Yu-Gi-Oh LUCKS

Chapter 3: The Capacity of Jormungand

In the spirit of corporate generosity, Heart Excavation provided its miners with everything they needed, from the monogrammed coveralls to dust masks, but you'd be on thin ice if you ever asked for a replacement. The dust masks were always the first to go, trapping so much granite dust that it became impossible to wash out. After the first two months, it was like breathing through sheet rock. Goggles were usually next, but they could break earlier if you were clumsy with them. Good news was, you could usually make do without either of those in terms of personal convenience. The helmet, though, was crucial. Firstly, it had the light. Secondly, it had your head.

This priority equipment and its constant failure rate was how Clavis Barnes found himself sitting on a bench in the yard of the excavation site, long after the bell signaled the end of the workday. He twisted a borrowed screwdriver in his hands, trying to pry up the bulb in his headlamp without shattering it.

B Block had gone home for the evening, though many other miners lingered in the yard. Management was mostly confined to the HQ building after hours, and saw little reason to come down into the yard to kick them out. For the miners who were avoiding their home life, the Heart Excavation yard was an oasis.

Clavis dug around the plastic retaining ring and carefully wedged the screwdriver tip underneath it. The reglued parts came away easily, and he grasped the bulb with his other hand to rock it loose bit by bit.

He had nothing to avoid at home, of course. He had nothing there at all. Sometimes, he'd get roped into dice games underneath a streetlamp, playing late into the night until they could only see the dice by the light of cigarettes bought in Badtown. He would feel neither good nor bad about it the next day. Either way, he was going back to work. No, Clavis was entirely neutral on being at work or on the street; he was the same man in both places. Really, he told himself, he was waiting for Yuu and Zato to shake things up.

I hope that kid isn't dueling his way into trouble, he thought. Maybe the advice to follow his heart should have come with a stipulation that they were in the Atrium and things could get ugly, regardless of people's better nature.

Yuu knew that, though. It gave him a healthy dose of fear, and Clavis had been the one to selfishly push him out of it. I was the one who taught him the game, gave him the deck. I can't pretend I don't want to see him become a certain person that I am not. Clavis had tried hard throughout his life to detach fortune from destiny. He had mined for Heart Excavation for twenty hard years. He was fortunate to still have his health, but that fortune paved the way, every day, for another trip to the darkness of the mines. He was good at his job, one of the best, and proved it by doing it to the death.

The power of a high-grade, though, was a gift with limitless possibilities. He knew that Yuu would find them eventually. More pliable and infinite than a high-grade card, there was luck. Yuu had that in spades; less so in dice. Clavis chuckled.

He dug into the socket behind the bulb, teasing the wires loose and pulling them out like weeds. He carefully restrung the circuit, winding the ends tight and trying to flatten the knots of nickel-copper to make the bulb fit back in. As he glued the retaining ring back on, he heard the glass sliding door open from HQ.

A man in a dark suit stepped out. That immediately drew Clavis's attention. If you wanted a suit to stand out, it needed to contrast the surrounding area. The dark, amorphous shape of the jacket made it so that this man blended into the darkness around him. He could do no posturing in such a color without an abundance of light; this clued Clavis in on the fact that this man had come from the surface.

A woman walked slightly behind him, listening as he spoke to her. She was dressed more casually, though her clothes were still of finer make than most Atrium residents. Her defining feature, however, was her arm, which sported a wheat-yellow Duel Disk.