New cover featuring Kayda's new character design! Yuto's hair, Ruri's eyes and complexion, she's a YGO OC alright. 

"You know, Numbers are a dangerous breed of xyz. You run a synchro deck I don't even know why you have one." Kayda sighed as her opponent ended his turn. They were in the middle of a midnight duel for the sake of a Number that she had never even heard of, but considering she hasn't been able to get anything of substance done for the last several days, she was glad to even get the chance – that being said she was still mildly pissed off about the first duel of the book.

"Look woman." Her opponent crossed his arms nervously as his breath formed clouds in front of his lips. "I don't even care anymore. You can take it. I just need to get home to my kids. I got the Number when I traded one of my monsters for a random 20 card lot – "

"Then why are we dueling in the first place?" She exclaimed and dropped her face into her hands. "I literally would have traded you a meal for the card and we both could have been on our way." Kayda blew out a lung full of hair in exasperation before looking down at the cards in her hand. It would be better for everyone if she handed off her main character status now. Maybe to an underused legacy character, or hell, Luke was a better OC than she was. So far she was just a complete cliché drop bomb and they were already four chapters in.

"I'm sorry, kid." Her opponent shrugged and pulled a card out of his duel disk. "Look if you really need it, we can end this right –"

"I need you to let me finish my turn, can you do that?" Kayda spat out manically before giving a weak smile through her mask that she hoped reached her eyes. "I need to get at least one on screen win. I can't keep having these no result duels. I am the main character of a yugioh spinoff. A one off character is better than nothing."

He motioned for her to continue. "Yeah thanks. I always wanted to  be called a one off character. My family is never going to let me live this down."

Kayda took a deep breath and moved her arm up at a right angle so that her monster card blade cast a gentle glow over her face. Her battery was already at 48% percent and she wanted to win this fast. "Okay it's my turn. I draw!" She glanced down at her cards. "I normal summon Wight Writer: Written Slander from my hand." The level four zombie monster appeared on the field next to her level two Wight Writer: Undead Egao. Written Slander, a skeleton in a leather jacket with neon pink graffiti on its scythe, shot a hard look at Undead Egao, who was a smiling tomato with a Dia de Los Muertos skull painted over its face. Undead Egao nodded and Kayda dipped her head in determination. "Showtime guys," she murmured.

Dark Rebellion surprisingly stayed quiet.

"I activate the effect of Wight Writer: Undead Egao!" Kayda snapped and threw out one of her arms. "When another Wight Writer is normal summoned to the field, Undead Egao can change until it has the same level as it." The tomato on her field bounced around excitedly and spun around until it's level changed from two to four.

"Xyz summon?" Her opponent queried.

"Xyz summon," she confirmed with a stiff smile. "Get to it guys!" Kayda threw her arm into the sky as her monster dissolved into a twist of blue and purple light. "I build the overlay network with my level four Wight Writers: Written Slander and Undead Egao! Overlay! Shadow of the written word, reveal the truth none wish to see! I Xyz summon! Rank 4 Wight Writer Chaos Novelist!" She took a step back as the overlay spiral spun out over the ground before her. The projection was almost too big for the small alley they were dueling in, but she didn't bother adjusting the dimensions as a ragged zombie with stars in its eyes clawed its way out of the xyz summon. A laptop bag hung slung over his chest as he continued to grow, the strap sinking into its undead flesh that clung by strings to the bone. The ground appeared to shatter beneath his feet as shadows wailed out of the eye of the hurricane to circle him as overlay units. When his jaw unhinged a thousand screams that weren't its own rumbled from every direction imaginable. Even Kayda found herself shuddering. Her monster was the thing nightmares were made of, the embodiment of every little shadow that haunted humanities darkest minds. Every story that was left untold because the words were too horrible to put down in documentation, so horrible that they bled.

The stats card flipped over on the field in front of Chaos Novelist. 2600 ATK 1800 DFS.

"Even if you somehow cleared my field, that wouldn't be enough to wipe out my lifepoints." Her nameless opponent rolled his eyes and pointed at his life point count which was sitting at a comfortable 3000 LP.

Kayda shrugged and let a little smile dance over her lips...only to realize that she was still wearing her mask so any expression she made with her lips was pointless. "I happened to draw a pretty good starting hand, and the rest has been smooth sailing. I'll end this now and you can get home to your kids."

"Not that I don't appreciate it and all, but how are you going to end this with that?" He pointed at her monster in amused disbelief. Chaos Novelist's eye twitched, although Kayda wasn't sure if it was a reaction to his words or a just another zombie mannerism programmed into the card's code.

She rolled her eyes at him. "Watch me." The shadows rose up from the ground as she threw a hand to the shivering sky. "I activate Chaos Novelist's effect! By detaching all its xyz materials I can send everything in your main monster and trap zones off of the field – "

"—what the –"

"— monsters are sent back to your hand while anything in your spell and trap card zone are shuffled back into your deck. Go on." She grinned. "Do it."

"That is the most annoying shit I have ever encountered. And I've been dueling since before synchros were cool." He sighed in exasperation and every single card disappeared from his field. "But even with this direct attack – what?" He glanced up in surprise as his life points increased from 3000 to 4200.

Kayda sighed and crossed her arms under her cape. "Unfortunately, when I use this effect, your life points increase by the number of cards that left the field multiplied by 300. Four cards were removed from your field so your life points increased by 1200." Her opponent opened his mouth to say something but she cut him with a swift swipe of her hand. "I don't actually like using this effect very often, to be completely honest with you. Most of the time it hurts more than it helps. Zombies are not easy to control, but you see, the thing is that right now, I can also activate the second effect of a spell in my graveyard Frantic Scribbling. By banishing this card from play I can double one Xyz monster's attack until the end of my turn."

"Well shit..."

"Yeah, sorry for dragging you into this. You're a good guy." Kayda shrugged sheepishly as she banished the card and Chaos Novelist's attack points doubled to 5200. "If you have any spells in your hand to help you out of this, I'd say screw the rules and play them now."

He shook his head and braced his stance.

"Okay then, my Wight Writer Chaos Novelist attacks you directly!" The zombie quietly pulled a laptop out from the laptop bag, powered on the screen and turned it outward to face the other guy. Suddenly a thousand words came powering out of the computer like the tentacles of some nightmarish monster. The strings of words raced toward her opponent in a net of data."Wordless Chaos Inscribe!" Kayda silently took off her mask as her opponent's life points dropped to zero. Somehow the win felt hollow, like she was handed it out of sympathy not out of earning. Chaos Novelist closed his laptop and the monsters and cards disappeared from the field as their duel disks shut down.

Kayda claimed her prize and sent the guy back on his way. Even though she won, she still couldn't push the thoughts from her head. What kinda of main character didn't win their first duel. It didn't matter that the first duel was against some legacy character -- he wasn't even a featured legacy character with a known deck archetype. He was the kid brother of a main character that no one gave two thoughts about. Kayda should have been able to kick his ass in a heartbeat, for plot related reasons if nothing else.

She hugged her cape around her shoulders. Even her character design was a knockoff of her father, Yuto. If she didn't throw a jacket over her shirt and tie, she would be getting comments from everyone who watched 30 episodes past the end of Zexal. She needed to shape up and fast before the evil of the show made itself known. Kayda could feel it fast approaching, like a shadow within a shadow. Always watching from the deepest corner of a circle but never seen because circles have no corners. A copycat of an old character wouldn't be able to defeat the evil – and that's just what she was, a copy and paste of nothing very special.

The night was getting older and Kayda was becoming ever more glad that her cape was triple layered and lined with a heavy fabric. Walking around in a short sleeve shirt all the time would have been annoying as hell if her cape hadn't been constructed the way it was, because despite how badass it looked, she did find to be a functional piece of clothing that helped her keep warm if nothing else. Just like a desert where no one decent stepped foot, the Cast Away dimension got really cold at night.

She turned a corner and paced the sidewalk silently. Any other person would have been anxious walking the streets at night – and she wasn't any different from other people, she was scared too. Cold and scared. A lot of people didn't have homes, and had to do what they could to survive. Bar nothing. 

Kayda was lucky to share an apartment, and even so there were months when she couldn't pay her portion of the rent and eat at the same time. Jobs were a scarce thing in NEO NEO NEO because due to the relative newness (hence the name) of the dimension, everything was still in chaos. No one knew what currency to use, from which time period, or yugioh era. The only thing that had sure worth were the cards in your deck, every one had a value, and they could buy anything from food to actual Neo neo currency which was scarcer than most would think. But even cards were hard to come by because most of the powerful ones were destroyed when the Arc-V universe up rooted the first four timelines.

All powerful deck archetypes were constructed from scratch nowadays. Duel disks were salvaged. Cards were made under careful scrutiny -- or in the deepest shadows away from public eye. Kayda was lucky and oh so lucky. Not many could make a living off dueling, despite the bundles who tried.

That being said, Number cards were something of an oddity -- mostly because they weren't supposed to exist in the dimension at all. They were supposed to have been destroyed with the main characters of the Zexal universe who had stayed behind to fight for their world. All logical sense they should have been obliterated when the dimensional crash that took out Duel Monsters, GX, and 5Ds, did away with Zexal. The Numbers were tied to Yuuma, Astral, and all the people they entrusted them too -- but now all those people were gone.

The fact that a large number of them (forgive the pun) had somehow made it into the Castaway dimension had the card hoarders in the Underground scrambling. So far not too many people had considered what the worth of those cards were and she was completely fine with that, the less competition she had the better. Between her number hunting and Luke's card making, the two of them had been able to live a better life than the majority of those in their positions. Tossed into the dimension from a prior show, no explanation, just a desperate last attempt to save their lives.

That being said, Kayda was still frantically searching for a main character Number, like a Number 32 or 39, or hell number 10, but they were still nowhere to be found. It was like the spare cards were cast away just like the spare people were.

And I'm a toss aside protagonist, Kayda thought sourly.

The street was quiet and allowed her to exist solely in the beat of her footsteps. It was too quiet for her liking, but there was no other way back that didn't involve looping the city or at the very least cutting through the market place. The market was catastrophe waiting to happen in the daytime, but at night it all went underground. She only went there when she had her business, and like everyone else she kept her distance given the choice.

Her fists clenched silently at the thought.

She had grown up in that night market. She had dueled on those streets and the deepest part of her whispered that was where a person like her belonged. But it was better if the people there didn't have a face to remember her by, because they sure as Hell would have remembered her as a kid.

Kayda came to a stop at the sound of a large mound of flesh hitting the side of an empty dumpster. An oddly specific sound, yes, but a distinct one all the same. There was a loud scuffle and a heavy tread of boots hitting concrete like someone was trying to run away. Then someone let out a low hiss, followed by two thumps. The first one belonging to a strike and a second immediately following, of someone hitting the ground.

The streetlights may have been dim, but they still illuminated enough  to see by. Kayda slowly approached the sounds, the fighting growing louder with each contact between her boot and the ground. She peered around the corner into an alley and saw almost exactly what  she expected to. There were a couple people fighting, more than a couple actually, more like three or four.

Except it wasn't really a fight, it was a more of a swat down because as much as the three others were trying to get their punches in, they could do nothing to touch the guy they were attacking. A blue haired guy at about the age of 18 (although who knows the ages of anyone in these things anymore) ducked a punch and swiftly spun his staff into the gut of the guy creeping up behind him. His eyes caught the light and shone a dull gold like fractured amber – angry fractured amber if you wanted to be one hundred percent specific.

Kayda would have liked to say she recognized the guy on the spot, considering how much that duel was haunting her subconscious in this chapter – but it was in that particular moment that she realized how often she challenged random strangers to duels in the middle of the night. The duelist ducked and spun his staff again, knocking the legs out from under one causing him to fall into his partner.

Kayda ducked into a corner as the blue haired guy made a mad run for it. She recognized him now. He was the duelist from the other night, the one who had used one card to throw her first duel into a draw – not even a no result, an actual, neither of them won, in fact both of them lost, draw. The guy spun his staff in a wide arc as he ran; something shimmered from the back of the pole and suddenly straps shot out from his jacket and condensed the pole to his back so that he could have free use of both of his hands. She sank into the shadows and watched as he disappeared around a corner.

 The other three guys were slowly collecting their wits as they dragged themselves to their feet and started formulating a plan.

Kayda heard the words, catch him and before they find out. Followed by we're going to say he had a gang of thugs with him and we took out six of them by ourselves. No one says anything about how we got our asses handed to us by some kid with an oversized stick.

Kayda glanced back in the direction that the other guy had run off in. "Haruto Tenjo, eh?" A smile turned up the corner of her lips. "Looks like I'm not your only problem. Hmm." She turned around and started walking in the opposite direction. None of this was her problem, and although her protagonist instincts were telling her to get involved and get oh so very very involved, the logical part of herself knew that it was none of her business and that she should keep her face three feet from a wall at all times...so to speak.

The first step to not being a copy and paste protagonist was to avoid running after every little occurrence that happened in the city. If she waited long enough the most important plot points would come around kick her in the ass, but until that happened, she was content to ignore it. There was still some left over cake in her apartment and it was calling her name. It was not like she was obligated to care about the guy she almost lost a duel to anyway.

By walking swiftly and not looking over her shoulder no matter how tempted she was, Kayda managed to put several city blocks between herself and the occurrence. And considering the fact that she was trying to get her butt out of there as soon as she possibly could, she was able to make very good time. A couple blocks from her apartment she ducked into an alley and braced herself to jump up to the ladder which was bolted to the side of the building. Once at the top she would be able to jump rooftops all the way home – which was usually safer than walking on the ground for some odd reason.

Unfortunately she never got the chance.

Her ears pricked at the sound of little feet pattering against the ground and she looked up to see a small kid with a duel disk on his arm, half running half falling through the mouth of the alley. It was a young boy, anywhere between the ages of seven and ten years. He paused and whirled his head around frantically before zeroing in her. She must have been a sight with her unwavering stare, arm half raised to grab the ladder and mouth slightly ajar. The boy shot one last frenzied look over his shoulder as he booked it in her direction. He ran the last couple steps then collapsed into a ball in the shadow between her and the wall. "I'm tired of running," the kid whispered.

And here is the plot, Kayda thought grimly as she looked down at the kid by her feet. She wasn't sure if he was a legacy character, a random OC, or something else in entirely, but she did understand running, and always being afraid to look back. 

A low chuckle floated in on the air, and the boy shrank deeper into her shadow. The laugh was soft, quieter than the world had become at that moment – and somehow that made it all the more sinister, as if it were the type of laugh a hunter made just behind the back of a victim just within its grasp.

She knew that laugh better than anyone, since most of the time it was coming out of her mouth.

Kayda dragged the reluctant kid to his feet. "We're cornered here, come on. I don't know where the city went, but we can't expect help from the people around here."

Together the two of them bolted out of the alley. From the corner of her peripherals she could just make out the silhouette of their hunter walking through the mouth of the space between buildings and she pushed the kid ahead of her.

"So distracted by the shadows that you can't even bring yourself to look at what's right in front of you?"

A jolt ran through Kayda's body as she whipped around toward the voice. Leaning against a lamp post was a face she hadn't seen before, this wasn't odd of course because it was a big city within an even bigger dimension, yet somehow the stranger sent shivers running down her spine. The voice belonged to a woman as far as she could tell, but it was difficult to make out any other distinguishing features. In that moment the lamp was blinding, and Kayda shielded her eyes with one hand to try and steal a better look.

Then the figure stepped out from the shadows, a smile softer than quicksand resting comfortably upon her lips. Once out of the complete darkness, the stranger almost seemed to almost glow, the electric cyan on her jacket and the white in her hair bounding the light outward like the warning colors to a poisonous frog. "I'll be taking the kid, if you don't mind," she said quietly as she reached forward.

Kayda usually didn't give two hoots what happened to strangers, especially strangers that appeared out of nowhere right when she was two blocks from her home, but the boy cowered behind her legs and she placed one hand down tightly on the kid's shoulder. "And if I do mind?"

"Why would you care?" The stranger crossed her arms and rolled her eyes. "You were painfully indifferent in the last chapter when the pastry guy was getting his ass beat by the orange haired new guy."

Kayda frowned and took a step back. "How would you know that?"

"This is a fanfiction, girl. We're all required to read the background chapters before we're allowed into the story. I know everything that has been penned to paper up to this point. And yes you seriously need to change your character design. I suggest modifying the cape and jacket ensemble. It will work wonders."

"Okay, fair enough." She took another cautious step back as the glowing woman moved forward. "I have a soft spot for children. What do you want with him anyway?"

"I –"

Kayda narrowed her eyes. "You're kidnapping him, aren't you?"

"Maybe, maybe not," the woman uncrossed her arms. "Okay fine, how did you guess that?"

"Fanfiction or not, this is a Yu-Gi-Oh! story and this is a kid under eleven years of age. I took an educated guess."

The three of them stood at an awkward stalemate. Finally the glowing stranger lifted her arms in a shrug and gave Kayda a flirty wink. "Look, I know you don't want anymore trouble. You have ninety nine problems and this kid doesn't need to be one of them. Just hand him over and I'll let you go free."

Kayda's grip tightened protectively on the kid's shoulder. "Oh, so you're holding us both hostage now are you?"

The stranger nodded. "Yep."

"News flash lady. You're not holding me hostage, and you're not taking this kid anywhere." Kayda threw her hand out from under her cape and activated the monster blade of her duel disk. The addition of her neon purple light seemed to make the strange glow with even more colors. "I may suck at my protagonist job, but I am not going to let the kidnapped younger sibling cliché be repeated in this story. So if you want him you're going to have to throw down with me first."

"Hmm," the stranger smiled and cocked her head to one side. "Well it's not like you've won anything important yet. This shouldn't take too long." She slapped a thin tablet onto her arm and a thin monster card blade rose up from the screen. It looked solid enough to Kayda, but there was no dimension that used a simple monster card zone system without having the spell and trap card zone be a part of the main blade. The disk design screamed Zexal dimension yet the woman wasn't pulling out a duel gazer (or putting together six different parts because Zexal dimension duel disks are a mess of parts to keep track of) and no AR vision was being established. "The name is Torch," the woman whispered with a smile darker than her name. "Remember it well."

"What dimension are you from? What timeline?" Kayda demanded, her fist tightening angrily. If this lady turned out to be another Xyz user she was going to have a fit. She may not have watched all of Arc-V, but she knew what the fusion dimension did to Heartland, the place that was supposed to be her home if she had had an adequately conceived backstory. There were already too Xyz users in her book. She ground her teeth in anger. Death to the timeline, if all the Xyz users were here, no wonder Heartland didn't have anyone good enough left to defend it.

The one calling herself Torch simply shook her head and drew her first hand. "It's time to duel."

"You're not from the Duel Monster's universe. Get over yourself."

The stranger narrowed her eyes. "Duel."

Art of Torch up by ColouredTorch. <3

DUEL!