Enigma

AN: This went faster than I thought it would, although I did end up cutting it off at a different place than I thought I would.

Thanks for the reviews!

~*~*~*~*~*~
Atemu shifted his weight from foot to foot uncomfortably. He had arrived at the pre-arranged meeting spot fifteen minutes early and now it was ten past three. He was tired of waiting but didn’t dare leave his spot in the crowded outdoor shopping mall, however, least he miss his contact.

“Look out!” someone shouted right before the man on rollerblades slammed into him. Atemu got the impression of long white hair and doe-like brown eyes in the ensuing chaos.

“Sorry! I’m so sorry!” the other was saying as they fought to untangle limbs. When they broke free, the rollerblader took off and Atemu realized he had a piece of paper in his hand.

Follow me, the note said, complete with the pyramid and eye. Atemu looked up and saw the rollerblader with white hair on the edge of the crowd and quickly followed.

A few blocks away, shops began to give way to warehouses as Atemu approached the docks. The white-haired man was still a distant yet visible figure, as if he was purposely setting the pace to keep Atemu on the trail but not close enough to risk yelling questions. Then the man on rollerblades turned suddenly into a building. Atemu ran, hoping to finally catch up with the man.

The building looked abandoned. Pieces of machinery sat and hung all around, rusting in the salty sea air. Most of the windows were broken and those that weren’t were cracked or had become wavy with age as the glass slowly ran down in its frames. There was no one in sight, but there was an innocuous piece of cardboard with a white arrow painted on it lying on the floor.

Atemu picked up the piece of cardboard, which was about a foot square, and frowned at it. It was pointing to the left. Atemu flipped it around and found a seemingly random set of numbers written in black ink on the back, as if someone had used the cardboard to take notes. With a shrug, Atemu sent the piece of cardboard spinning to the ground and took off in the direction the arrow had previously pointed at. Soon after he left, the white-haired figure that had been watching him moved to follow.

Atemu weaved his pay past old machinery and found himself outside a room that had been built inside the warehouse. Since it was by the wall, presumably it was the office and there were doors on the outside leading into the street. On this side, there was just a door without a knob and a keypad of numbers on the wall beside it. Atemu’s mind was working out how to open the door when someone grabbed his hair, forcing his head back and exposing it to the knife his attacker wielded.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” Atemu’s attacker growled. Atemu, catching a glimpse of white hair, was confused.

“I’m Atemu Dakku and I followed you here.”

His attacker laughed. “Followed me here? Unlikely.”

Atemu was turned around and pushed against the wall. Atemu grunted and looked at his attacker in surprise. Had he followed the wrong man? The man before him resembled the man that had run into him – long, white hair, slender build. But this man was harsher than he believed that other man to be, although he couldn’t be certain what with only a brief look at the first man to go by. But Atemu distinctly remembered that the man on rollerblades had soft, brown eyes while this man had hard… what had Mai called that reddish-brown color? Mahogany. This man had hard, cold, mahogany eyes.

“Dakku,” the man was musing, “I’ve heard that name before.” Then Atemu saw comprehension dawn on the other man’s face. “You’re that porn star! What the hell are you doing here?”

“I *thought* I was following this man that looked like you. I thought he worked for Enigma.”

The other man paused for a long moment before speaking. “As fate would have it, I was following someone I believe to work for Enigma as well. I’m the thief known as Bakura. My talents are well-known. But what would Enigma want with someone like you?”

“That’s something I intend to find out,” Atemu said, his tone low and almost threatening.

“Well, this is the end of the line, pretty boy. Go home. You’re doing nothing but causing me trouble.”

“I’ve done nothing of the sort,” Atemu huffed.

“Oh, yeah? What about this? You turned the arrow so it was in a different position,” Bakura growled, picking up and shaking the piece of cardboard he had brought with him and dropped when he grabbed Atemu.

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” Atemu retorted, “I just toss… Give me that.” Atemu ripped the piece of cardboard out of Bakura’s grip, pushed himself away from Bakura, and entered the numbers on the back of the cardboard into the keypad. There was a soft swoosh as the door slid open. Bakura’s eyebrows slid up.

“Well, maybe you are useful for something after all,” the thief grudgingly admitted as he pushed his way into the room.

“Why do I have the feeling that’s the closest thing to an apology and a thank you I’m going to get from you?” Atemu asked rhetorically as he followed the thief, the door sliding shut behind him.

~*~*~*~*~*~

“Yugi-boy?”

“Yes, Mr. Pegasus?” Yugi asked, wondering what he would have to do next. His first day was actually going rather well, if you didn’t count that annoying nickname his new boss was intent on calling him.

“I need you to copy these. Give the copies to accounting and file the originals, will you, Yugi-boy?” Pegasus told him, passing him one-handed a stack of paper. Yugi grunted in surprised at the weight of the stack, requiring both hands to carry it and a moment to rebalance himself. Who knew office work could build up your muscles? And Pegasus had called him by the nickname again, but at least Yugi knew his boss could at least pronounce his name.

“Yes, sir,” Yugi said as he tottered out of his new boss’s office.

Pegasus watched him go and, once the door closed, let out a sigh. Yugi was a nice boy, eager to please and everything, but there was something off and the Millennium Eye wasn’t picking up what. The nickname made up for it, though. The first time, it had been a simple slip. Now he was doing it because he knew it annoyed the boy. Pegasus smiled at the thought.

Pegasus stood, went to the mirror over the bar, and pushed back his hair so he could look at the golden eye resting in his left eye socket. With a sigh, he let his hair fall back over the left side of his face and pressed a part of the mirror’s gilt frame. The mirror, bar, and part of the wall slid back, revealing several lock boxes that required fingerprint identification to be opened. Pegasus used his thumb to open one of the ones in the middle on the right side. He took out a gold box and shut the drawer. As he walked back to his desk, everything slid back into place.

The box had originally been found by a modern-day Egyptian thief who, knowing he could never fence the whole thing, had sold the golden puzzle in it piece by piece over the years. Pegasus, during his brief stint as an archeologist, had been integral in catching the thief and had been allowed to keep the box and the remaining thirty puzzle pieces. The thief claimed that there had been a hundred pieces originally, which meant somewhere out there, seventy more pieces of the puzzle existed.

Pegasus peeked at the puzzle pieces. Not one of them had the Millennium symbol on it and, for a hundred piece puzzle, it looked wickedly hard to put together. One of the pieces looked like a toy building block while another resembled a piece out of a flat jigsaw puzzle and a third looked like an angular spindle.

Pegasus closed the box and opened the top right-hand-side desk drawer. He drew out the piece of paper he had stolen from Atemu Dakku’s dressing room. Croquet had informed him that the symbol was that of the notorious Enigma. The thing that bothered Pegasus, though, was that he had seen it years before, in ancient Egypt. A clan living underground had, upon pain of death should he reveal the location to another living soul, shown him a carved inscription of the Nameless Pharaoh. While most people thought of the all-seeing eye, they think of an eye in a pyramid that points to the sky. Enigma’s symbol, however, had the pyramid inverted so it looked precisely like the inscription of the Millennium puzzle on the stone slab hidden in the Egyptian desert. What was more, Atemu Dakku, whom Pegasus had desired since first laying eyes on him, was the spitting image of the Nameless Pharaoh, just as Seto Kaiba resembled the High Priest on the tablet. Far be it for Pegasus to deny the existence of reincarnation.

Pegasus put the puzzle and the letter in the desk drawer and shut it. He’d have to show them both to Marik after he left the office. The Egyptian might know something and if this Enigma was after the Millennium items, they would have to be ready. Something was going to happen, and Pegasus would be damned before he let someone else get to the Puzzle and the Pharaoh first.

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