so dark...

His face scrunches. Usually not-remembering details doesn't bother him much, but something about this one, particular detail is digging at his mind weird. There is something here that he should just know, instinctively, and coming up empty instead is Very Wrong. Somehow??

The Puzzle's Eye of Wadjt draws his focus and he can't not-ask. "What is that?" ...asks. the Ring-Spirit,, as he locks into a staring contest with a Millennium Item,,

[bloomingdespite]

...

"Wait, you weren't fucking with Jounouchi by faking amnesia? You actually have brain damage?" There's a hint of genuine concern in their voice, hidden beneath a layer of disaffected surprise.

[luckydragonsfoot]

"Eh, guess we c'n wait tha' long..." Anyway. With a deck like Ryou's, he's Glad to have Go-Fish on the table. And...uh.

"Nyh... Y'...y' mean like how...tha' night worked..."

It seemed kinda oneshotty at least, and also, you know, life threatening.

[bloomingdespite]

"Rest assured, this is only a temporary arrangement." Noa waves at Zahra, who nonchalantly waves back before realizing who's waving, nearly dropping the supplies they were carrying, stepping forward, pausing, looking at who he's talking to, then shrugging and moving on. "I can't imagine that whatever Team Skull Grunt whose Haunter I'm... borrowing is too happy about what I'm doing."

are you implying that you're possessing a ghost noa,

"...you know, it's almost disappointing. How different you are from him." There's a pause as he looks out at the sea, face carefully blank—the same poker face that Gozaburo had taught his world's Seto. "I've been trying to find any singular point where you two split, but as far as I can tell, you just... decided to be better than him at every opportunity."

[blue_ice]

Kaiba blinks, but quickly shakes his head. Whatever. He's heard weirder. The grunt will live without one of many, many Haunters for a little while.

But that question catches him off guard. He has to think about it for a few moments. The emotions that flicker on his face are tangled up---regret, embarrassment, and then resolve. He's slowly learning to live with who he is now.

"I don't know if you listened in on all of Zahra's conversations with me, but the differences in all of our lives from the puzzle going to a different person appear to have had a number of ripple effects. I didn't have the opportunities to be hostile to them that your Kaiba did, I was so laser-focused on defeating the pharaoh---and after he left, it got worse. I abandoned Mokuba over chasing that title."

He finally got one corner of the tent up and leaned over the pole for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Someone I met here showed me that I needed to make a choice between my obsession with a title or building a future---that I wasn't as prepared for the consequences as I'd thought. I realized once we were apart for this long that Mokuba means more to me than winning. I'm not better---I'm just a failure who got a second chance."

[bloomingdespite]

"Yeah. I mean, most days are in Alola, but this one stands out." Zahra chuckles, staring up at the sky. "Although I probably shouldn't say that, considering that every time I so much as thought about how much of a beautiful day it was on our roadtrip we inevitably got jumped by a cultist and/or the weather went to shit."

oh if only you knew how right you were zahra,

[gm_of_my_own_soul]

“Yeah. Except I don’t have the Millennium Ring, so it should be fine,” Ryou laughs. “You all had pre-gen characters and we used the Monster World D20 system. I have been experimenting with a D100 system and you can make your own characters. So similar but different.”

[gm_of_my_own_soul]

Ryou laughs a little, though it is a little confused.

“That seems so specific. Sounds like you and the beach have disagreements, often,” Ryou said. He curls up on the sand and idly traces images in it, idly drawing ghosts around Slifer.

[luckydragonsfoot]

"Hah! Yeah, tha's definitely somethin' we got goin' for it!" Uh. Hm.

"Shit. ...Didn' think I'd even have th's chance, y'know? I mean... ...Was pretty fun until..." He waves his hand- Ryou get's the picture. But, he did get pretty into it last time so it's...not really surprising that Katsuya's considering it again.

[improvking]

"Weren't you just whining that we're too lively? Mixing your signals pretty heavily there, Kaiba-kun." Conclude with wink and fingerguns -

- and immediately whirl back to their new victim addition. "You heard him, we've got to kick things up by several notches." Ring-Spirit that grin is highly unsettling this is just karaoke,,

And unless Yuume fights it, the Spirit is just gonna wrap an arm around her shoulders and move her on over to the machine. "Zahra, pick something! No time to waste, new song, new song!"

[improvking]

The mimikyu looks at Ryou. She looks over at the Spirit. She looks up at the dhelmise. That she's noting the similarities and discrepancies between humans(?? does the Spirit count as human?) is pretty clear. But why is she looking at the dhelmise with so much confusion?

She makes a few exasperated whispery-shrieks at the Ring-Spirit, and then directs a steady stream of softly discordant hissing noises at the dhelmise. It seems there's been a misunderstanding: the mimikyu came over to correct the Spirit's 'continuing refusal to battle properly' - but is that not what's happening? She demands to know what 'the disaster' is 'fucking up now'.

When Ryou calls to him, the Ring-Spirit huffs and finally gets to his feet. "S'not like ya boy can die." (He has no idea why he believes this, but he believes it strongly enough to likewise believe that he does have a reason. Unless he doesn't! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

[bloomingdespite]

"...he's amazing." Noa says this with genuine fondness, and an equally genuine smile. No sardonic smirk, no wicked grin, no indulgent leers- for a moment, his guard is completely down. "Mokuba, I mean. The amount of love he feels for you, despite everything that happened- the amount of love he feels for me, despite. Well. Every horrible thing I did to him, which I can assure you far exceeds whatever emotional damages you think you've wrought upon him.

"...I'm glad at least one version of you figured out what was really important, at least."

[bloomingdespite]

"Less the beach and more the concept of vacationing itself, but. Semantics."

what does that even mean,

[blue_ice]

That's one thing they have in common. Nothing softens Seto up quite like the thought of his dear brother. He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a letter in Mokuba's handwriting.

"I promised him I'd do better. And he loved you...the group of us in my world weren't as resourceful as Zahra. We weren't able to save you, and it really hurt him."

Oh god, why is he saying this. He lapses into silence for a moment before he continues.

"I tried to push past it and move on, but...I've had time to think, Noa, and we're not that different. We weren't in any position to be friends back then, but with the past behind us..."

He takes a breath. "Can we try this again?"