(38) Preparations – Part 4 – The calm after the storm… And possibly before

Date: Still 09/Sept/35MT

Time: 2:30PM

Sometimes you fuck up. Other times, you fuck up royally. This time I want to introduce a new term! I fucked up UNIVERSELY! I don’t know what the fuck was going through my head to think that was a good idea! From the start, it was full of red flags. The way Yasuna reacted in the meeting with the Director, Mia and Aiko remaining quiet every time Aya was in the same room as them. But no, I didn’t pay attention to any of that; I was too focused on getting my old roommates on good terms with my past enemy! You know? Like every good, emotionally stunted Japanese light novel protagonist…

In retrospect, it’s obvious I should have waited at least till next year before trying that. Maybe then Yasuna and Aiko may have been comfortable talking things over with Aya. But no, that’s not what I did…

Honestly, I walked away from that with fewer consequences than I should have. Aya stood shocked for a few more moments before gradually accepting Yasuna was open to hear her out. They talked about their experience at the academy, then Aya moved on to why she needed to win the tournament. Yasuna and the others were shocked that her father would do something like that and suggested that maybe it was just a scare tactic. She responded by saying that her father wasn't one to bluff, and that she didn’t want to test that out. In the end, they decided on cautiously helping Aya out.

So we all made a promise, we will win this tournament. I was already too invested in helping Aya and now Yasuna was also feeling guilty about messing with her. Mia was too good of a person to ignore her predicament and Aiko… well, I’m not sure. Maybe she’s just following her sister, or she just went along for the hell of it.

After things calmed down, I offered to go over their decks and also finished Aya’s, there was not a lot I needed to change, Mia and Aiko are still using the decks I gave them, with only a few modifications and they were fine. Yasuna’s deck needed a little work, just some hand traps and modifications to the extra deck. The tournament we would go to only allowed an extra deck size of 15. So I had to create a variation of Yasuna’s deck for that. She looked it over with me, and I made sure to explain my decisions to her. I also verified what Aya said about deck building class… She confirmed most students also found it to be a waste of time. Poor Kayu, she got stuck teaching that.

Going back to the point, we all returned to our rooms, kind of hopeful, but also scared, and worried. Unfortunately for me, this wasn’t the end of the day. I still had something else to do, and that brings us to now.

“N!” a pink haired, tall girl shouts, posing with her legs apart and pompoms close to her face and shoulders appart.

“W!” follows a dark-skinned cheerleader, her long black hair tied in two braids. She stands behind the first and hunches over to the side, with both pompoms on her knees, making her large behind pop out from the short miniskirt for a moment before the fabric moves to cover it again.

“D!” I continue the routine by moving my right arm to the air and my left on top of my chest.

“A!” The final cheerleader, a girl with large breasts and long hair tied into a single back-length braid, finishes by jumping up in the air and making both her arms shot into the air.

Yup, cheer club. Unfortunately, the routines they had prepared never accounted for 4 cheerleaders, sometimes 3, sometimes even 2, but never 4. It was just a strange number and so we had to come up with a decent routine for the tournament. A tournament that, mind you, would take place in just a week's time. They had assured us that the ship that would take us to the space station had the facilities necessary for us to keep training, so we were mostly theory crafting at this point.

“Stop!” Announces Haru. “We need more movement. These positions are too static. Let’s up the acrobatics.”

Nanako doesn’t take long to complain. “Are you kidding me? How? I would spend more time in the air than on the ground!” She’d been the one getting thrown around like a rag doll for the last half hour, with Haru also following her sometimes. Yes, back to back. Let’s just say that my arm strength was being tested today.

I also had something to say. “Haru, I know you don’t want to chop down our original routine, but we just can’t do it with four members. How about we try to add something to the three person one?”

“Nope, not doing that. It’s been a year since we had the change for a Zero-G routine and I’m milking this opportunity for all it’s got.”

Tsukiko, the clubs manager, moves in to correct her. “They haven’t confirmed Zero-G, it may be a space station, but the arena is grav stabilized, and we don’t have any word that they’ll turn it off just for a cheer team. Keep that in mind, Haru.”

“I know!” She winces, inadvertently throwing her pompoms to the floor. “We need to cycle out. Neko, you fly?”

“Are you kidding? I’m heavier than both of you combined. We’d last maybe two games like that.”

Seeing them argue about who’s going to fly, decide to remind them. “Hey… I’m here.”

That makes the three turn to me, and Haru starts. “Hmm, I appreciate the enthusiasm Yuumi, but you’ve been with us for maybe a month. You’d only hurt yourself.”

I roll my eyes. “That’s what the safety net’s for.”

“Yes… but even then, you can still injure yourself. We’re not doing that. Solid vision safety net or not.”

“Then how do you want to do it?” I say, shrugging. “Don’t see any other opt— Wait.” I catch myself looking off into the distance.

‘Solid Vision huh… what if..?’

The three expectingly stare at me.

“What?” asks Haru, clearly at her wit’s end, trying to figure out a way to manage this.

“Stop me if what I’m about to say is stupid, but isn’t the safety net using solid vision?”

Haru nods. “Yes, it detects a rapidly falling object and projects cushioning mid air to slow down a fall. But why?”

“Well, can’t it project other things? Like I don’t know… Duel monsters?” I suggest, turning to Tsukiko.

She raises an eyebrow but responds. “Technically, yes, but what for?”

“Well, we are missing members, right?”

Haruna’s eyebrows straight up retract to her hairline. “Wait… H-Holy crap, how didn’t we think of that?” she says, holding her head in her hands and looking at the floor in surprise.

It only takes a few seconds for Neko and Nana to come to the same conclusion.

“I mean… It’s obvious, right? If we don’t have the members to do it normally, let’s just use duel monsters, heck we could probably even use spells for visual effects.” I casually add.

They glare at me like I had just invented gunpowder.

————

Let’s just say that the practice session from then on became way more interesting. First, we tried using monsters strictly for support of our initial routine, but then Nanako figured out she could use any flying humanoid monster to pick her up mid air and it got out of hand fast.

In the end, we decided on using Neko’s and Haru’s decks for monsters. Naeko runs dark magician girls and, well, like I’d already experienced, Haruna uses trickstars. Those two archetypes work well together for visuals.

I’m surprised they hadn’t realized to use solid vision sooner. I mean, why hadn’t they figured this out? All the pieces were in place, the solid vision projectors, and protocols for projecting duel monsters were there. By the way, I figured out that the ‘Safety net’ is just a field spell not legal in duels, placed in a duel disk integrated in the system, so as long as we don’t take that card out we could do this in the tournament. Everything was already in place and we were going to exploit the fuck out of it.

Because of our excitement, we might have exhausted ourselves quicker than we hoped, so by four in the afternoon we had to take a break, but after being told by Tsukiko that we went for two hours non-stop and that I could seriously hurt myself as I didn’t have all the same body mods as the others, we left it there for today and continue practicing during the trip.

Unlike most other practice sessions, we all raced back to our dorms. They had stuff to pack up for the trip and I didn’t really have any reason to dilly dally at the track. But I decided to make a pit stop at the ‘Market square’, student nickname for the path with all the shops, and I went to one of the more… let’s just say upper class establishments. My aim? Cards, lots of cards.

Before leaving the academy on this trip, I’ve decided to now fully build another deck, and I wanted to make something fun, like a deck I could use and really enjoy the duel. Something refreshing, with lots of options, something that didn’t have only one line of play, but was still strong enough to beat most duelists here. What deck was it? I didn’t know at the time I was just going to this upper end card shop, with two floors and finally decorated interiors, and I planned on making it up on the spot.

For this, I had 475DC available. At the start of the month, I had to spend 75DC on the garage, 50 on the deposit and 25 for the month’s fee. Actually, I found a fine garage, near the driver’s entrance and everything, nice find. Back to shopping, in reality, I allocated a budget of 75DC for the deck, but if something better came up, I wasn’t opposed to spending 100DC.

Anyway, I took one look at the big card shop, some distance away from the start of merchant square. It was an extensive building with a blocky, modern style exterior. And stepped inside.

The first thing that hit me was the temperature. I was wearing the winter version of the academy uniform at the time, so the rise in temperature was really noticeable.

‘Air conditioner? In a shop? We eating good here.’ I thought to amuse myself. The reason for the surprise was the lack of this in other shops around the square. Normally, students went in and out as fast as they could, so there was no need for it. Not in this store, though.

The second thing I noticed was the high celling, and the clean environment. There were shelves with various cards in clear jewel cases, neatly organized into columns. Next to the entrance were two duel runners, they were being showcased on spinning platforms. And finally the clientele, blues and pink ranks mostly, honestly that was the largest amount of pink ranks I’d ever seen in one place. Comparing to something from my old would, I would say it looked like one of those fancy casinos, just with shelves full of cards instead of gambling.

I walked in carefully, trying not to disturb the other patrons, and went right into the boss monster aisle. There was no way I could build a deck if the boss monsters were too rare. If you are wondering why I never went to card shops and mostly stuck to packs, well… I just didn’t know any better. Deck building class might be mostly a waste of time, but I learned packs are only worth it when you don’t have a good idea about what deck you want to build or very little DC. Now, while I had literally no idea about what to build, I had a lot of DC to make up for that detail.

So, with no idea about what to build other than the requirement that it had to be fun, I went on my adventure into the aisles of this enormous card shop.