365 Days of Starshipping (Part 2)

New Year's Kiss

12/31/19

They'd told Carly about the bet almost immediately after her arrival, and after her agreement it didn't take long for them all to start up the first game. It went back and forth for a while, Judai and Yusei mostly staying in the lead and Crow being the first one out instead of Jack for once, but it ended with Carly nearly coming back from behind, taking second place behind Judai.

"Aw, I was so close!" Carly grinned, showing her hand off - if Judai hadn't won the game when he did, she would've on her turn, "Nice game, though."

"You too!" Judai chirped, noting the way Yusei was staring in confusion at the board still and wondering how he'd gotten third. He'd gotten supremely unlucky thanks to an event Jack had triggered on one of his turns and gotten dragged down to the point where he wouldn't be able to catch-up in time, though it didn't help that Carly had, on the other hand, gotten a very lucky card pull later on that put the final nail in his coffin so to speak.

"Again," Jack stated, gesturing for Judai to pass him the stack of cards he'd regathered so he could shuffle them. They all agreed to it though, starting up another round after a quick reset of the playing field and getting passed fresh hands to play with.

The rounds passed quickly, a lot more events happening this game than the last one, but Judai was quickly noticing a pattern in that Carly was really lucky with her pulls... almost to the point that it was unnatural. By all means, she shouldn't have this kind of consistent luck that was generally a trait reserved for kings like him and Yusei, and it wasn't surprising when she ended up winning the second game.

"Those were... the most lucky pulls ever," Crow complained, sending her a playful pout, "Are we sure she ain't cheating?"

"You wish, I'm just lucky!" She replied, smiling with a bit of a sharp edge of glee to it, "Guess my Fortune Fairies are coming through for me today. I did pull Hikari this morning!"

"Fortune Fairies? Are those your duel monsters?" Judai asked, blinking at the name and the thoughts he'd been having about her weird luck. It'd make a lot more sense if she had an archetype that dealt with luck that was helping her out, and would actually explain a lot of other little things about the things she did as well. He imagined her duel spirits must play some part in her day-to-day life, even if it was just a little bit every day.

"Yeah, that's right. Did I never tell you about them?" Carly answered, pulling out her deck to let him look through them, "They're effect monsters, but they have versions where they're normal monsters with a flavor text description instead. Those descriptions are all fortunes though, so I like to shuffle my deck and pull until I get one every morning just to see what my fortune is, more for fun than anything else. I pull them out for duels, though, it's just easier to keep them with my other cards."

Judai read over the descriptions once he discovered the said normal monster variants were all sorted out already and put on top of the deck, quickly finding the Fortune Fairy Hikari that Carly had mentioned and discovering it meant she'd be super lucky today. He had to wince when he read the other ones afterwards, knowing that if her duel spirits were actually managing to affect her luck then all the bad luck ones had to have an effect too, and that the warnings on them were probably to be heeded.

At least now it made sense why she was winning though, she was quite literally out-magicking him and Yusei. He found it more hilarious than anything else though, and passed her cards back with a smile.

"Interesting deck. We should duel sometime," Judai said, pausing for a moment before adding, "On a day where you pull one of luckier fortunes, though."