Chapter Text

"You called it a game. What are the rules?"

"There are three rooms. Each room contains a test. If you pass the test, the next room will be revealed. If you fail, or if you become incapacitated, you lose. If you pass all three tests, you win. If you win, I will show you the exit. If you lose, I will destroy you."

"How do I know I can trust you? You might have made the test impossible."

"I designed the trial to test worthiness of the Puzzle. It is not impossible. I certainly consider myself worthy. I have no doubt I would succeed even without any relevant knowledge of it. If you are concerned about my motivations, know that if I wanted to destroy you I would have done so immediately when you touched the Puzzle."

Telling someone you could kill them isn't exactly a good way of reassuring them but before Yugi could find a polite phrasing the voice spoke again. "I am confident that without my help you will not leave this room for an extremely long time. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain."

"Just to be clear, is forfeit also a failure condition?"

"You do not know me so I will forgive you this time. I do not forfeit. Not ever. I would not recommend that you do either. This is a serious matter."

"I'm just trying to understand the rules of the game."

"Are you ready to begin or are you hoping that I will fade into oblivion before the game begins in earnest?"

Yugi took a deep breath. "I'm ready."

"I will need to share the usage of the Puzzle with you to facilitate the game. I require your permission."

"What happens if I refuse?"

"I am within my rights to help you reach the first room. If you refuse my assistance I will wait patiently for you to find it on your own or give up."

Better just let him. "All right. You have my permission."

There was a scraping noise and the pedastal fell through the floor. After discovering the ghost of a pharaoh that lived thousands of years ago and that there's a golden pyramid that he could teleport to himself at will and was maybe invincible, a moving rock didn't seem far outside the realm of impossibility Yugi found itself. Through the hole in the middle of the room he could see a pasageway about ten feet below. Yugi took a deep breath and jumped down. His flashlight revealed stairs leading down in front of him. They formed a square spiral so it was hard to see how much further down he had to go as he followed them. After a little too long he reached the end of the stairs and entered a much larger room. A sudden gong startled him just after he entered. This must be the first room.

Yugi's flashlight didn't reveal any immediate danger. Three of the walls were empty, but the far one had evenly-spaced handholds going all the way up further than he could see. As he got closer he noticed two things. First, the handholds were clearly designed for someone taller than he was. Much taller. Second, there was a pit several feet across in front of the climbing wall. It was filled with stone spikes. Of course. At least the handholds looked sturdy and easy to hold on to and step on. The jump was unnerving but it didn't look like there was any way around it. No point putting it off. Yugi put the strap of his flashlight over his head so he wouldn't drop it. He'd have to hold it in his mouth to climb with both hands. Yugi got a good running start and leapt for the nearest handholds. He managed to grab it with both hands, bang his knees hard against the wall, and not lose the flashlight. Two out of three. A good start. He began to climb.

New problem. No more handholds in reach. There was one he just barely couldn't reach. There was no way around it. He'd have to jump for it or spend the rest of his life hugging a wall. One, two, THREE! He forced himself up and grabbed for it. He was already falling before he noticed it was wet and he'd slipped on it. Just a moment too late he realized what he should have been doing all along and called the Puzzle to his hand and tried to sling the chain around a handhold but he missed. He landed with a loud crack...but no pain. Shock? Paralysis? His fingers and toes still seemed to work. Somehow the spikes he'd landed on had all broken. He wasn't even bleeding. Come to think of it, his knees didn't hurt either when they smashed into the climbing wall. Maybe the Puzzle extends its invincibility to its wielder. He stood up and kicked one of the spikes. It seemed sturdy enough.

He turned back to the climbing wall. Convenient that the handholds go all the way down this far. After a few experiments he discovered he could summon the Puzzle in his grip with the chain looped around a handhold as long as the chain would reach. It still took a while to reach the top, but the rest of the climb was uneventful. At the top he found another hallway leading to the next room. Another gong sounded as he entered it.

The second room was much smaller and had a lot of rocks scattered around its floor. The far side opened into a much larger room. As Yugi walked closer he noticed that something in the larger room moved too. Peering through the far wall he saw a larger version of himself on the far side of the larger room. To his right he saw a small box with a smaller version of himself looking away at an even smaller Yugi. This was a room that contained itself.

The pharaoh spoke again. "You must destroy the map before you can leave this room."

How is that possible if the map IS the room? You can't destroy the model without destroying yourself because you're in the model. Confusing. Maybe this was all just some silly mind game and it's impossible to do. No, no good thinking like that.

Reaching into the side of the model, Yugi waved at himself and almost waved back. That would just be silly. The big Yugi would be looking the other way.

He picked up a small rock and dropped it into the side of the model. It went in just fine. The larger version of it behind him seemed ordinary enough. It's completely impossible of course, but the rock didn't seem to mind that its existence made absolutely no sense if you thought about it on an atomic level. Were its atoms bigger now, or were there twice as many? What if the size ratio of the rooms isn't an integer? What happens when a single air particle goes through the wall? Was he going to run out of air made of normally-sized molecules and end up suffocating or bludgeoned to death by atoms the size of boulders? Yugi must have made some false assumption. Incorrect conclusions usually come from false assumptions.

It can't just be a simple teleportation. That doesn't explain the size difference in the rock. It would disintegrate if its atoms were proportionally spread out. It sort of can't be a room inside itself but that doesn't seem more impossible than making a bigger rock out of nothing. If it's a room inside itself could it be an infinite list of bigger and bigger rooms and smaller and smaller rooms, all synchronized perfectly? Maybe, but that's functionally the same as just having one room. It might help to think of it that way, though.

How do I destroy the map? It wasn't rooted to the ground or anything. He could pick it up and even tilt it without seeming to cause problems. Was the inner room not affected by outer gravity? Why was it seemingly not immune to physical forces from his hand moving the rock in the inner room? Maybe that's because the rock came from the outer room? No, it was possible to nudge inner rocks too. Maybe "what" matters more than "why". Yugi sat down and thought for a while.

I can move the map, I can move things from this room to the bigger room, and I can move things from this room to the smaller one. He could try smashing the model but that would probably be suicidal. What if he reached in and smashed the inner model? No, that had the same sort of problem: the inner inner Yugi would get crushed, and all of the Yugis are the same. No safe way to test that assumption. Yugi reached in and crushed an "inner" rock, and the same rock was crushed behind him by the other Yugi. Yugi very carefully reached in to touch a rock inside the inner model. The ground shook as he touched it. He'd hoped it would have been safe to destroy the inner model but that didn't seem to work. Maybe if he carefully split the map in half and crushed half the room from the other half? No, that won't work either. He'd just end up in a room half the size with the same problem.

Yugi looked out the opening and brought the model over to it. His hands seemed to pass through without any issues but the Puzzle somehow refused to cross the threshold. Strange. The model itself, however, did seem to go through the wall. It seemed unsafe to just throw it through. Yugi didn't want to lose track of it and have a version of himself a few orders of magnitude larger than him step on him by mistake. It also wasn't obvious what would happen if he moved the "map" through the wall. Why did this room have to be so much harder than the last one?

Maybe there was some sort of way of reducing the size of the map to zero. If the size is zero, then it doesn't exist. If he could just make it fall through the side an infinite number of times in a finite amount of time it should work, assuming a few air molecules didn't knock it off course once it got down to that size. If it shrinks by half and then takes half as much time to fall through again the next time then that would do it. Now he just had to make a room that contained itself fall through the open side of itself into itself and then land on itself. Did that even mean anything? Maybe he'd been working on the wrong method. If there were two maps he might be able to arrange to destroy one with the other with something like that but that wouldn't solve this problem. Even if he split the model in half safely and destroyed one half with the other that left him with half as much room to stand in. It would shrink the room, but wouldn't really destroy the map because there'd have to be enough of the room left for Yugi to stand it.

So he couldn't destroy the map all at once and he couldn't destroy it half at a time. What else could he do?

Yugi put the model half way through the open wall with the model's opening facing to the right. Surely enough, a smaller model protruded slightly from the model, and a smaller one came out of that one, and so on. Good so far.

Wait a minute. The inner models won't finish coming through until I finish pushing this model out because they're all the same. I can safely push it as far as I want. As it crosses over it should shrink down to infinitely small size. That should count as destroyed. Hopefully. Yugi pushed the fractal model through the opening, vanishing it.

Hurray, it works! The open wall replaced itself with another passageway. Yugi took a deep breath and walked to the third challenge room.

A third gong sounded as Yugi entered the final room. There were five statues on each side of the room. The far side had the exit. The statues looked just like monster cards from Duel Monsters. He knew they were supposed to be based on ancient Egypt but he had always assumed that was a "based on a true story" sort of thing. His grandfather was doing a lot of research into the shadow games and the civil war that followed but it had always seemed that Duel Monsters was either entirely made up or based on old superstitions, until today.

Yugi cautiously approached the exit, and the largest statue suddenly opened its ten red eyes, picked up one of the nearby statues and hurled it at Yugi, pinning him against the far wall. He flinched, expecting pain, but none came. When he opened his eyes again he saw the monster had gone back to its original position. It must be guarding the exit.

If you're trapped, you lose. Yugi struggled against the weight of the statue but it wouldn't budge. New problem. I can't move. I need to get the statue off of me so I can get past the creature. What do I have available? I can move my arms but I can't just brute force it. Maybe the Puzzle can do something. Yugi tried to summon it inside of the statue, but it appeared near the surface instead. No telefragging. That's a shame. Hitting it with the Puzzle didn't seem to do much damage either.

If you're trapped, you lose. Well, there's another side to that: if I really were trapped then Yami probably would have declared victory by now, therefore there must be something I can do. But what? Yugi had broken the spikes in the first room when he fell on them. They couldn't be much softer than the statue pinning him. They were damaged by the fall but the statue wasn't hurt much by direct attacks or being hit by the Puzzle. It could just be speed, but if that's the case then there's nothing that can be done. It could be impossible to do intentionally, or maybe Yami did it. Again, if that's the case there's nothing that can be done. Maybe the gravity was different here somehow but it felt the same climbing and falling so that seemed unlikely. Besides, if that were the case it would explain why he was unharmed but not why the spikes had been broken. They probably weren't designed specifically to be broken, and even if they were Yugi probably still have been impaled. Maybe the bottoms of his feet were special somehow? No, these were all useless ideas. He needed something usable.

If you're in a hopeless situation then it doesn't matter what you do. If you're not, then it does matter. Therefore you should always act with the assumption that it's not hopeless, regardless of the probability. It won't do any harm if you're already doomed and it just might fix the problem. Something he could use. Either this place was protecting him or the Puzzle was. Either way, it seemed like Yugi couldn't be harmed. Yugi experimentally tried biting the back of his hand, slowly increasing the force in case he was wrong. There was never any pain or blood. Punching the floor didn't have any useful effect either. It was like punching rubber.

Ok. Maybe for now it would be better to focus less on solutions and more on understanding the situation. If he didn't have the Puzzle it would certainly be impossible, therefore the Puzzle must be involved in the solution. What was different about when he fell? He certainly fell a lot harder but it should still have some effect. Then he had an idea. Injury. He would have been injured if the spikes hadn't broken. He would have been injured if the statue had crushed his legs and torso, but they still felt fine. The spikes were small and the statue was big. Maybe the Puzzle exterted a counter-force against any incoming object that might hurt him until it wouldn't do any damage anymore. If that's the case then the greater the potential injury and the smaller the area of contact, the greater the force would have to be in order to quickly stop the object. A giant statue falling on him would have the force spread out enough to remain mostly undamaged but a small spike (or maybe a bullet?) would be utterly destroyed. Yugi extended his left pinky finger. It was probably the most vulnerable finger. If he hit the statue with it as hard as he could maybe he could start to break it apart. He started finger-stabbing the statue with his finger. It was surprisingly difficult to override his instincts telling him he was about to break his finger. After several tries he summoned the frustration and desperation of being trapped and punched forward with his finger extended as hard as he could. The statue cracked. Success! After that it was easy to break the statue into small enough pieces that he could lift them and get up.

Now he just had to get past that monster without it pinning him completely. It looked just like the Shadow Ghoul card from Duel Monsters. Nine of its ten eyes were open. That one's pretty easy for someone who knows Duel Monsters. The Shadow Ghoul is powered by monsters in the graveyard. One of the ten statues was destroyed, and one of the eyes was shut. It wasn't proof yet but it was the obvious next thing to try. Yugi went to the nearest statue and smashed his fingers into it, breaking it into pieces. Another eye shut. Another success! Hopefully when all the statues were gone it would be weak enough to evade. One by one Yugi broke the rest of the statues. The Shadow Ghoul did not interfere.

Weakness was his greatest strength. He charged forward. As the ghoul raised one of its arms to hit him, Yugi aimed his hand at the incoming limb, his fingers flat and splayed. He took a stance so that the full force of the blow would go into his hand. When the fist landed, it tore apart and an inky goo flooded from the wound. It wrung the limb back in pain, releasing Yugi's arm from the wound. Yugi ducked past it and ran through the doorway. The blood vanished off him as his surroundings faded back into the tomb he had entered.

"Congratulations, Yugi. The Puzzle is yours. I think you are a fool, but a clever one. You'll go quite far."

"Why make me go through all that? That was horrible."

"I wanted to see you were worthy. Those who will not fight to survive do not deserve the air in their lungs or the blood in their veins. Life is the struggle for life. For every meal you've ever eaten, something died to give it to you, be it plant or animal. It is a sin against nature to give up. If you will not fight then you disrespect all those you defeated. Every animal, every plant, every enemy. To give any less than your best is to say that your opponent is not even worthy of defeat. Never give up. Never hold back. Struggle for victory in all things. That is the way of this world."

"But I didn't kill the monster."

"You defeated it. That is all that matters. In this case it was not significant but I would recommend that you think twice before allowing an enemy to live to strike again."

That was a little scary but not unexpected coming from someone like him. "So you'll show me the way out now?"

"If you wish, but before I do there I have a few questions for you. No doubt you have many questions as well."

"Yeah. Where is my grandfather and why did he go somewhere different from where I did?"

"Those who enter the tomb with no intention of taking anything from it find themselves in the room that held the Puzzle. Those who know of the existence of the Puzzle cannot enter at all. Unless your grandfather left he is still in the physical tomb. It is perfectly safe as long as he isn't stupid. We are elsewhere. I did not expect you to succeed so quickly. How did you determine the monster's weakness?"

"It looked like the Shadow Ghoul duel monsters card. It's powered by monsters in your graveyard, and there were statues in the room so I guessed that the statues were making it stronger. I was a little surprised it worked. Where are we?"

"We are in the Shadow Realm. Think of it as a shadow of the real world. The rules of reality are more flexible here. Who sent you here and who created this card game based on the events of my life?"

"Nobody sent us here. My grandfather is researching ancient Eg - you, I guess. A guide led us to the tomb. Duel monsters is an American card game that's also very popular in Japan. It's supposed to be based on ancient Egypt but I always thought it was mostly made up until today. The CEO has a weird name." Yugi thought a minute. "Pegasus something. What is the Puzzle?"

The voice paused. "The Millennium Puzzle is a question that cannot go unanswered. Something that can be seen, yet cannot be seen."

Yugi looked at it more closely. "Is there anything inside it?"

"Why would you ask?"

"Why would you not answer?"

"Even if there were, how would you open an invincible container to find out?"

"I guess you couldn't if it's really invincible."

"I owned the Puzzle for a long time before I wondered if something was inside." The voice sounded approving. "I have my suspicions, but the truth is I don't know what's inside, if anything. There is nothing that can harm the Puzzle. It is the physical manifestation of permanence. Does your guide have any connection to this Pegasus, and did he enter the tomb with you?"

"She doesn't have any connection to him as far as I know. She did show us the tomb illegally so maybe she did the same for Pegasus or someone who works for him when he was doing his research. She didn't enter the tomb. She was wearing a necklace with the same symbol on the front of the Puzzle. She kept her eyes shut the whole time but she seemed to be able to see anyway."

"A man creates a game based on the events of my life not long before exactly the right conditions happen in order for someone to reclaim the Puzzle. How long ago was this game created?"

"About two years ago. Why do you ask?"

"Either this man has made many attempts to arrange this in just two years which have all failed or he has tools I am unaware of at his disposal. What made the game so popular?"

"It's awesome! It has monsters and trap cards and magic and lots of cool strategies and -" Yugi swallowed. Don't get carried away, ghosts don't really want to hear about a card game. "I think part of it was that Industrial Illusions got an exclusive contract with Kaiba Corp for the new duel disc system. It's like having illusions act out the game while you play."

"A man creates a game based on the events of my life at just the right time for it to be made very popular and shortly after, exactly the right conditions happen in order for someone to reclaim the Puzzle. How very fortunate. It is clear there are powerful forces in play. You will need all the allies you can get. I want to come with you and see how this game plays out. In exchange I will assist you with what I know."

They certainly know a lot more than I do. It would help a lot to have an extra edge. "All right. Let's team up!"