365 Days of Starshipping (Part 1)

Arcade Shenanigans

1/31/19

"This place is very... colorful," Haou said, taking in the multitudes of lights and games in the darkened building. Somewhere off in one section, black lights filled the room to make the wall's neon paint light up vibrantly.

Yusei hummed from where he was getting points using Judai's card - he'd tell him later, but for now he was the one with the most money and it was for Haou anyways. He made sure to get a lot so they wouldn't run out too soon.

"Here, you use this card to play the games, each one'll have a place to swipe it," Yusei said, handing him one of the two cards he had, "Since these are arcade games, they're either going to be rigged or extremely skill based, but seeing as neither of us know what any of them are... we'll just have to see."

Haou scoffed at that, "Well, if Judai wanted me to come to this place then he must have thought I'd find some part of it entertaining. Come, let's go."

Yubel floated along behind them, still sporting the same grin from before they'd left the apartment. Yusei wasn't too sure what to think of that, especially considering she'd called him stoic of all things (he still couldn't really see it), but as long as everyone was happy he'd just go with it.

"I vaguely recall him saying something about you cheating your way through the system," Yubel chipped in, looking up in thought, "something about using your shadows to consistently beat the skill based games."

The two men blinked at her, narrowing their eyes in consideration.

"I admit that sounds relatively entertaining," Haou said, turning to Yusei, "What's the point here again?"

"To get enough prize tickets for whatever it is you want in the prize exchange area... Or to get prizes by winning at things like crane games. Apparently those are really difficult though, since the claws are designed to lose their grip easily," Yusei replied, remembering the few articles he'd stumbled across randomly while trying to find the parts list of a different machine - he didn't quite know how he'd gotten there, but he'd curiously looked over the different parts and programming of certain arcade machines because it was so foreign to him. "From what I've read, everything's basically designed to steal your money with either built-in chances of winning, faulty parts, or other things like that."

"Good," Haou said, eyes glinting suddenly in glee, "That means it's only fair to use my shadows to make up for any advantages given beforehand."

"Makes sense to me," Yusei shrugged, not minding it much. It's not like anyone would be able to prove they were cheating if they were caught, after all, and the games were designed to be unfair anyways. At the very least, it would make this trip far more interesting - the previous Supreme King of Darkness, cheating at arcade games using the powers of darkness.

Yubel cackled with every new game they moved on to, though they were able to ignore it for the most part.

"So you throw these balls into the ring with the net attached to it?" Haou asked, staring dispassionately at the basketball cage in front of him.

"Yeah, it's called basketball," Yusei replied.

"...Why?"

"People find it fun, I guess. It's a sport, so like any sport there's people who find entertainment with it. Besides, this is one of those skill based games so it's probably satisfying for some people to do really well."

Haou swiped his card and started, and suddenly Yusei was very glad there was no one in the area around them at the moment; the shadows were shoving the three available basketballs through the hoop in a very fast, small, continuous loop. In other words, not very conspicuous at all.

After an hour and a half, they'd torn through nearly every game's previous high record, at least for the skill-based ones that weren't rigged. With skee ball Haou would just use the shadows to bump the ball into the hundred point slot every time, then on the coin pusher he just shoved all the coins off one section with a shadow when no one was looking. The most interesting one to Yusei was when the golden-eyed man had played a two-player game by himself, one where you had to press lit-up buttons as quickly as possible, by manipulating the shadows; Yusei just found it impressive that he was able to keep track of all the lights and hit so many without messing up a single time.

"So, this is a crane game?"

"Yup. You use the little stick here to move the claw, then press the button when you're ready to try grabbing at the prize. Here, let me try it once to show you what I was talking about earlier with the claws..."

"...The fuck? It just slid right off, it didn't even pick it up a little bit. Alright, move over Yusei."

"'Kay. Oh, make sure you grab all the card packs though at least, the sets that are in there have a lot of this time's commonly used cards. I know Judai hasn't gotten around to buying any yet."

Yubel was definitely getting her entertainment for the day, that's for sure - in between laughs, Yusei could vaguely hear her say something about him and Haou and how she just knew they would get along like a house on fire in between laughs.