Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: Rainbow Stardust

Chapter 2: Duel Me

(A/N: Scripting Duels is hard and choosing between two protagonists is harder. I hope this is sufficient. Sorry I keep rewriting the same chapters in different ways over and over again)

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Sylvia was still unused to reacting to her own name. Even though the profile Yusei backed up on her Runner had her personal information in it, and her name was written right there in thousands of tiny pixels, it still felt foreign to her. Perhaps that was due to her completely blank-slate memory. Somehow the name Yusei felt less foreign than Sylvia did.

Yusei was the raven-haired man who nursed her back to health-- more specifically, he and Rally together saved her life and treated her wounds. If it weren't for the two of them, she would've surely died. Truly, she was indebted to them. It was a massive shock to her when she learned she'd been marked dead. With no memories of her family or past, she had no idea what to do going forward. Other than leeching Yusei's friends of their bandage supply, as well as being an extra mouth to feed, she knew she had little to offer. And having nothing to offer them made her feel restless and uneasy, which led to fidgeting, pacing, and al sorts of other anxious habits that they probably found annoying, but she just couldn't stop no matter how hard she tried.

It didn't take a genius to know she was being suspected. If she were them, she'd suspect her too. Convenient amnesia to hide how she knew Yusei's name without an introduction? A miraculous recovery from a life-threatening crash? Cards that magically dried themselves? And the suspicious mark that refused to heal, like an irritated tattoo combined with a laser burn. Even Sylvia knew she was a walking enigma.

To make matters worse, the one time she tried to duel was against Rally, the most harmless individual out of the group, but the visual effects-- specifically, a pair of red lasers shooting out of Mecha Bunny's eyes when activating their effect-- triggered an unsettling flashback. It was just some snippets, so all she could make out were a white laboratory and red lasers. But the red-hot searing pain in her arm was somehow associated with it, and that's the part that freaked her out. She screamed that day, as if she'd been set ablaze and only she could see or feel the heat of the fire. Couple that episode of hers with the voices she'd been hearing, and even she thought she was crazy.

So of course, it was natural that Yusei and his friends were wary of her. She was a stranger, presumably had no memories but could be lying, and she was absolutely not all there in the head. She felt sick just thinking about everything. In all honesty, sometimes she thought about the prospect of death, and that perhaps it might be better for everyone if she had died. Then she thought about all the effort they put into keeping her alive and realized it'd truly have all gone to waste if she threw it all away like that, and it would be disrespectful to her saviors.

If only they'd left her to rot. Then everything would've been so much easier. If she really had died, things would have gone so much smoother.

Nevertheless, she was here now. Satellite had little to offer, but she was grateful for it nonetheless. Oddly enough, she was grateful for the voices, too, actually. They meant a lot to her. She didn't know who or what they were, but they often pointed out things she normally wouldn't have been able to notice from her point of view. It was as if they had an omniscient view of the world around her. Contacting them herself was difficult, though. And they didn't seem to know everything about her, either.

She did come to notice, however, that the voices actually had names. There were six in total, and they reacted to the names of the cards Sylvia held. The Weather Painters. So far, by far the most vocal and the easiest to talk to was Thunder, the youngest in a family of colorful fairies who paint the sky. She could parse his voice and personality the easiest. In fact, he spoke so much, he gave her a headache on a daily basis.