Young Rebecca stared wordlessly at the field created by that final strange turn. Solomon could hardly blame her. He himself was stroking his short grey beard out of a mix of surprise and interest at the whirlwind of events that had transpired from the very first turn.

  “So, this is Phillip Jenson…” Solomon absentmindedly muttered to himself. Beside him, Arthur Hawkins gave a ‘mhm’ of agreement. So this was Phillip Jenson. It was as Solomon knew – a proper duel lays bare the spirit of the duelist to one who had the eyes to see it. This man before him…

  Unyielding, yet flexible. Sad, yet still quick with a laugh or a joke. A steel to his spirit forged strong through events both recent and long past. This hardly seemed… hm, how would the young man put it? It hardly seemed like Phil’s first rodeo. That realization alone was enough to make Solomon’s bones feel heavy with age. Still, he could tell in his heart that Phil was still a good man. He would be no monster, no walking revenant consumed by the fires of rage to burn all in his path.

  He was still human to his core.

  “Phil-“ Solomon began, only for Rebecca to interrupt.

  “Meanie-butt! Old man! Bald! Baldie! Baldie-pants! You need the gambling addiction helpline! Gramps, what’s the number? Give it to the baldie now!” Rebecca stood, shouting and stomping her foot into the ground. It was to her credit that only a few tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Is this her first loss?” Solomon whispered the question to Arthur, who waggled his hand in response.

  “Other than to me? I believe so.”

  Now it was Solomon’s turn to give a ‘mhm’ of agreement. Likely Rebecca had never taken her losses to Arthur to heart or really even counted them, merely rationalizing them as her grandpa being the strongest and her losses to him being a natural part of life. Meaning until now, in her mind, she'd gone otherwise undefeated. Losing oneself to emotions at that point would be natural. Even more so for an eight-year-old girl who had faced as frustrating a deck as Phil's. In a way, it was amusing. Solomon could believe that many of Rebecca’s former opponents might have felt the same feelings after falling to her Cannon Soldier/Gravity Bind combo.

  “Hey, it’s what I do!” Phil spread his arms out wide in response. Solomon shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. Of course, Phil was hardly making things better. Before either of the two elderly men could so much as move or speak, Rebecca’s face turned a deep shade of red. She let out something that sounded like a mix between a catlike hiss and a snarl of rage, and then she launched herself over the table to tackle Phil.

  Phil fell backward off his chair from the strike, laughing uproariously while the hellcat in human form battered away at his chest with tiny fists. Neither Solomon nor Arthur could help themselves at this point – they both doubled over, letting out loud ‘ohohohohohos’ at the sight of Rebecca, who was barely a third of Phil’s size, doing her best to seriously maim the man.

  “Stop! Mercy! Uncle!” Phil shouted through laughter that shook his entire body. Rebecca let out another angry hiss, sending another tiny punch into his chest.

  “Why won’t you die! Die! Just die!” She screamed out.

  This continued for a full minute until finally Phil managed to put a lid over his laughter and hoisted Rebecca up off the ground by her collar and held her an arm’s length away from his body – far enough so that her short arms could only swing away at thin air. This set off another round of ‘ohohohohohos’ from the two grandfathers, both men in their minds overlaying the scene with an imaginary image of a grumpy battle-scarred tomcat holding up a mischievous kitten by the scruff of its neck.

  “I’ll bite your fingers off! I’LL BITE YOUR FINGERS OFF!” Rebecca howled out, her hands still battering away at empty air. Phil bounced her through the air with the practiced aura of a man who wasn’t a stranger to dealing with excitable children.

  “Like a slinky! Like a little bouncy slinky~!” He taunted back. Somehow, Rebecca's face turned an even deeper shade of red. She let out a strangled snarl of rage.

  “I’LL TEAR YOUR EYES OUT! Just lemme go! Lemme go!”

  Phil cupped his free hand up to her ear with a mischievous look. “Oh~? A threat~? That doesn’t sound like a ‘I’m sorry, Phil the Great, I’m sorry for orchestrating this terrible and deadly attack on your life!’ that you should be saying, does it not, oh ye of little height?” He then directed a knowing glance toward Solomon and Arthur. Solomon hastily agreed, though at this point Arthur had been so overtaken by a fit of laughter that he could do no more than lean on the counter to keep his balance between loud guffaws.

  “I’LL KILL YOU!”

  “Sure, sure~, but you need to say the magic words first shortie~."

  “I’m not short! I’m not! I’m not!”

  But now Rebecca was hiccupping. Her flailing limbs were slowing down. A few more tears fell from her eyes. The hissing noise stopped.

  “I’m not short!” She wailed. Phil sat her back on the floor and patted her on the head.

  “There there, sure you aren’t. How about you get on back to your gramps? See if he can get some ice cream for a valiant and honorable duelist, ay? You did well~, you did well~, look at my life point counter! I was down to 100 points! One more turn and I’d have been toast.”

  Rebecca ran over to Arthur and pressed her face into his chest. Arthur stopped chortling for long enough to pat her on the head.

  “Yes, of course! Ice cream it is! I think grandpa also needs a scoop or five… how about we see if there’s anything particularly delightful in the back of Young Solomon’s freezer?”

  Solomon let out a scoff. “Young? If I’m young, you’re ancient. Go on back, Young Arthur. I think I have some mint chocolate chip in the chest freezer, and some rocky road next to it. I hope my grandson won’t miss that one too terribly.”

  “Ohohoho!” Laughed Arthur, already guiding a mollified Rebecca to the back room, “The kiddo should know that in this house, if you snooze, you lose!”

  “Rapscallion!” Solomon snorted.

  “A most foul one.” Phil nodded in agreement.

  Still chuckling, Solomon ambled over to the duel table to occupy Rebecca’s abandoned chair. Phil picked up his own overturned chair off the floor and took a seat. Solomon’s chuckles died out. He stroked his grey beard, looking over Phil’s face with a considering gaze.

  “The deck is yours as promised," Solomon said.

  Phil nodded his thanks, and then he cocked his head slightly. “I feel like there’s a ‘but’ hanging on to the back of your words.”

  “Mhm.” Solomon stroked his beard again. “You are correct… but pardon this old man for not quite knowing the best words to approach this subject with.”

  A silence fell as Solomon continued to contemplate the man before him.

  “You are going to kill the man who murdered poor Jean, are you not? My grandson thinks you want to put him in jail, but I believe he may be mistaken.”

  Phil’s eyes grew steely.

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  “I’m gonna damn well try.”

  “Mhm.”

  “And if you must let an innocent bystander die to do that?”

  Phil let out a great sigh.

  “I… I don’t know. If I don’t… Shit. I guess you’re concerned about that, huh?

  Now it was Solomon’s turn to let out a great sigh. “That I am… that I am. I won’t say revenge is never the answer. It has its time and place, like all things in life. What is that dangerous fellow’s name? Red Summer? A monster like that has to be put down. To think so otherwise is naive. Every day he continues to draw breath is a day marked by a metaphorical coin flip – will he kill again, or will he not? He is a danger to every good man and woman who crosses his path. I… this old man is just worried. Yugi and his friends are too. They care, you know. About you, about what happened to Jean.”

  Phil brought up a hand to his face to knead at his brow. “Yeah. I know. They’re good kids.”

  “They are.” Solomon leaned forward to place his hand on Phil’s shoulder. “Revenge has its time and place, as I said. Just… don't be consumed by it. Let it be done so that other good people do not suffer at his hands. No more and no less. And I honestly hope you do not have to make a decision like that. I… am not sure what I would choose either.”

  To take an innocent life in order to possibly spare more from the coin flip. It was a terrible thought to turn people into statistics. A slippery slope, was it not? Yet it was also a terrible thought to let a body count rise higher when one might be able to prevent that very thing from happening. It was, in Solomon’s mind, the ultimate question that no man had the true best answer to. It was also the part he disliked most about old age, that and his bad knees. Everyone expected an old man to know all the answers, when in reality Solomon felt no surer of himself than he had been in his 20s. The only difference was that he’d had more time to make mistakes.

  And Heavens above, had he made mistakes.

  “Jean was a good man.” Solomon continued in a voice he hoped was not as fragile as he felt inside. “He wouldn’t want you to destroy yourself along the way. None of us wants that. Take Red Summer down, but have hope for the future and listen to your conscience if you truly are forced to decide. That is all men like us can do in times like these, to hope and strive for the best with what power we have.”

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  "That is all men like us can do in times like these."

  Phil walked over to the counter to grab the frog deck with Solomon’s words still ringing in his ears. He shuffled through it, noting each and every card within. It was under 40 cards, the contents entirely being made up of frog and frog support cards. All were ones he recognized, with a few even being ones he did not expect to see at this point in time.

  “Interesting…” He muttered to himself. Another example of his world’s card release schedule being different than this one’s.

  “That is true.” Solomon’s voice came from behind Phil’s shoulder. The old man had walked around the table to join Phil at the counter. In his hands was clutched a newspaper, which he offered to Phil. “The other thing I hoped to give you. The contents are… concerning.”

  Phil gently placed the cards down on the counter to hold the offered newspaper in his hands. He glanced at the headline. His eyebrows rose and his pupils constricted.

  “Maximillion Pegasus Murdered.” Phil read out.

  Solomon said something, but so great was the sound of the blood pounding in his ears that he hardly noticed the elderly man's words. Pegasus dead. But how? He'd met Pegasus in GX. Briefly, but it was still a meeting. They'd exchanged maybe two words. Chumley had gone to work for him. But now the man was dead. Phil shot a glance toward Lumina, who read his face like it was an open book.

  “I don’t know either!” She exclaimed, spreading her arms out wide in confusion before letting them drop to her side. “This is one hundred percent the same timeline, same universe, same reality. It’s why it was so hard to find you. I didn’t expect Ryko to just drop you off at an earlier point on the same timeline. In hindsight it made sense, as your presence has already affected this world. You being here again doesn't throw up any warning bells or red flags in our system, meaning he could get away scot-free with his alcohol-fueled cocaine bender. What a prick.”

  Phil raised an eyebrow, letting the unspoken words of 'Yeah, but Pegasus is dead now' fill his face.

  Lumina let out a grumble of defeated exasperation. “I know! But I checked five times before coming here, entirely out of confusion. At that point I hadn’t realized at all how easy it would be to hide you here. This is the same timeline. The same world. The same universe. The same reality. It's exactly the same as when you were in GX. I checked. If you waited around long enough, you could probably run into yourself at the academy. And no, don’t ask me if that would make a paradox or whatever. I’m an office worker, not a time scientist or whatever the hell those soulless lab coats are called. I’d say either something has changed in the timeline due to your involvement, or somehow Pegasus gets brought back to life before you meet him in GX. Hell, maybe you met an imposter. Don’t ask me which one it would be.”

  Phil let out a long, slow breath. He could feel his brain spinning already. Timey-wimey bullshit, an imposter, or resurrection. Considering he was for certain in the same timeline, anything could be possible. It could be an instance of the timeline never being fully set in stone. Or it could be that by GX, someone had gotten together enough magic mojo that they could bring the dead fully back to life. His brow creased as he thought. The latter option… wasn’t entirely impossible. Pegasus himself had worked on a project just like that. It was the very same reason why he had held the tournament. Combine the Millennium Eye with Kaiba’s solid vision tech. Millennium items were, in fact, essentially pseudo-cheat items, though some were simpler than others.

  For the briefest of moments, Phil's mind returned to his previous thoughts on Jean. If Pegasus really was brought back to life… could it be possible…

  He screwed his eyes closed tight. No. It was as before. He'd already theorized the Millennium Items could probably be used to bring someone back from the dead. But that was a 'probably', and considering one Item by itself was unable to do it… and what he would have to do to gather multiple… assuming they didn’t kill him for being unworthy even if he won them in a duel… he could focus on villains… but would that even be enough? And the villains all had hosts… what would they do to their hosts if defeat became inevitable?

  No. Again, it had to be a no. Down that path led a dangerous mindset to a possibility that was just that – a possibility. A possibility that even if turned to a certainty, held no assurance that it would be any different than all the other times the ‘brought back to life’ cliché had been used in media, where the second life was nothing but some false, empty shell of what was once before.

  But if… Phil breathed in. He breathed out. In. Out. His eyes were still closed tight. Solomon continued to chatter on, but he heard not a word. It wasn’t just the chance of failure or disaster that scared him the most.

  It was what Phil realized he might do along the way. It was that alone which spurred his refusal to even think a moment further on the matter.

  "That is all men like us can do in times like these."

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Another spoonful of deliciously chocolatey rocky-road ice cream disappeared past Rebecca’s glum half-frown. A shiver of delight ran down her spine at the taste. The carton in her hands, already half-empty, now only had a quarter of its contents left. Gramps was nearby, licking away at the mint-chocolate-chip ice cream cone he had whipped up out of nowhere. Rebecca didn’t mind. She wasn’t a waffle cone girl.

  “Stupid old baldie…” Rebecca pouted around another chomp of ice cream. The sting of defeat had lessened slightly (mainly due to its replacement, a hefty brain freeze raging around her noggin), but it still didn’t feel good.

  "Ohohoho! Didn't Grampa say at the start? This is a wide world with many big fish to be found."

  Rebecca directed what she hoped was a scorching glare to her grandpa, who, annoyingly enough, seemed to only find that amusing.

  “I know…” Rebecca eventually grumbled out. “Still. The way that guy dueled was too annoying.”

  Arthur lightly shrugged, hardly bothered by the little ball of rain and thunder clouds his granddaughter had become.

  “Hello kettle, meet pot. Besides, I told you he’s a professional underground duelist. Those types are less bothered about honor than most. Phillip is the type of lad to stay close to that stereotype. When he can, he bothers with it, but he’ll drop it to the curb the moment he feels the need to. Such a style is neither good nor bad. It simply is.”

  Rebecca rolled her eyes and shoved another spoonful of ice cream into her mouth. There he was, gramps in the flesh. Talking about complicated junk that she didn't care about. A second and a third spoonful were shoveled into her gullet before she made to respond.

  “He’s still a stupid-face.” She growled.

  "Ohohohohoho! Maybe so, maybe so! You'll get him next time, won't you, my dear?"

  “Yeah!” Rebecca pointed her spoon high into the air like a sword to make a solemn knight’s oath upon. “He’s going down next time!”

  “Ohohoho! I can’t wait!”

  “I’ll make a brand-new deck! I’ll train! I won’t lose ever again, not even to you! Gramps, we can’t wait another second!”

  Rebecca shoved the last of the rocky road ice cream into her mouth and then spun around to charge toward the door.

  “Onwards to victory!” She screamed.

  -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

  Arthur watched his precious granddaughter’s back disappear through the back door. He could feel a smile blooming on his face. Such was the privilege of the elderly to see the passion of youth, was it not? He took another bite from his ice cream cone. Hm, but it was also the downside of age to move more slowly.

  …Had he left the car unlocked?

  Arthur tilted his head in thought. His memory was neither good nor bad these days. Then he shrugged and crunched into the deliciously crisp waffle cone. If it wasn't, it wouldn't hurt Rebecca to wait around for a tad bit. Long enough for him to finish this mint chocolate chip ice cream cone, at least.

  Hm.

  Maybe he’d get one for the road as well. A plane flight back to the States would be quite the journey for his old bones, after all. Always was. Yes. A second cone would be quite nice indeed.

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